Adolescent Social Networks and Physical Intimate Partner Violence Among Colombian Rural Adolescents

ABSTRACT

The current study analyzes individual and social network correlates of adolescent engagement in physical intimate partner violence (IPV) utilizing socio-centric data from a high-school population of 242 adolescents from rural Colombia. We studied self-reported victimization and perpetration for boys and girls. First, we used logistic regression to explore the relationship between adolescents’ IPV engagement and school peers’ IPV engagement, school violence victimization, and social network position, controlling for gender and age (N = 111). Second, we used social network statistical methods to investigate if there were more friendships of similar IPV status to the adolescent than expected by chance in their social networks. Our results show that the proportion of friends perpetrating physical IPV increased the probability of adolescents’ IPV perpetration. Contrarywise, the proportion of friends experiencing IPV victimization decreased with the adolescent’s own victimization. Being a victim (a status significantly more common among boys) was also associated with reporting perpetration for both genders. Furthermore, our results contradicted the social network literature, as we found no preferential ties among perpetrators/victims (e.g. adolescents do not seem to befriend each other by IPV engagement). Our study is unique to the global adolescent IPV literature given the scarcity of research examining physical IPV among adolescents in the context of both girls and boys in the context of their school networks. We also add to the understanding of IPV in the case of the global majority of adolescents with the highest rates of IPV victimization (living in low and middle-income countries).

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent intimate partner victimization
• adolescent violence perpetration
• intimate partner violence
• physical dating violence
• physical teen violence
• school social networks

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of our community partners and their teams during the data collection, member check workshops, and dissemination efforts: Institución Educativa de Santa Ana and Fundación Amor por Baru. We also want to acknowledge the following early career researchers for their support in site: Elisa Barcenas, Kimberly Marin, Ana Maria Jaramillo, Paola Martinez, and Ana Maria Guerra. Also, HDCI Lab research assistants: Laura Ramirez, Juliette Herrera, Carla Rodriguez, and Bianka Valentin, assisted in data cleaning and qualitative analysis. Ph.D. (c) Loreen Magariño, Baru Santiago, and Dr Yanet Ruvalcaba gave invaluable feedback on this manuscript’s early versions. Finally, the following local institutions supported our efforts during the data collection phase: Departmento Administrativo de Salud Pública de Cartagena, Secretaria de Educación de Cartagena de Indias, Consejo Comunitario de Santa Ana, Clínica Julio Mario Santo Domingo de Santa Ana, and Asociación de Mujeres por el Cambio.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Conflicting interests

The authors) declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethics approval

Florida International University (Protocol: IRB-190107) and Universidad de los Andes (Protocol: 9452018).

Notes

¹ In the Colombian context, legal names include first, middle, and two last names (paternal and maternal names). In the context of this study, this was helpful to discern among cousins, for example, given that it is culturally common practice to repeat the same names among families.

Additional information

Funding

Ana Lucia and Felipe Montes Rodriguez received funding from the Global Health Equity Scholars Program funded by the National Institutes of Health [NIH FIC D43TW010540] while preparing this manuscript.