Early antecedents of spouse abuse

✍ Scribed by Bettina von der Pahlen; Björn Öst; Bodil Lindfors; Ralf Lindman

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 54 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0096-140X
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-2337(1997)23:4<239::aid-ab2>3.0.co;2-f

✦ Synopsis

Males taken into police custody for reported spouse abuse (n = 19) and a matched control group (n = 19) were asked to describe the drinking habits of their parents and the extent of intra-family violence witnessed by them as children. The retrospective data were compared to the participant's own present alcohol use and aggressiveness (CTS). Excessive paternal drinking and intra-family violence were recalled significantly more often by the spouse abusers than by the controls. A latent structure model suggested that the accumulated violence history was less well predicted by either paternal violence or present aggressiveness than by the direct and indirect effects related to drinking. Context-specific social learning could explain why the parental drunken violence behavior pattern witnessed by the child was repeated by the adult spouse abuser.