Patterns of Repetition, Intermittency, and Harm Escalation in Same-Sex and Mixed-Sex Intimate Partner Violence: An Analysis of 1,000 Days of National Police Records in Sweden

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677231199047
• Author: Marika Dagenbrink,Matthew Bland,Barak Ariel
• Date: 01 December 2024
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Patterns of Repetition,

Intermittency, and Harm

Escalation in Same-Sex and

Mixed-Sex Intimate Partner

Violence: An Analysis of 1,000

Days of National Police Records

in Sweden

Marika Dagenbrink

1

, Matthew Bland

2

,

and Barak Ariel

2,3

Abstract

In recent years more attention has been given to the ways in which mixed-sex and same-sex

intimate partner violence (IPV) couples report crimes to the police. Specif‌ically, what patterns of

repetition, intermittency between contacts with the police, and harm trajectories over time

exist, and are there variations between same-sex and mixed-sex dyads? We explore all eligible

IPV reported in Sweden over 1,000 days (n=14,939) and use descriptive statistics to examine dif-

ferences between different victims and offenders. We code IPV offences within three levels of harm

recognized by law and develop a tiered approach to harm quantif‌ication that supports the growing

evidence that not all IPV harm is the same. Based on off‌icial records, IPV usually ends following the

f‌irst contact with the police, as nine out of ten dyads never call again. Variations across cisgender

and sexual identity groups exist: Repeat same-sex IPV is not as common as mixed-sex IPV but is

reported more quickly to the police after it had occurred once. In the 1,000-day follow-up period,

same-sex dyads do not call the police more than four times and the repeated incidents trends seem

to be driven primarily by outliers. Moreover, we f‌ind an overall pattern of decreasing time intervals

between each additional contact, but no overall pattern of escalating severity over time. However,

the overall severity trend it driven by female-victim-male-offender dyads: male offenders are more

likely to cause escalation of harm, while two out of f‌ive male–male repeat IPV experience escalation

in harm. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these f‌indings, which overall illus-

trate the importance of observing IPV in typological terms, rather than as a continuum.

1

Swedish Police, Stockholm, Sweden

2

Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

3

Institute of Criminology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Corresponding Author:

Barak Ariel, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

Email: ba285@cam.ac.uk

Original Article

International Criminal Justice Review

2024, Vol. 34(4) 412-432

© 2023 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/10575677231199047

journals.sagepub.com/home/icj

Keywords

domestic violence, domestic abuse, escalation, harm, same-sex couples

Research on intimate partner violence (IPV) has historically focused on male offenders and female

victims with emphasis on the role of gender as a prominent component of popular explanatory abuse

theories. Scholars such as Johnson (2008) and more recently Løwenstein et al. (2023) have leaned

into gender-based differences as the source of hypotheses. But such hypotheses are typically

grounded in historical contextualization of IPV as a male-on-female crime. A more recent body of

work has begun paying closer attention to other groups of victims and offenders. Self-reported

data from multiple research sites indicate that the prevalence of IPV victimization among heterosex-

ual men can, at times, resemble, the prevalence among heterosexual female victims (Archer, 2000;

Nybergh et al., 2013; Rozmann & Ariel, 2018). Non-heterosexual victims experience similar or

higher prevalence but more severe forms of IPV and abuse than heterosexual victims (Ibrahim,

2019, p. 8). There are additional maladaptive outcomes for subgroups of non-heterosexual victims

because of the unique components of their sexual orientation and their minority status in society,

which create abuse multipliers (Badenes-Ribera et al., 2016, p. 284; Callan et al., 2023; Finneran

& Stephenson, 2013; Gehring & Vaske, 2017). Specif‌ically, these additional outcome factors

include sexual orientation “outing,”homophobia, and higher barriers to support.

One overlooked area globally is nation-level data on the IPV escalation, which states that IPV

grows worse over time (see Pagelow, 1981; Walker, 2006). There is no ubiquitous support for the

existence of escalation of abuse, with some dyads experiencing escalation, and some that do not

(Bland & Ariel, 2020b; Loewenstein et al., 2022; Sherman, 2018). Some IPV victim groups such

as indigenous populations suffer disproportionately with harm escalation (Kerr, 2016; Piquero

et al., 2006). There may be different trajectories for cisgender and sexual orientation IPV victim

groups. For example, does repeated IPV look different for men and women of different sexual iden-

tities? Do they share the same intermittency patterns or harm variations over time? At present we lack

both empirical evidence and theoretical constructs for these questions. Specif‌ically, there has not yet

been a body of research that enables us to examine even the existing dominant theories of

IPV escalation in the context of same-sex dyads.

We aim to address these gaps by analysing cases of IPV reported to the Swedish national police

between 1 January 2015 and 27 September 2017. We review patterns of victimization while compar-

ing same-gender and mixed-gender IPV. We begin by reviewing the literature on IPV against differ-

ent victim groups and then focus on IPV research using off‌icial records to test the IPV escalation

question: Does escalating IPV f‌luctuate differently across victim groups? We then describe the

methods used to analyze the data, followed by a presentation of the results. We conclude with a dis-

cussion on the theoretical and practical implications, which calls for more attention to variations

across victim groups.

Literature Review

IPV With Heterosexual Male Victims

Historically, research has focused on female victims of IPV but it is possible that men experience

it at similar rates of prevalence. Globally, there are wide variations in male-victim IPV prevalence

between nations (Coll et al., 2020): some studies suggest higher IPV prevalence against heterosexual

female victims compared to heterosexual male victims (see Rozmann & Ariel, 2018); others indicate

equal or higher rates of physical IPV among men than women (Sparrow et al., 2020). In the United

Kingdom, the Off‌ice for National Statistics (2016) reports, based on a national survey, that IPV

involving heterosexual male victims occurs at 4.0%, as opposed to 8.2% of IPV involving

Dagenbrink et al. 413