Session: Intimate Partner Violence During the Transition to Young Adulthood: The Role of Antisocial Tendencies (Society for Prevention Research 21st Annual Meeting)

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a common occurrence in adolescent relationships but gradually lessens in frequency and intensity for many youth during the transition to adulthood (O’Leary, 1999). A considerable subset of young adults, however, continue to engage in various forms of IPV (relational, psychological, physical), and these behavior patterns place themselves (and possibly their young children) at risk. The goal of this symposium is to consider the mechanisms by which IPV continues into emerging adulthood and beyond, with a focus on the antisocial behavior tendencies that might reinforce and be reinforced by IPV during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.

The first paper in this symposium examines the link between antisocial tendencies in 5 year-olds and IPV in 19 year-olds. Using a high-risk, ethnically diverse sample, the authors find that early deficits in social competence, as well as high levels of aggression and defiance, were longitudinally predictive of dating violence fourteen years later.  Early antisocial tendencies were not, however, related to later attitudes condoning aggression, suggesting that there may be multiple pathways to adolescent IPV.

The second paper in this symposium explores the potentially reciprocal associations between aggressive peer networks, alcohol use, and IPV. Utilizing an autoregressive, cross-lagged path analysis approach with a large randomly recruited sample of Canadian adolescents (12-18 years-old), the authors demonstrate that experiences with peer aggression, alcohol use, and dating victimization all display a downward spiral of influence on one another across the course of adolescence and early adulthood. These findings suggest that antisocial and aggressive behaviors build upon one another in a manner that my place some adolescents at considerable risk of difficulties transitioning into early adulthood.

The third paper in this symposium reports on a long term follow up of at-risk boys followed across 8 time points until 21-35 years of age, and posits that IPV in young adulthood will be related to a history of poor inhibitory control and dysregulated relationship dynamics. The authors found that rates and impact of IPV decreased with age for the men and their female partners, regardless of the type or severity of IPV examined, which suggests that many men and women are able to gain increasing inhibitory control over IPV during early adulthood.

Results from these studies will be discussed with regard to young adult IPV as an outgrowth of early antisocial tendencies, a common pathway shared by many other high-risk and potentially preventable behaviors.