Friends of the Forensic Science Club, this week we present the paper “Childhood Maltreatment, Borderline Personality Features, and Coping as Predictors of Intimate Partner Violence” by Krause-Utz, A.; Mertens, L. J.; Renn, B. J; Lucke, P.; Wöhlke, A. Z.; van Schie, C. C. and Mouthaan, J. (2021), in which authors study whether a relation between suffering childhood maltreatment, borderline personality disorder, and perpetrate or suffer intimate partner violence.
Intimate partner violence is a criminological phenomenon that has become a worldwide problem as the time has gone by.
Inside this concept of intimate partner violence, would be not only gender violence, but violence in homosexual couples and also, violence from women to their masculine partners.
Authors choose this topic for a main reason, besides the phenomenon’s importance.
Previous research suggests that suffering childhood maltreatment is related to suffer or perpetrate intimate partner violence. It is suggested that childhood maltreatment, such as abuses or neglect, increases the risk of commit or suffer this kind of domestic violence.
Nevertheless, this couldn’t be scientifically proved, there is not a strong, direct correlation between the two concepts. This suggests that the link between growing up in an abusive family and intimate partner violence is more complex that it was thought.
One thing is clear: the presence of violence as a rule in childhood helps to normalize it later in adult life. Here is where borderline personality disorder’s importance appears.
This disorder’s core features are interpersonal violence, affective instability, disturbed sense of self, instable identity, interpersonal disturbances and self-harming or suicidal impulsivity. And these are thought to develop under the influence of childhood maltreatment and abuse. Moreover, these are factors at which people should pay attention to, due to their ability to predict intimate partner violence.
Because of all that has been mentioned, authors decide to study whether the presence of borderline personality disorder and its features are the nexus between childhood maltreatment and, later, commit or suffer intimate partner aggression.
Authors conducted a study in which a total of 703 participants were gathered. All of them referred to have suffered from domestic violence, childhood maltreatment, or have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
They answered a series of questionnaires indicated from the three of these concepts, and it took about 45 minutes to finish them. Later, using a software created to analyze statistics, authors started to study the data.
Some of the participants showed high score in the questionnaire that was about borderline personality disorder, and, due to this, they suggested they suffered it. This was significantly more frequently the case in female participants. Women reported more borderline personality disorder’s features, such as anxious attachment and less perceived social support from friends and family than men. Women also reported higher severity of childhood trauma, particularly higher frequency of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, than men.
On the other hand, approximately 84% of the participants reported at least one from of intimate partner violence perpetration (physical, psychological, sexual coercion or injuries), and 82% reported experiencing these types of aggressions.
A positive relation was found between childhood maltreatment and commit or suffer intimate partner violence.
The same occurs with borderline personality disorder and intimate partner violence, and with borderline personality disorder and childhood maltreatment.
Namely, a history of childhood maltreatment may increase the likelihood of perpetrating and/or re-experiencing violence in adult relationships.
Besides, positive and significant associations are found between all kinds of childhood maltreatment and borderline personality disorder’s features. And this disorder is highly related to intimate partner violence, even comparing it to other metal diseases, such as antisocial disorder. It may put individuals at higher risk for perpetrating and experiencing this type of violence.
Authors say that these findings could help to achieve a deepest comprehension of the psychological mechanisms underlying intimate partner aggression.
They point out the existence of limitations in this study. First, individual’s answers in the questionnaires are subjective, and so, probably biased. Namely, it is possible that someone lied affirming to have suffered childhood maltreatment. Plus, more empirical studies in this field are needed, with equality in the number of women and men participating, because, in this research, the majority of the sample were women.
To sum up, in this study is suggested that, as it was thought, there are strong associations between traumatic childhood experiences and intimate partner violence, which may be partly influenced by the presence of borderline personality disorder’s features’ presence, especially affective instability and interpersonal disturbances.
Besides the need of keeping studying this topic, authors mention some guidelines in order to fight these phenomena, such as teaching emotion regulation strategies and social interaction skills, or control and violence reduction training programs.
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