14 DAY TRIAL // Relationships in which women are abused, both physically and mentally, are oftentimes made this way by controlling, over-jealous boyfriends, says a new research. Experts say that these individuals dictate most of the things in the life of their couple partner.
Some of these things include how late women can stay out, who they can meet and for how long, how to dress and so on. In the new study, it was estimated that about 70 percent of women experienced this type of behavior at least once.
At the same time, nearly 33 percent of the women surveyed in the new investigation reported being in an abusive relationship, in which their boyfriends were violent towards them physically, mentally, as well as in bed. A large number said they were subjected to all three.
Researchers opted to conduct their survey via a self-administered computer-based interview, that was given anonymous to women attending a reproductive health center, PsychCentral reports.
The main goal of the study was to investigate the correlations between relationship violence (with all of its components) and controlling behaviors that boyfriends exhibited. Jealousy was just one of them.
Some 603 women were questioned in this investigation. They were all aged between 15 and 24, and more than 68 percent of them (411 women) said that they experienced at least one episode of controlling behavior from their partners.
However, the researchers were able to determine that, in some cases, a high level of control on the part of the men in the relationship was all that was wrong. About 38 percent of the respondents said that they had no other problems in the couple except this.
Nevertheless, 30 percent of them said that they were also subjected to physical abuse as well, both in everyday life and in bed. Some 9 percent of all women said that they experienced both kinds of abuse.
“These data demonstrate the high frequency of controlling behaviors in the relationships of adolescents and young adults and support a nuanced approach to universal screening of controlling behaviors,” says the team behind the new work.
“In addition, this awareness of the high rates of controlling behavior and the overlap with relationship violence, particularly for young people, may affect how they view health care provider-based screening and how honestly they might answer screening questions,” they add.
The work was conducted by experts with the Mailman School of Public Health at the Columbia University, in Ithaca, New York. The team was led by scientist Marina Catallozzi, MD.
Details of the investigation were published in the April issue of the esteemed medical journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
“An awareness that young women may not be comfortable disclosing information honestly should prompt carefully crafted, repeated, and novel screening to improve identification, referral and treatment,” the team writes in the new paper.