Violent Acts and Injurious Consequences: An Examination of Competing Hypotheses About Intimate Partner Violence Using Agency-Based Data

The current study proposed and tested a series of competing hypotheses about intimate partner violence in the 2006 National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), a dataset of criminal incidents known to the police. Three research questions were presented concerning gender differences in victim identity, victim-offender relationships, and victim injury with hypotheses derived from the feminist, family violence, and general violence perspectives. Victim-based analyses were consistent primarily with expectations of the feminist perspective, although aspects of the general violence perspective were supported as well: Women were more likely than men to experience violence from an intimate; they were more likely to experience violence from an intimate partner than from any other perpetrator; and when victimized by an intimate, women were usually more likely to be injured. These results highlight the uniqueness of violence between intimates relative to other types of violence.