Abstract
This issue of Violence Against Women opens with a symposium on an article by Anne DePrince, Joanne Belknap, Jennifer Labus, Susan Buckingham, and Angela Gover. DePrince and her colleagues evaluated a victim-focused, community-coordinated intervention to determine if it improved criminal legal system outcomes. They used a randomized controlled design, which, as they and the commenters point out, is considered the “gold standard” in evaluation research. Their findings indicate that women in the outreach program, especially women of color and women still living with their abusers following the target incident, were more engaged with prosecution tasks and were more likely to participate in the prosecution of their abusers. The individuals offering comments on the article represent social work (Denise Gamache), law (Meg Garvin), and criminology (David Hirschel), and their review of the research provides context and raises thoughtful issues that the authors address in their reply. I am grateful to Anne DePrince and her colleagues for allowing me to make their article the focus of the symposium, and I thank Denise Gamache, Meg Garvin, and David Hirschel for their careful reading of and insightful reflections on this article.
Many of the comments on DePrince et al.’s article concern methodology. Additional articles address methodological issues as well. Peter Lehmann, Catherine Simmons, and Vijayan Pillai discuss their work to validate a new measure of coercive control in abusive relationships, the Checklist of Controlling Behaviors (CCB). The 84-item CCB is composed of 10 subscales that assess various dimensions of coercive control, including those we traditionally think of—physical and sexual abuse—but also those not typically measured, such as male privilege, minimizing and denying, and economic abuse. The authors’ principal components analysis confirmed 10 factors with strong goodness-of-fit values. Additional research using the CCB will hopefully confirm its usefulness with diverse samples of abuse victims.
Seana Golder, Christian Connell, and Tami Sullivan used latent content analysis to identify different groups of women who were experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV) according to their victimization history and several other factors. Golder et al. discovered three distinct groups (classes) of women who varied by degree of recent IPV and previous childhood victimization and these classes varied, in turn, on indicators of psychological distress and substance use. The authors explore the implications of their findings for intervention and treatment.
Samara McPhedran and Jeanine Baker discuss some of the methodological challenges of studying lethal IPV. McPhedran and Baker point out that there are two major hypotheses regarding the development of IPV from nonlethal to lethal levels: the escalation hypothesis and the behavioral typologies hypothesis. Although the authors focus specifically on the Australian context, many of the issues they identify in terms of the limitations of available data, measurement issues, and conceptual difficulties, apply to other societies as well.
Lindsey Thomas and Boris Gorzalka’s article turns our attention to sexual coercion proclivity (SCP) among heterosexual White and Asian college men. Thomas and Gorzalka designed an experiment in which subsamples of college men were insulted by a woman and exposed to sexually coercive/noncoercive fantasy material. Among the findings, Thomas and Gorzalka report that the young men who scored high in sexual coercion proclivity experienced more frustration, especially when they were both insulted and exposed to sexually coercive fantasy material, but changes in negative affect predicted likelihood of engaging in sexual coercion among young men low in SCP as well as anticipated enjoyment of sexual coercion among young men high in SCP. Although Thomas and Gorzalka’s article does not deal with methodology per se, the experimental design and laboratory setting do raise interesting methodological questions.