Subtypes of batterers in treatment: empirical support for a distinction between type I, type II and type III.

José Luis Graña,Arthur L Cantos,Natalia Redondo,Marina J Muñoz-Rivas,Patrick Callaerts

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110651

Abstract

This study explores the existence of different types of batterers in a sample of 266 men who had been court referred for intimate partner violence. The data collected in the assessment that have been used to perform a hierarchical and a two-step cluster analysis fall into three areas: aggression towards the partner, general aggression and presence of psychopathology and personality traits, more specifically, alcohol use, borderline and antisocial personality traits, psychopathy traits, state anger and trait anger, anger expression and control, anger, hostility, and, finally, impulsivity. The results show a typology consisting of 3 types of batterers on the basis of violence level and psychopathology: low (65%), moderate (27.8%) and high (7.1%). This study provides empirical support for the development of batterer typologies. These typologies will help achieve early detection of different types of batterers, allowing us to tailor interventions on the basis of the needs of each of the types.

Highlights

Beginning in the 1980’s, domestic violence researchers attempted to move beyond theoretical conjecture in order to empirically describe the characteristics of men who perpetrate violence against their intimate partners
Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart [3] reviewed existing male perpetrator typologies to determine the subtypes that consistently appeared across typological models and identified three major dimensions that have been used to distinguish among subtypes
Analyzing the dendrogram, in which scores are standardized in a 25 point scale (25 being the greatest distance between cases), it looks like a three cluster solution is the one that best reflects the underlying structure of the data, since three groups of relatively homogenous data without large amalgamation coefficients are observed

Summary

Introduction

Beginning in the 1980’s, domestic violence researchers attempted to move beyond theoretical conjecture in order to empirically describe the characteristics of men who perpetrate violence against their intimate partners. Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart [3] reviewed existing male perpetrator typologies to determine the subtypes that consistently appeared across typological models and identified three major dimensions that have been used to distinguish among subtypes These dimensions were (a) the severity of marital physical violence and related abuse, such as frequency of the violence and psychological and sexual abuse; (b) the generality of violence (i.e., family-only or extrafamilial violence) and related variables such as criminal behavior and legal involvement; and (c) the perpetrator’s ’s psychopathology or personality disorders. They further hypothesized that researchers using these three descriptive dimensions would usually identify three major subtypes of batterers: family only, dysphoric/borderline, and generally violent/antisocial

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Results

Conclusion