Severity and Predictors of Physical Intimate Partner Violence against Male Victims in Canada

ABSTRACT

Recent debates surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV) have focused on its gender symmetry and gender-oriented nature. These debates center on findings from various data sources, like victimization or self-reported surveys and police-based reports. Data by Statistics Canada, from 1999 to 2014, has shown that the prevalence of IPV is similar for male and female victims, except for sexual assaults. However, there has been a paucity of studies on the severity and risk factors of IPV against men by female partners. Thus, this paper examines the severity of and risk factors for physical IPV against heterosexual men in Canada using the General Social Survey (Victimization) data of 2014. This study revealed that there is a symmetry in the experiences of physical violence between male and female victims. This study also revealed that male victims experience more severe violence than female victims. Using binary logistic regression analysis, years of dwelling together, the victim’s age, childhood victimization, and marijuana use were found to predict physical IPV against heterosexual men. This paper concludes with suggestions about how these predicting factors can be used to identify male victims and the need for a more inclusive approach toward addressing IPV, which should include male victims.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic abuse/violence
• family violence
• intimate relationships
• IPV against men

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully appreciates the Demographic Health Survey (DHS) program for making the dataset of this study available for use.

Disclosure of interest

The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with regards to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this study and article.

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study. The NDHS study was approved by the National Health Research Ethics Committee (Assigned Number: NHREC/01/01/2007) (NPC and ICF International, 2014). Before the questionnaires were distributed, signed informed consent for the survey was obtained from the respondents at the beginning of the interviews (NPC and ICF International, 2014).

Notes

¹ One of the requirements for the release of data at the RDC is that it must be weighted to reflect the general population.

² One of the weights allowed for the release of descriptive and bivariate data in the RDC is the `svy’ weighted through which the whole population can be reflected in the results of the data.

³ This variable is a merging of three questions on physical violence. The reason for collapsing these variables was based on the requirement for releasing data from the University of Saskatchewan Research Data Center (SKY RDC). Unweighted data with cells fewer than 10 respondents will not be permitted for release from the SKY RDC, and those three variables had cells fewer than 10 respondents. This is also one of the reasons why five-year IPV estimates were preferred to last year (i.e. one year) IPV estimates.

⁴ It is important to note that this phenomenon is applicable for female victims as well.