Intimate Partner Violence and HIV Among Drug-Involved Women: Contexts Linking These Two Epidemics—Challenges and Implications for Prevention and Treatment

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Intimate partner violence (IPV) and HIV are two serious overlapping public health epidemics that disproportionately affect drug-involved women. This article reviews research that has identified a number of contexts that may explain the links between IPV and HIV transmission risks. These contexts include sexual coercion, fear of violence, negotiation of condom use, extradyadic relationships, disclosure of sexually transmitted infections or HIV seropositivity to intimate partners, drug involvement of women and their male partners, low social status of drug-involved women, relationship dependencies, and sex ratio imbalances. The article focuses on how the bidirectional relationship between IPV and HIV risks may be mediated by a history of childhood sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Also addressed are the challenges that substance user treatment programs face in dealing with female clients who experience IPV and the implications for HIV prevention.