Prevention of Intimate Partner Violence in Substance-Using Populations

Abstract

Although the prevention of intimate partner violence is a major public health priority for the United States, little is known about how to prevent this form of violence. The strong cross-sectional and longitudinal association between substance misuse and partner violence suggests that substance-misusing populations may be an ideal audience for implementing partner violence prevention programs. This approach is reviewed from the perspective of universal, selective, and indicated prevention programs.

Keywords:

• intimate partner violence
• substance misuse
• prevention

Notes

¹Treatment can be briefly and usefully defined as a planned, goal-directed, temporally structured change process, of necessary quality, appropriateness, and conditions (endogenous and exogenous), which is bounded (culture, place, time, etc.) and can be categorized into professional-based, tradition-based, mutual-help based (AA, NA, etc.), and self-help (“natural recovery”) models. There are no unique models or techniques used with substance users—of whatever types and heterogeneities- which are not also used with non-substance users. In the West, with the relatively new ideology of “harm reduction” and the even newer Quality of Life (QOL) treatment-driven model, there are now a new set of goals in addition to those derived from/associated with the older tradition of abstinence-driven models. Editor's note.

²The reader is referred to Hills' criteria for causation which were developed in order to help assist researchers and clinicians determine if risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated (Hill, 1965). Editor's note.

³The reader is reminded that alcoholics—whatever their diagnosis, quality, and levels of functioning and adaptation—represent a heterogenous population, who, for a range of reasons, may and do continue to be “homogenized” as if they represented a homogenous population. Editor's note.

⁴Because students attending alternative high schools are at increased risk of substance misuse and other problematic behavior, it could be argued that targeting these youth is an example of a selective prevention program. However, we refer to Project TND here as a universal prevention program because (1) most youth are not in alternative schools strictly for substance misuse, and (2) Project TND was implemented universally in the respective schools and shown to be effective in reducing substance use and violence-related variables in both alternative and traditional high schools.