Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration by Court Ordered Men: Distinctions among Subtypes of Physical Violence, Sexual Violence, Psychological Abuse and Stalking

This study continues previous work documenting the structure of violence perpetrated by males against their female intimate partners. It assesses the construct validity of a measurement model depicting associations among eight subtypes of perpetration: moderate physical violence, severe physical violence, forced or coerced sexual violence, sexual violence where consent was not possible, emotional/verbal psychological abuse, dominance/isolation psychological abuse, interactional contacts/surveillance related stalking and stalking involving mediated contacts. Data were obtained from a sample of 340 men arrested for physical assault of a female spouse or partner and court ordered into batterer intervention programs. Men were surveyed before starting the intervention. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) supported the validity of model as evidence by good model to data fit and satisfaction of requirements for fit statistics. Latent variable correlations revealed that the violence types were mostly moderately positively correlated, and ranged from .381 (Emotional/Verbal Psychological Abuse with Interactional Contacts/Surveillance Related Stalking) to .950 (Forced Sex with Sex Where Consent Was Not Possible). The findings suggest that the heterogeneity in IPV must be considered explicitly to assure that decisions about prevention strategies are based upon the most specific available data. Future studies should determine whether there are distinct risk factors associated with each of the eight IPV perpetration subtypes.