Nonfatal Strangulation During Domestic Violence Events in New South Wales: Prevalence and Characteristics Using Text Mining Study of Police Narratives

Nonfatal strangulation (NFS) is a common form of domestic violence (DV) that frequently leaves no visible signs of injury and can be a portent for future fatality. A validated text mining approach was used to analyze a police dataset of 182,949 DV events for the presence of NFS. Results confirmed NFS within intimate partner relationships is a gendered form of violence. The presence of injury and/or other (non-NFS) forms of physical abuse, emotional/verbal/social abuse, and the perpetrator threatening to kill the victim, were associated with significantly higher odds of NFS perpetration. Police data contain rich information that can be accessed using automated methodologies such as text mining to add to our understanding of this pressing public health issue.

Psychometric Properties of the Coercion in Intimate Partner Relationships Scale

Coercive control is defined as the systematic use of demands, threats, and surveillance behaviors to gain control over an individual. Content validity appears to be an issue for existing measures of coercive control tactics, as they do not assess all of these behaviors. This study investigated the validity and reliability of the Demand, Threat, Surveillance, and Response to Demands subscales of the Coercion in Intimate Partner Relationships (CIPR) scale. Participants ( N = 541) completed online measures of coercive control, physical intimate partner violence, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder symptomatology. Confirmatory factor analyses, linear regressions, and correlational analyses investigated the construct (i.e., concurrent, convergent, and discriminant) validity of the CIPR subscales. Internal consistency of the subscales and test–retest reliability were also examined. Results provided support for the validity and reliability of the CIPR. Implications and usage of the CIPR in research and practice are discussed. We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

Social Abuse in Intimate Partner Relationships: A Hybrid Concept Analysis

Belongingness is a basic human need. The violation of this need has been described in numerous studies on intimate partner violence (IPV). However, it has not been conceptually defined. Therefore, this study aimed to develop and analyze the concept of social abuse in intimate partner relationships. A hybrid model of concept analysis was used for this study consisting of three phases: theoretical, fieldwork, and analytic. In the theoretical phase, a systematic literature review was performed to obtain a working definition of social abuse. In total, 20 articles that met the inclusion criteria were included in the analysis. The findings from the theoretical phase were refined and confirmed by qualitative data collected from the fieldwork phase. In the analytical phase, four attributes of social abuse emerged: cutting off the victim’s social relations, limiting the victim’s social engagement, interfering with the victim’s social relations, and closely watching the victim’s social interactions. Possessiveness, escalating suspicion, allegations of infidelity, and fear that the victim will leave were identified as antecedents of social abuse in perpetrators. Additionally, the experience of social abuse had negative consequences on victims’ social relationships, mental health, and help-seeking behaviors. This study extends the theoretical framework of IPV and implies a strong need to educate victims and their social acquaintances on social abuse.

Listening to the “HITS:” Screening for IPV in African American Co-Parents of Young Children

Relationships among African American (AA) parents living apart can be contentious. A common assumption is that men are the perpetrators and women are the victims of violence. Research examining the symmetry of intimate partner violence (IPV) has not focused enough on AA parents who are co-parenting their young children while living apart. The purpose of this study is to explore reports of IPV among non-cohabiting AA co-parents of 2-6-year-old children enrolled in the Dedicated African American Dad Study (DAADS). Our objectives for this study are to characterize the nature of intimate partner relationships among non-co-residing co-parents by exploring the association between the quality of relationship and co-parenting fathers’ and mothers’ Hurt, Insult, Threaten, and Scream (HITS) scores. The HITS is a domestic violence screening tool for use in the community. As part of the screening protocol for study inclusion, we administered the HITS to father-mother dyads. Fathers were ineligible for participation if either parent reported HITS cut-off scores >10 and identified safety concerns for themselves when interacting with their co-parent. Among DAAD study parenting dyads, we noted symmetry in reports of IPV (i.e., both parents reported elevated HITS scores). The most frequently elevated HITS items were “insult or talk down to” and “scream or curse” indicating the preponderance of verbal conflict among parents in the study. The nature of IPV among co-parents in this study is predominantly verbal. In light of the potential for reciprocity in IPV, interventions for families in this context should focus on communication and problem solving to support fathers and mothers and minimize child harm.

Horror by Gaslight: Epistemic Violence and Ambivalent Belonging

“Gaslighting” is a common theme in post-horror films where emotional abuse cannot be immediately ascribed to intergenerational family dynamics. This chapter focuses on post-horror’s generation of dread within depictions of intimate-partner relationships where gender, race, or class provide the impetus for others to monstrously undercut a protagonist’s worldview. Whereas the couple is presented as part of an endangered out-group in both Midsommar and The Invitation, the racialized possession of Black bodies in Get Out demonstrates how gaslighting within romantic bonds can function as a form of epistemic violence that reinforces larger social inequalities. The affective discomfort created by films about the horrors of gaslighting is further heightened by post-horror’s tendency toward epistemic hesitation, as well as viewers’ potential hesitation over their own sense of belonging in the audience of films that may be feel far less entertaining than expected.

Attitudes towards Violence in Adolescents and Youth Intimate Partner Relationships: Validation of the Spanish Version of the EAV

The main purpose of the present study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the Attitudes Scale Towards Violence (Escala de Actitudes hacia la Violencia, EAV) in adolescents. The EAV is a questionnaire devoted to assess attitudes towards violence. Additionally, the relationship between EAV and violence manifestations and depressive symptoms was analyzed. The final sample comprised a total of 1248 students in a cross-sectional survey. The EAV, the Modified Conflict Tactics Scale (M-CTS), and the Reynolds Adolescent Depression Scale (RADS) were used. The analysis of the internal structure of the EAV yielded a two-factor structure as the most adequate. The EAV scores showed measurement invariance across gender and age. The McDonald’s Omega was 0.862 and 0.872 for the two hypothesized factors. Furthermore, self-reported attitudes towards violence were associated with violence manifestations both as a victim and as a perpetrator and depressive symptoms. These results support that the EAV is a brief and easy tool to assess self-reported violence attitudes in intimate partner relationships in adolescents from the general population. The assessment of these attitudes, and its associations with violence and depressive manifestations, may help us to enhance the possibility of an early identification of adolescents potentially at risk for suffering violence as a victim or as a perpetrator.

Costs of social mobility in the context of intimate partner relationships. “It is really easy to be angry at someone who is in front of me and not at the system, which produces the inequalities between us”

Power inequalities originating from capitalist patriarchy are having an impact on and even determining our personal relationships: gender, class and ethnic inequality are consistently present in our intimate ties as well (Ridgeway 2009). For socially mobile individuals from lower classes, one of the main costs of moving between social classes is to exist in the complex conflict that arises from distancing from the social class of origin in order to integrate into new social spaces (Bourdieu 2005, Friedman 2016). These internal conflicts that are caused by broadened social structures are also present not just in the difficulty of finding a desired romantic partner (Durst at al. 2014) but in the process of sustaining an intimate relationship with someone from a particular social background as well. Structural inequalities are also determinative factors in partner selection, education homogamy and ethnic homogamy are highly present in society (Kamijn 1993, 1998, 2010, Kang Fu 2001). In this paper, through analysing narratives of educationally upwardly mobile women in Hungary, regarding intimate partner selection and looking at intimate relationships themselves, I aim to discover how their narratives reflect upon the hidden costs of mobility. I show how gender, education and ethnic inequalities emerge through the personal accounts of their mobility experiences and to what extent these inequalities determine the process of finding a desired partner or sustaining an existing intimate relationship.