Sexual Assault versus Intimate Partner Violence
A Population-Based Study of the Prevalence and Distinctiveness of Battering, Physical Assault, and Sexual Assault in Intimate Relationships
Smith, P.H., Thronton, G., DeVellis, R., Earp, E., & Coker A. (2002) Prevalence and distinctiveness of battering, physical assault and sexual assault in a population-based sample. Violence Against Women, 8 (10), 1209-1232.
Excerpts:
Prior research with battered women suggests that battering is a chronic, continuous phenomenon that is conceptually distinct from episodic discrete acts of physical assault. Ferraro and Johnson’s (1983) research with battered women revealed a process of victimization that was ―not synonymous with experiencing violent attacks from a spouse‖ (p. 336). In their study, they found that battering had an emotional career‖that incorporated women’s subjective perceptions of their experience, including feelings of shame and guilt; vacillation between fear and affection; loss of hope, love, and intimacy; and increasing loneliness and pessimism.
Our own research with battered women (Smith et al., 1999; Smith, Tessaro, et al., 1995) revealed battering to be an enduring, traumatic, and complex experience that continuously shapes battered women’s behavior, their views of self, and their beliefs in the controllability of their own lives.
The WEB conceptualization, which focuses on battered women’s psychological experience, leads us to define battering as follows:
“a process whereby one member of an intimate relationship experiences vulnerability, loss of power and control, and entrapment as a consequence of the other member’s exercise of power through the patterned use of physical, sexual, psychological, and/or moral force.” (Smith et al., 1998)
This definition is consistent with Pence and Paymar’s (1986) ―power and control‖ conceptualization, which recognizes that battering consists of a variety of abusive tactics including physically assaulting women; threatening, intimidating, and humiliating them; isolating them and restricting their access to resources; threatening the safety of their children and others in their families; controlling women’s activities outside the home; and using sex as a weapon by both forcing and withholding it.
Sexual Assault
Also following CDC’s recommended definition, we defined sexually assaulted women as those whose male partners forced them to have sexual activities against their will, whether or not the act was completed (Saltzman et al., 1999). An additional item from the AAS (McFarlane et al., 1992), also modified to ask only about violence by the current or most recent male partner, was used to measure sexual assault: ―In the last year, how many times have you been forced to have sexual activities by your male partner (husband or boyfriend)?‖ For women not currently in a relationship, the ―last year‖ time reference in both the physical and sexual assault questions specified the last year of the relationship. Responses ranged from 0 (no incidents) to 5 (five or more incidents in the past year).
Discussion
This is the first published community-based study to assess three types of intimate partner violence in the same sample of women, and it is one of the few published studies to look empirically at the distinctions between battering and physical assault (Coker, Smith, Bethea, et al., 2000; Coker, Smith, McKeown, et al., 2000). Our findings support the growing body of work indicating conceptual and empirical distinction between battering, physical assault, and sexual assault. We found (a) modest correlations between battering, physical assault, and sexual assault; (b) both distinctions between, and co-occurrence of, battering, physical assault, and sexual assault; (c) different demographic correlates of the three types of intimate partner violence; and (d) different health status and behavioral correlates of the three types of intimate partner violence. The modest correlations between the three types of intimate partner violence are consistent with somewhat different constructs, and the patterns of associations between the variables suggest discriminate validity.