Exploring the Relationship between Changes in Informal Social Control and Intimate Partner Violence

• In Event: Emerging Scholars on Emerging Adulthood: Explicating the Relationship between Social Environment and Offending

Abstract

Given that intimate partner violence reaches its peak during adolescence and young adulthood, which are periods marked with instability, it is important to examine whether change in risk factors and sources of social support relate to intimate partner violence over time. However, research primarily focuses on static risk factors or dynamic risk factors that are only measured during a single time period. Repeated measures of intimate partner violence perpetration from criminal history and risk/need data (e.g., family, housing, intimate partners, vocational skills and employment) were used from the Incarcerated Serious Violent Young Offender Study. Random and fixed effects regression was used to estimate the overall and within-individual effects of each dynamic risk factor on intimate partner violence. Cross-lagged dynamic panel modelling was used to examine whether changes in an informal social control scale, a sum of the quality of sources of social support, related to changes in intimate partner violence. The change in informal social control from emerging adulthood protected against intimate partner violence perpetration, but only when the individual- and family-level baseline risk from adolescence were high. Findings have implications for repeated monitoring of dynamic factors and early targeting of criminogenic needs of individuals involved in the justice system.

Authors

• Hana Ryu, Simon Fraser University, BC Corrections

• Evan McCuish, Simon Fraser University