Monsters and victims: Male felons’ accounts of intimate partner violence

Abstract

Previous research on men who commit intimate partner violence has addressed two questions: (1) how can researchers and clinicians classify men’s accounts of intimate partner violence?, and (2) do men who engage in intimate partner violence subscribe to particular codes of manhood? The present study linked these two questions by asking how men account for their own intimate partner violence and how their accounts draw upon understandings of manhood. Grounded theory analysis of interviews with 22 incarcerated men identified three categories of themes in participants’ accounts of intimate partner violence: justifications (‘she disrespected me as a man;’ ‘a man has a right to control his woman;’ ‘she provoked me;’ ‘she took it’); dissociations (‘I am not the abusive type;’ ‘my violence was limited, and abusers don’t limit their abuse’); and remorse (‘I regret I abused her’). Divergence among these representations of violent men’s reasons for violence and previous typologies reflects this study’s focus on insiders’ views of behavior. Also, the themes that emerged from participants were informed by conflicting, although not wholly independent, codes of manhood that circulate in U. S. cultural life. Attention to violent men’s sense-making strategies and contradictory narratives of manhood suggests opportunities for intervention and rehabilitation.

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