Abstract
Although research on intimate partner violence (IPV) has emphasized the importance of building situational frameworks and event-based research, our knowledge of the contexts surrounding IPV is particularly limited for immigrants. The present study identifies the sequence of specific antecedents of IPV and their relationships with one another. This study is a content analysis of online postings on an anonymous internet forum for Korean married women living in the U.S. Ninety-five postings narrating IPV episodes from the direct experiences of the posters were selected. With a novel method named the “might-cause chain,” violence was extracted from the narratives and then traced back to prior actions. Results suggest that environmental settings of IPV can be expanded from immediate proximal situations (triggers), through contingent pathways, to distal context. The roles of verbal exchange, alcohol, in-laws, and self-control, and the patterns of demand interactions, IPV cycles or continuums, and dispute-related violence are discussed.
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Notes
Five posts were excluded. Although the forum is anonymous, some posters mentioned their previous posting when they wrote similar or related posts. The forum provides a search service, and it might save time and effort for members to find. Aside from the notice, similar episodes were examined to determine whether posts were written by the same poster based on the type of offense, the years of marriage, the number of children, and the context.
Posts without specifying when or how IPV occurred were excluded. For example, if a post indicated “My husband always yells at me when I start complaining,” but did not provide a time when it happened (e.g., recently, a year ago, or immediately after marriage), this post was not included.
Economic violence was not found in the present study.
If the most recent IPV was the first experience of a poster, it was categorized into the first.
Bubu ssaum in Korean is closer to the term “marital quarrel” in English—translated literally into English, it means a husband-and-wife (bubu) quarrel (ssaum).
Provoking words were indicated when posters mentioned (translated into English): “My specialty is to make people go mad by teasing;” “I heaped harsh words on my husband;” “I said to him, ‘You are throwing something very well again. Keep going’;” “He left home after destroying a clock and other household goods… He smashed the clock, so I told him ‘Okay, crush that, thinking it as your mom;” and “I was at a loss for words; so I [just] said to him, ‘hit me,’ like a scene of B rated movies. And, I said, ‘Do it more’.”
The reason was that the number of situations for wife-to-husband IPV was not sufficient to depict except the marital quarrel and the loss of self-control. Also, physical and verbal violence for both husband-to-wife IPV and wife-to-husband IPV were connected to few other events.
Loss of self-control was indicated when posters mentioned (translated into English): “I was in a frenzy again because of his words;” “I couldn’t control my mind;” “At the moment, I went berserk;” “I lost control of myself;” “I still couldn’t calm my mind down;” and “I couldn’t manage my anger.”
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The author would like to thank Jody Miller, Leslie Kennedy, and Bonita Veysey for their valuable comments.
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Byun, Sh. What Happens Before Intimate Partner Violence? Distal and Proximal Antecedents. J Fam Viol 27, 783–799 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-012-9464-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-012-9464-y