Psychotherapist Jill Murray thinks an alarming number of teenage girls are taking beatings from their boyfriends – some on their bodies, others on their self-esteem.

“They will tell you they’re happy, that nobody really understands their boyfriend, that he’s sweet, that he loves them,” Murray said. In reality, she said, “they’ve completely lost sight of what a normal relationship is.”

Murray, author of “But I Love Him: Protecting Your Teenage Daughter from Controlling, Abusive Dating Relationships,” said her experience working at shelters for battered women has convinced her the teenage girl in an abusive relationship is the battered woman of the future. Physical abuse is the minority in abusive teenage dating relationships, she said; abusers generally start with demeaning verbal abuse and then go on to unwanted touching or kissing, date rape and other physical violence.

“Teenage girls really only identify physical abuse as abuse,” Murray said. “If they don’t have a broken arm or a black eye, they don’t think they’re being abused.”

Murray said it’s harder to get them to understand they’re being abused in more subtle ways, when a dating partner continually puts them down, keeping them depressed; tries to have complete control over where they are and who they’re seeing; isolates them from their friends and family; or pressures them sexually.

When pagers don’t pay

The advent of technology has given teens more pathways for controlling their dating partners, Murray said. Boys will often page their girlfriends with numerical messages that mean “I love you” or “I miss you,” she said. Though at first the girl and her friends think it’s sweet and romantic, it often escalates into the boy requiring the girl to call him back within five minutes so he can grill her about where she is or what she’s doing.

“It’s an easy way of an abuser checking up on the person he’s abusing,” Murray said.

Dane McLemore, 15, said he sometimes sees other teens at his school being “overprotective; they don’t let (dating partners) hang out with their friends.” While he doesn’t agree with this behavior and said if a girl restricted who he was seeing or what he was doing, “I’d probably break up with her,” he allows that girls don’t always do the same.

“If they’re really serious,” he said, “they’ll do whatever it takes to keep the relationship.”

Too much, too soon

Murray said today’s teens are in intense, exclusive relationships far too young …quot; as early as 11 or 12. And society, she said, sends a message to girls that if there are problems in their relationships, it’s their job to fix them. Women’s magazines and even teen magazines like Seventeen and YM heavily promote ways to find and keep a man at all costs.

“You absolutely don’t see that in any men’s magazine that I can think of,” Murray said.

That doesn’t mean males always have it easy, Murray said.

Boys abused, too

“It’s a common belief that only girls are being abused, when in fact girls can be highly emotionally abusive,” she said. Boys tell her their girlfriends may cry to get their way; make them feel guilty for not spending time with them; or get so jealous when they see their boyfriends casually looking at another girl that they accuse them of wanting the girl sexually. Teenage boys, she said, may be even less likely than girls to recognize this behavior as abuse.

And while instances of teenage boys being physically violent toward girls has reached a plateau, the ratio of female-to-male physical violence has tripled in the past three years, Murray said.

In any case, a teen with high self-esteem has the best chance of getting out.

Jon Lonas, 20, who dates a 17-year-old, said he sometimes sees his girlfriend’s teenage friends treated badly by boyfriends who call them names, put them down or try to monitor their activities. “They don’t think there’s anybody else for them,” he said.

His own girlfriend, he said, “would leave me quick! She has self-respect, self esteem …quot; she has it all. She wouldn’t put up with it.”