Understanding Intimate Partner Cyber Abuse across Partnership Categories Based on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation

ABSTRACT

Research indicates non-cisgender and non-heterosexual individuals experience higher rates of intimate partner violence compared to their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts. It is unknown if this is the case for intimate partner cyber abuse (IPCA). Thus, the current study examines IPCA prevalence rates among a sample of adults in intimate partnerships and compares these rates across four partnership categories, defined by gender identity and sexual orientation. We also assess prevalence rates within five IPCA domains and patterns of recurring victimization. Findings suggest victimization experiences may differ across partnership categories and highlight the need for further research with non-heterosexual and non-cisgender populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate partner cyber abuse
• victimization
• recurring victimization
• LGBTQ+

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the term IPCA to capture all terms used to describe cyber abuse between intimate partners (e.g., technology-related abusive behaviors, Bennett et al., 2011; cyber dating abuse, Borrajo et al., 2015; cyber intimate partner aggression, Marganski and Melander, 2018).

2. Note that Marganski et al., (2021) measure of polyvictimization is more similar to “multiple victimization” (as defined in the current study and others; see, e.g., Daigle & Fisher, 2013; Kaasa et al., 2016) because it refers to experiencing more than one type of IPV rather than more than one distinct form of crime (e.g., IPV and burglary).

3. CloudResearch is an online crowdsourcing platform where “Requesters” can recruit “Workers” to complete various Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for small monetary payments.

4. The “Approval Rate” is the rate that requesters have approved HITs [Human Intelligence Task] that Workers complete. For example, if a Worker has completed 5000 HITs and had their work rejected 250 times, their approval rate is 95%” (Amazon Mechanical Turk, 2017, para. 14).

5. Four respondents who completed the survey were removed from the sample because they did not pass attention checks or did not enter the correct completion code.

6. We use a dichotomous indicator of IPCA overall and of each domain (discussed below) rather than a composite score (ranging from 0 to 27) of the number of behaviors an individual experienced. We chose this coding scheme because we do not want to imply that experiencing a greater number of different behaviors necessarily indicates a person experienced more severe abuse than a person who experienced fewer behaviors. A person may experience a single or a small number of behaviors many times.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a Faculty Enrichment grant awarded by the University of Cincinnati’s Criminal Justice Research Center.