There is an increasing appreciation of the interconnections among all forms of violence. These interconnections have critical implications for conducting research that can produce valid conclusions about the causes and consequences of abuse, maltreatment, and trauma. The accumulated data on co-occurrence also provide strong evidence that prevention and intervention should be organized around the full context of individuals’ experiences, not narrowly defined subtypes of violence. Managing the flood of new research and practice innovations is a challenge, however. New means of communication and integration are needed to meet this challenge, and the Web of Violence is intended to contribute to this process by serving as a concise overview of the conceptual and empirical work that form a basis for understanding the interconnections across forms of violence throughout the lifespan. It also offers ideas and directions for prevention, intervention, and public policy.
A number of initiatives are emerging to integrate the findings on co-occurrence into research and action. The American Psychological Association established a new journal, Psychology of Violence, which is a forum for research on all types of violence. Sherry Hamby is the founding editor and John Grych is associate editor and co-editor of a special issue on the co-occurrence of violence in 2012. Dr. Hamby also is a co-investigator of the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV), which has drawn attention to polyvictimization. Polyvictimization is a focus of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Defending Childhood Initiative and has recently been featured in calls for grant proposals by the Office of Victims of Crime and National Institutes for Justice.
Sherry Hamby, PhD, is also author of Battered Women's Protective Strategies: Stronger Than You Know. She is Research Professor of Psychology and Director of the Life Paths Research Program at the University of the South. She is also founding editor of the APA journal Psychology of Violence. A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Hamby has worked for more than 20 years on the problem of violence, including front-line crisis intervention for domestic and other violence, involvement in grassroots domestic violence organizations, therapy with trauma survivors, and research on many forms of violence. She is co-investigator on the National Survey of Children's Exposure to Violence, which is the U.S.'s primary surveillance of youth victimization and the first national effort to measure crimes against children under 12 that are not reported to authorities. She is the recipient of numerous honors and author or co-author of more than 100 works. Dr. Hamby's work has appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and hundreds of other media outlets. John Grych, Ph.D, is professor and chair of the Psychology department at Marquette University. He has studied a range of questions related to violence in close relationships, including the impact of family violence on children's development and the origins of physical and sexual aggression in adolescent relationships, and also has published work on children's perceptions of interparental conflict and aggression, family processes related to child psychopathology, and interventions for children from conflictual and violent families.
