The Victim–Offender Overlap in Intimate Partner Violence: A Within-Individual Approach

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to contribute to the understanding on whether the victim–offender overlap in intimate partner violence (IPV) is a product of population heterogeneity or state dependency between victimization and offending. The study uses a large data set of Finnish police-recorded IPV victims ( N = 13,452) and offenders ( N = 13,061) to assess whether IPV victimization and offending are temporally associated over and above stable individual differences. The results indicate that the associations between IPV victimization and offending are not fully explained by population heterogeneity, as they persist in the within-individual analyses for both directions and genders. Gender, however, seems to affect the magnitude and robustness of the associations. Further research is needed on the mechanisms driving these results.