Perpetrators’ Perspectives on Family Violence: An Event Process Model

Abstract

Offense process models are descriptive theories that provide a temporal outline of an offense—including its cognitive, behavioral, contextual, and motivational components—from a perpetrator’s perspective. Offense process models have been developed for a wide range of criminal offending (e.g., alcohol-impaired driving, child sexual offending, rape, aggravated robbery, homicide), but remain underdeveloped for family violence. The purpose of this study was to develop an offense process model of family violence. We conducted individual semistructured interviews with 27 participants—14 men and 13 women—completing community-based family violence perpetrator treatment programs, and systematically analyzed participants’ narratives of family violence events using grounded theory methods. The resulting event process model of family violence (FVEPM) contains four sections, arranged temporally from the most distal to the most proximal factors in relation to the family violence event: (1) background factors, (2) event build-up, (3) event, and (4) post-event. Each section outlines the cognitive, behavioral, contextual, and motivational factors that contribute to family violence perpetration. The FVEPM is the first attempt to consider whether a single offense process model can account for a broader range of family violence than that used solely by men toward their female intimate partners. Furthermore, the FVEPM highlights the dynamic nature of family violence events (FVEs), and the salient role of situational and interpersonal factors in contributing to family violence perpetration. We argue that the FVEPM has the potential to accommodate a range of types of family violence perpetration, and makes a useful contribution to theory and research on event-based models from a perpetrator perspective.

Testing the Generalizability of the Event Process Model of Family Violence With an Incarcerated Sample

“…Participants collectively described 13 FVEs in which they used physical (and often also psychological) FV toward an intimate partner ( n = 10), child ( n = 1), sibling ( n = 1), or parent ( n = 1). Consistent with our earlier research (Stairmand, Polaschek, et al, 2019), event narratives for FVEs involving any family member as an event victim were included in data analysis. Three participants described one FVE, and five participants described two FVEs; of the second FVEs described, three involved a different event victim to the first.…”

“…With these limitations in mind, Stairmand, Polaschek, and Dixon (2019) developed the event process model of FV (FVEPM). 1 This research extended Drummond’s (1999) model by considering a broader range of FV than that perpetrated by men toward their female partners.…”

“…The current study is part of a larger research project in which we developed (Stairmand, Polaschek, et al, 2019) and examined pathways through (Stairmand, Dixon, et al, 2019) the FVEPM with a community-based treatment sample. This study further developed the FVEPM by testing the generalizability of the FVEPM (Stage 1) and its pathways (Stage 2) with an incarcerated sample of men with extensive histories of violent and other offending.…”

Pathways to Family Violence: Investigating Patterns in the Event Process of Family Violence Perpetrators

“…Johnson, 2006) typically fail to consider the role of relevant situational and interpersonal factors that may usefully differentiate between types (Dixon & Browne, 2003;Holtzworth-Munroe & Meehan, 2004). Indeed, the event process model of family violence (FVEPM; Stairmand et al, 2019) highlights the importance of these factors in contributing to acts of FV. Among other forensic populations, heterogeneity has been captured by examining distinct pathways in the offending process.…”

“…The current study is part of a larger research project that developed the FVEPM (Stairmand et al, 2019) by using grounded theory methods to systematically analyze perpetrators' narratives of FV events (FVEs). This paper further develops the FVEPM by investigating the presence of distinct offending pathways through the model.…”