Hi. I have spent the last 18 months researching this topic area -- treatment of IPV offenders. While there has been some research to support the premise of personality characteristics, if this is to support treatment, I would suggest assessing for depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress symptoms, alcohol usage, and dissociation. Additionally, current life stressors have been shown to influence one's usage of IPV behaviors. If you look at the research in these areas, it suggests that decreases in these areas results in result in decreases in IPV offending and victimization. Given the high correlation between individuals who are both victims and offenders this is an interesting area to research and is on the cutting edge. Another interesting area to research would be the correlation between childhood adverse life events and how these interact with adult adverse life events with IPV offending and dual IPV - victim and offender.

The standard treatment model being used (psycho-educational Duluth module) does not address treatment resistant IPV offenders: it is being arrested that results in 60% of offenders not re-offending, meta-analysis results have shown that the addition of treatment models based on the Duluth module as 0-5% impact on reoffending. There are some interesting studies being done looking at Motivational Interviewing and/or using the stages of change (transtheoretical) model. Approaches that have successfully addressed substance abuse offenders who display the same characteristic - treatment resistant. It might be interesting to assess for stages of change and then correlate that with severity and frequency of subsequent and/or historical offending

Hope this helps.

Hi Eleni,

when reading your question I thought of response inhibition tasks (e.g. go/nogo, flanker paradigms) as additions to an investigation of domestic violence offenders. The mere ability to inhibit an aggressive act may be determined by the general ability to withhold a prepotent response. Response inhibition and impulse control may be an important measure when looking at the topic of aggression.

Regards, Vanessa

Hi,

A psychopathy scale or other measure to check reliability of the subject would be important. It is essential to measure the perpetrators' history of violence exposure and maltreatment, and substance use throughout the lifespan, as well as a careful history of affect regulation and attachment if possible. See the work of Fonagy on the latter. fMRI or other neuroimaging (EEG) tasks would be interesting with showing of images of unknown women versus photos of the partner-victim, perhaps with different verbal prompts to evoke different states of mind for the offender.

If there are children, it is important to ask about the offenders' relationship with the children and awareness of any threat posed to them indirectly or directly if offender has threatened or harmed children.

Best wishes,

DSS

Daniel,

I am most intrigued by your answer. Can you send some links to the fMRI work & by Fonagy. Do you have any links or abstracts to share perhaps?

Please email me - [email protected]

Thanks

jjk

Will do. Here's a related and very recently published paper on a measure that is borne out of the Fonagy work (see any of his papers with Anthony Bateman on Mentalization-Based Treatment) for further reference as well:

Crim Behav Ment Health. 2013 Oct;23(4):274-89. doi: 10.1002/cbm.1889.

The Index Offence Representation Scales; a predictive clinical tool in the management of dangerous, violent patients with personality disorder?

McGauley G, Ferris S, Marin-Avellan L, Fonagy P.

Thanks Daniel

I will look at this:)

p.s. what about those without PD?

The idea is that even without PD, the representations are likely to be associated with hostile-helpless mental representations of attachment figures. And that is what the Fonagy work is about-- with the meta-analytic stance of mentalization as important key to or, if you like, legacy of those relationships. Our romantic relationships are very often (almost always-- even or more!) informed by those prior attachments-- see the work of Judtih Crowell on that. Hope this helps.

Please talk to the people doing the work in your area. On this site, you are going to get a lot of suggestions that the responders personally feel should work, rather than ones that have proved useful in therapeutic settings.

Here in Canada, I used to use the Marshall and the Tolman. (You may have to be a psychologist to buy & administer these. This has to do with understanding that how you ask the questions can have an influence on the answer given). The correlations with re-arrest, not surprisingly, had to do with the severity of injuries, frequency and whether the men had been violent with other people as well.

Do some research and you won't find yourself "re-inventing the wheel".

Ellen

Hello Eleni,

I hate to ask but what exactly are you aiming at learning from a "scale"? What is the purpose? Is this for risk assessment or to be used therapeutically? I tend to be skeptical of the almost fetishistic use of scales in clinical practice, as if they had an ability to reveal the person in ways that could not be obtained from talking and interacting with them, along with people who know them. That said, to the extent that you want to know the individual rather than simply their problem, I would advocate for using broad-based methods for personality assessment (e.g., MCMI, MMPI, TAT, Rorschach) in addition to, if possible, 3-4 interview sessions, collateral info and a representational attachment measure (AAI or AAPS). The idea is to locate the problem in a relational (or developmental) context rather than try to isolate/medicalize it.

Research from Amy Holtzworth-Munroe and others dating back to the 80's and 90's found that half ot the men arrested for domestic violence in the U.S.can be categorized as "family only," and to not evidence high levels of psychopathology. Since then, the enactment of so-called "mandatory arrest" laws in the US have led to an even greater proportion of the :family only" types among all perpetrators. Therefore, it makes sense to not only measure for personality disturbance, but also for motivation, reasons for violence, interpersonal skills, and so forth. I conduct batterer programs in California, and my assessment protocol can be found at www.springerpub.com/hamel-ancillary

BRIEF SPOUSAL ASSAULT FORM for the EVALUATION of RISK (B-SAFER)

Kropp, Hart, Belfrage, 2005

The B-SAFER is a structured professional guideline for assessing risk for spousal assault, designed to be especially useful for decision making by police and other justice agencies.

The B-SAFER can be obtained from: proactive-resolutions.com