Young Adult Women's Perceptions of Their Maritally Violent Fathers

Abstract

ObjectiveTo qualitatively examine fathering and father–child relationships from the perspective of young adult women who grew up with maritally violent fathers.BackgroundMaritally violent men are consistently described as volatile, unresponsive, self‐centered, and often abusive. Yet domestic violence (DV) perpetrators are not homogenous, suggesting that maritally violent fathers may not be homogenous either. The revised tripartite model of father involvement and Johnson's typology of DV were applied to better understand how maritally violent men father.MethodA theoretical thematic analysis was conducted based on interview data from a volunteer sample of 23 young adult women who were exposed to father‐perpetrated marital violence during childhood and adolescence.ResultsFindings were consistent with the small body of literature on fathering by maritally violent men, suggesting that these men as fathers are generally volatile, lack warmth and responsiveness, are disengaged, and sometimes are controlling and abusive. Nevertheless, dissimilarities in fathering and father–child relationships over time were identified such that participants categorized into coercive controlling violence exposure reported uniformly negative fathering experiences, whereas greater variability existed within the situational couple violence groups' recollections of their fathers over time.ImplicationsFindings suggest that practitioners should take into consideration the context in which DV occurs when working with maritally violent men as fathers, while erring on the side of caution and safety for victimized women and their children.