14 DAY TRIAL // A new study finds that female domestic violence characteristics are very similar to the three subtypes already established by prior studies in domestically violent men.
The study's lead author Zach Walsh, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Okanagan campus, says that “Intimate partner violence is a major public health concern”, and so this study offers more details about the role that gender, personality and mental illness can have in domestic violence.
Walsh adds that “Examining subtypes of perpetrators is an important way of learning more about why people are violent in close relationships [and] understanding why different people are violent may be crucial for developing new ways to reduce violence in relationships.”
Along with his colleagues Marc Swogger (University of Rochester), Yael Schonbrun (Brown University), Brian O'Connor (UBC), Tracie Shea (Brown University) and Gregory Stuart (University of Tennessee-Knoxville), Walsh analyzed data collected for the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, to investigate normal personality, mental illness and psychopathic features among 567 civil psychiatric patients, of whom 138 women and 93 men had a history of domestic violence.
Previous studies have classified domestically violent men in three categories, which this new research extended for women perpetrators too: Antisocial perpetrators, that are often violent people outside their relationship and present high levels of psychopathic personality characteristics; Dysphoric perpetrators can have high levels of depression, anxiety and other forms of mental illness and Low Pathology perpetrators, that generally have normal personalities and are rarely violent outside of intimate relationships.
Walsh says that “Although both men and women engage in substantial levels of domestic violence, fewer studies have examined female perpetrators [and] these new findings are among the first to highlight similarities between subtypes of domestically violent men and women.”
The results of the study also suggest that categories from research on domestic violence perpetrators in the community are also valid for psychiatric patients perpetrators and learning more about them is crucial as they usually engage in higher levels of domestic violence than most people.
This research has been published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the August edition and scientists' next step is to further examine the three subtypes of perpetrators in other groups.
Meanwhile, Walsh advises caution in generalizing conclusions from psychiatric patients to the entire community.