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01-01-2015 | Original Article

Guardians Against Spousal Violence? A Case for Considering Motive

Author: Maureen Outlaw

Published in: Journal of Family Violence | Issue 1/2015

Abstract

The current study examines the applicability of the routine activity factor, of guardianship, to intimate partner violence. In so doing, it expands the range of routine activity theory to better accommodate different types of crime and challenges the original theoretical notion of simply “assuming” motivated offenders (Cohen and Felson, American Sociological Review, 44, 588–604 1979). Findings from the National Violence and Threats of Violence Against Women & Men in the U.S., 1994–1996 (Tjaden and Thoennes 1998) survey indicate routine activity principles such as guardianship may be useful in understanding the risk of intimate violence, but that the effects of guardianship depend on the motive for the violence. Implications for research and theory are discussed.

It is not the intention of the author to suggest that feminist scholars and family violence scholars actually represent two mutually exclusive groups. Some family violence scholars are feminists. The distinction is one more intended to highlight the differences in findings between two groups of scholars studying the same phenomena from different perspectives.

It was originally intended that a second measure of seriousness would be used that reflected whether their was injury as a result of the violence. Unfortunately, because of the survey design of the NVAW survey, seriousness as described here and injury are not very highly correlated, indicating that they actually reflect different things. The main reason for this seems to be that the seriousness scale reflects the most serious thing the perpetrator ever did, whereas the only injury data available refer to the most recent incident, which is not necessarily the worst (or within the 5 years window). Further, because there is a large amount of missing data on the injury variable, this measure could not reliably be used. Therefore, in order to keep the analyses consistent and comparable, analyses of the presence of injury were not pursued further.

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Title: Guardians Against Spousal Violence? A Case for Considering Motive
Author: Maureen Outlaw
Publication date: 01-01-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Family Violence / Issue 1/2015
Print ISSN: 0885-7482
Electronic ISSN: 1573-2851
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-014-9650-1

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