A spotlight on Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse
The KCMHR cohort study has completed its fourth phase (2022-23), providing an abundance of information on health and wellbeing of serving and ex-serving members of the UK Armed Forces over the past twenty years, including the duration of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
Royal British Legion funded some independent research to look at three key topics, including Intimate Partner Violence & Abuse (IPVA). IPVA can be understood as physical, psychological or sexual aggression, coercion or abuse in the context of an intimate relationship.
It is important to note that findings relate specifically to over 3,000 participants of the phase 4 sample (serving and ex-serving Regulars), who were mostly male (90%) with a mean age of 48 years and two-thirds (63%) had deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Overview of findings
· One in seven serving and ex-serving participants reported having experienced IPVA themselves in the past year
· One in eleven serving and ex-serving participants reported having used IPVA against another in the past year
· One in twenty serving and ex-serving participants reported both
To understand the experiences or characteristics linked to IPVA, we studied their associated risk factors and found both use and experience are similarly related to poor mental health, anger, childhood adversities and younger age. The linked infographic highlights risk factors in full. We did not find anything noteworthy relating to gender (not statistically associated) or sexual orientation (could not be studied due to small numbers) in this analysis; both can be potentially linked to the small sample sizes of specific groups.
Linda Slapakova, a PhD student at KCMHR, has embarked on a PhD to study IPVA dynamics in more depth and is supervised by Dr Deirdre MacManus, Dr Rachael Gribble & Professor Dominic Murphy , and funded by the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership.
Research team: Laura Palmer, Aarya Meynon, Sofia Franchini, Rupa Bhundia, Marie-Louise Sharp, Nicola T. Fear, Deirdre MacManus, Sharon Stevelink