ABSTRACT
Aggression and violence in intimate relationships is a global problem of significant magnitude, affecting people of different ages, sexualities, gender identities, marital statuses, ethnicities, and cultures (Dixon & Graham-Kevan, 2011; Esquivel-Santoveña & Dixon, 2012). Physical intimate partner aggression has a yearly prevalence of 15 per cent in several nationally representative studies of US adult couples (e.g., Schafer, Caetano, & Clark, 1998). Separating out the rates for men and women, crime victimisation surveys in the Western world show it is a problem for both genders. For example, the 2014 New Zealand Crime and Safety Survey (Ministry of Justice [MOJ], 2015) shows that 4.4 per cent of men and 5.7 per cent of women reported victimisation in the previous 12 months. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (Walters, Chen, & Breiding, 2013) determined lifetime prevalence rates for rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner. Respectively, these were: 61.1 per cent and 37.3 per cent for bisexual women and men, 43.8 per cent and 26 per cent for lesbian and gay participants, and 35.5 per cent and 29 per cent for heterosexual women and men. Focusing on women alone, the World Health Organization (WHO) Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2006) reported lifetime rates of physical intimate partner aggression from 13 per cent in urban Japan and 27 per cent in urban Brazil, to between 40 per cent and 50 per cent in Samoa, rural Bangladesh, rural Tanzania, rural Ethiopia, rural Peru, and 61 per cent in urban Peru. Although methodological differences between surveys make it difficult to compare rates across countries and across demographics (Esquivel-Santoveña & Dixon, 2012), it is clear that intimate partner aggression affects a wide variety of people across the world.
