Parental Style, Dating Violence and Gender

Abstract

The relationship between parenting styles and teen dating violence has become a relevant research topic in recent years, especially related to violence inflicted online. To more fully understand this relationship, the objective of the present study was to examine which parenting style (authoritarian, indulgent, authoritative, or neglectful) best protects against dating violence in adolescent relationships. A total of 1132 adolescents of both sexes participated in this study (46.4% boys and 53.6% girls), with ages between 14 and 18 years old (M = 15.6, SD = 1.3). A multivariate factorial design was applied (MANOVA, 4 × 2), using the parenting style, the parents’ gender, and the adolescents’ gender as independent variables, and the dating violence dimensions (online and offline) as dependent variables. As the results show, the lowest scores on all the dating violence dimensions examined were obtained by adolescents from indulgent families. In addition, three interaction effects were observed between the mother’s parenting style and the adolescent’s gender on online violence (e-violence and control), and the father’s parenting style on offline violence (verbal-emotional). Thus, adolescents with authoritarian mothers obtained the highest scores on violence and control inflicted online, respectively, and adolescent girls with authoritarian fathers obtained the highest scores on verbal-emotional violence. These findings suggest that the indulgent style is the parenting style that protects against violence in teen dating relationships, and they also highlight the risks of the authoritarian style as a family child-rearing model.

Relations among Romantic Myths, Offline Dating Violence Victimization and Cyber Dating Violence Victimization in Adolescents

“…Psychological/emotional offline DV involves acts like insulting, despising, humiliating, and threatening victims [33,35,38,61], and its prevalence is high in adolescent couples [30][31][32][33][34][35]. Cyber-control victimization is also more frequent in adolescents than cyber-aggression victimization [11,22,49]. The closer relations between verbal-emotional offline DV victimization and cyber-control victimization herein observed could be linked with the higher prevalence of both types of teen DV victimization and their association with adolescents' lack of previous experience in romantic relationships [49,52,[62][63][64].…”

“…Physical offline DV victimization could be a higher risk factor of cyber DV victimization for girls, who would also be more likely to suffer cyber-aggression and cyber-control by their partners, and with more serious consequences for their psychosocial adjustment. These differences between boys and girls highlight the need to take a gender perspective in teen dating violence research [22,65,66], as some differences appear in the variables related to different teen DV types in adolescent boys and girls. From this gender perspective, not only should the differences between boys and girls in the relations among variables be analyzed, but also new variables, such as the extent to which girls and boys assume female and male stereotypes, their gender identity or their adhesion to male and female social norms, should be considered.…”

“…Some studies have shown more cyber DV victimization in girls [7,8,45], while others have indicated more cyber victimization in boys [3,46]. In studies differentiating between cyber-control and cyber-aggression, more involvement of boys in cyber-aggression behaviors and a similar involvement of boys and girls in cyber-control behaviors have been observed [22]. Research into gender differences in cyber DV victimization should be extended by analyzing not only gender differences in prevalence, but also possible gender differences in variables related to cyber DV victimization.…”

“…Cyber DV includes both behaviors that involve harming victims through direct attacks, e.g., threats, insults or disseminating private information, namely cyber-aggression, and forms of abusive control of victims to monitor their social relationships and what they are doing at any time, namely cyber-control [1,11,18,20,21]. Cyber-control behaviors toward partners are more frequent than cyber-aggression behaviors [20,22,23].…”

“…Indeed, offline DV victimization could be a risk factor for experiencing cyber DV victimization. Nowadays, a marked continuity of the real world with the virtual world exists in relationships among adolescents, and partner violence in their romantic relationships can easily move from the real world to the virtual world [22]. However, offline DV victimization includes different forms of victimization (physical, psychological, relational) that can be differently related to cyber DV victimization.…”