U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Review of 20 Years of Research

NCJ Number
178598
Editor(s)
Jana L. Jasinski, Linda M. Williams
Date Published
1998
Length
324 pages
Annotation
These seven papers provide an interdisciplinary review of the past 20 years of research on domestic assault involving 2 married or cohabiting adults, with emphasis on the implications for future research and practice in the areas of prevention, intervention, and treatment.
Abstract
The introduction notes that the text uses the term "partner violence" to include non-marital relationships and to exclude the other types of family abuse usually included in the term domestic violence. The first chapter focuses on prevalence rates of partner violence, dynamics of abusive relationships, typologies of batterers, risk factors, and violence in different life stages. The second chapter focuses on the consequences of partner violence, with emphasis on the emotional consequences for victims and other family members, the economic costs of treatment, the costs from loss of work or school, the consequences for family norms and community standards, and the transmission of violent behaviors from one generation to the next. Subsequent chapters examine how children who witness it or who live in the families where it occurs, marital rape, violence in homosexual couples, and violence in the four largest minority groups in the United States (blacks, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and American Indians). The final chapter examines the literature on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention and treatment and how successfully professionals can deal with and respond to the relevant dynamics, risk factors, and outcomes of partner violence. Lists of recommendations, tables, chapter notes and references, index, and approximately 800 references