Web of Violence : Exploring Connections Among Different Forms of Interpersonal Violence and Abuse

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 is a Research Associate Professor of Psychology at Sewanee, the University of the South, studying the methodological and measurement challenges of violence research and cross-cultural issues in measuring and intervening for violence. Dr. Hamby is the Founding Editor of the journal Psychology of Violence, published by the American Psychological Association. Dr. Hamby is a co-author of the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire―the core of the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, which is the largest survey conducted on youth victimization and the source of the most up-to-date and comprehensive statistics on the co-occurrence among different forms of youth violence. Dr. Hamby is author or co-author of more than 60 publications on family violence and youth victimization, including The Conflict Tactics Scales Handbook and Sortir Ensemble et Se Respecter, the first Swiss dating violence prevention program. With Mary Beth Skupien, she conducted the first reservation-based study of intimate partner violence among American Indians. She has served on two expert panels for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention on violence. A licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Hamby has received awards from the National Register for Health Service Providers in Psychology and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. John Grych is a Professor of Psychology at Marquette University. His primary research interests are in the effects of interparental conflict and family violence on children’s development and the causes and consequences of physical and sexual aggression in adolescent romantic relationships. He is the author or co-author of over 40 publications including Interparental Conflict and Child Development: Theory, Research, and Applications, co-edited with Dr. Frank Fincham. Dr. Grych is widely cited for his work on social-cognitive processes in families who have experienced violence and for developing models of causal mechanisms of the links among types of violence and family conflict. He has been principal investigator on grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and other agencies, and has been a member of numerous grant review study sections for the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Grych serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Psychology of Violence, and is a licensed clinical psychologist. He is co-editing a special issue on new empirical data related to the co-occurrence of different forms of violence that will appear in Psychology of Violence.