Beliefs on Marital Violence Among Portuguese Adolescents: Monitoring Their Evolution and Relationship With Dating Violence

Abstract

In the last two decades, the problem of violence in the family sphere in particular and in intimate relationships in general has been on the agenda for Portuguese governmental and nongovernmental agencies. Several initiatives and campaigns have been launched, which are aimed at reducing occurrence of this violence, particularly among teenagers. This present study aims to assess the evolution in adolescents' attitudes and behaviors concerning intimate partner violence. We collected data from a sample of adolescents (n = 913) to compare with corresponding data collected 7 years ago by Neves and Nogueira (2010) in a sample that had identical sociodemographic characteristics (n = 899). Both cohorts resided in the same areas in the northeastern region of Portugal. The instruments used were the Scale of Beliefs about Marital Violence (ECVC) and the Marital Violence Inventory (IVC; Neves & Nogueira, 2010). The results indicate that although respondents tend to reject traditional beliefs on marital violence more now than in the past, especially male and older respondents, the percentage of dating violence reports has not decreased. Among girls, there was even an increase in perpetration of emotional and mild physical violence. We discuss possible reasons for this discrepancy between the evolution of attitudes and behaviors and make suggestions for improvement in the actions implemented among teenagers to increase their effectiveness.

Using cinema voice to promote positive intimate relationships among European youth: The Lights4Violence Project

“…The role given by students in these stories to the victim's emotional ties is to debunk distorted beliefs about gender and love. This is an important achievement, because, as pointed out by different authors (Marroquí & Cervera, 2014;Neves et al, 2021) those beliefs are a risk factor for DV as they give access to violence as a powerful affirmation strategy and can influence the perpetration of violence, keeping the young people in abusive relationships.…”

The Implementation of Dating Violence Prevention Programmes in Portugal and Their Effectiveness: Perspectives of Professionals

“…Because the programmes vary in terms of their theoretical approaches, epistemological orientations, methods and evaluation systems, it is extremely important to assess which elements have proven to be efficient in terms of mitigating the behaviour of intimate partner violence. Several national and international investigations have sought to systematize the factors that seem to best guarantee the success of preventive interventions in the field of dating violence (Avery-Leaf et al 1997;Foshee et al 1998;Neves et al 2020;Rey-Anacona et al 2020). Issues such as gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age and ethnicity of victims and perpetrators (Foshee et al 2010), as well as the duration of the sessions, their format and the techniques used, have been considered as influencing the success of programmes to prevent dating violence (Graham et al 2021).…”