Published In

Journal of General Internal Medicine

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2003

Subjects

Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To examine in-depth the lives of women whose partners attempted to kill them, and to identify patterns that may aid in the clinician’s ability to predict, prevent, or counsel about femicide or attempted femicide. DESIGN: Qualitative analysis of 30 in-depth interviews. SETTING: Six U.S. cities. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty women, aged 17–54 years, who survived an attempted homicide by an intimate partner. RESULTS: All but 2 of the participants had previously experienced physical violence, controlling behavior, or both from the partner who attempted to kill them. The intensity of the violence, control, and threats varied greatly, as did the number of risk factors measured by the Danger Assessment, defining a wide spectrum of prior abuse. Approximately half (14/30) of the participants did not recognize that their lives were in danger. Women often focused more on relationship problems involving money, alcohol, drugs, possessiveness, or infidelity, than on the risk to themselves from the violence. The majority of the attempts (22/30) happened around the time of a relationship change, but the relationship was often ending because of problems other than violence.

Description

© 2003 by the authors. Licensee: Springer. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

*At the time of publication, C. Nicolaidis was affiliated with OHSU.

DOI

10.1046/j.1525-1497.2003.21202.x

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/32757

Share

COinS