Reciprocal partner violence

Reciprocal partner violence involves intimate partner violence (IPV) in which each person in the relationship is both a perpetrator and victim of IPV.

The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge (PASK) Project, the largest meta-analysis of DV/IPV research ever undertaken, found that 57.9% of all IPV is reciprocal in large population samples.

PASK Classification	Partner violence (percentage)
	Reciprocal	Male Perpetrated	Feale Perpetrated
Among large population samples	57.9	13.8	28.3
Among school and college samples	51.9	16.2	31.9
Among respondents reporting IPV in legal or female-oriented clinical/treatment seeking samples not associated with the military	72.3	13.3	14.4
Within military and male treatment samples	39	43.4	17.3

The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study found high rates of reciprocal IPV among study participants. The document “Findings About Partner Violence From the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study” released by the US National Institute of Justice found:

When the data were analyzed, victimized women were 10 times more likely to be perpetrators than other women and male perpetrators also were 19 times more likely to be victims than other men."

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health also found that about half of all IPV is reciprocal IPV. The study examined differences in injury rates between reciprocal and non-reciprocal IPV and found that injury rates are higher in reciprocal IPV than non-reciprocal IPV.

In 2017, 12 of 27 women who were killed by their intimate partner had previously been identified by police as perpetrators of IPV.

One of the key indicators of whether a woman will be a victim of IPV is whether she is a perpetrator of IPV. It follows then that one important way that a woman can avoid being a victim of IPV is to not be a perpetrator of IPV. Research by Capaldi has found that this holds true.

Models that ignore reciprocal IPV can inhibit violent women from receiving the support they need to stop their violence.

Governments, domestic violence organisations and the wider community completely ignore reciprocal IPV. By ignoring the prevalence of reciprocal IPV these groups are preventing effective interventions as they discount the need to intervene with violent women. This will contribute to the continuation of reciprocal IPV and actually make it more likely that the women involved will be injured. Ignoring women's violence contributes to violence against women.

See Also

• Non-reciprocal partner violence

External Links

• Discussion of women's violence by Dr Liz Bates
• Article from 2009
• Restorative Change