Intimate Partner Violence in the Military: An Analysis of Police Reporting Behaviors

• In Event: The Broad Reach of Intimate Partner Violence Across Groups and its Consequences

Abstract

Although awareness of intimate partner violence (IPV) has increased in society, acknowledging that American military members and their families are particularly vulnerable to these forms of violence has been relatively recent. The 2011 Department of Defense Health Related Behaviors Survey of Active Duty Military Personnel concluded that 21.7% of women who joined the military reported unwanted sexual contact by someone in the military. While scholars have shown that victims of IPV are unlikely to report their victimizations to the police (Venema, 2016), virtually no attempts have been made to explore police reporting behavior by those in the military and/or victimized by someone in the military. In this paper, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): Concatenated files, 1992-2014 were used to examine whether intimate partner assaults were less likely to be reported by the victim if either the victim and/or offender were active duty military personnel. To ascertain whether military status affected reporting behaviors for other violent crimes, models predicting the probability of police reporting behavior for robbery victimizations were also examined. This counterfactual comparison was utilized to provide further evidence that the military culture differentially silences IPA victims compared to victims of other violent crime.

Author

• Patricia Becker, University of Delaware