ABSTRACT
Acts scales, the most common way of measuring partner violence, have been criticized for being too simplistic to capture the complexities of partner violence. An alternative measurement approach is to use typologies that consider various aspects of context. In this study, the authors identified typologies of dating violence perpetration by adolescents. They conducted in-depth interviews with 116 girls and boys previously identified by an acts scale as perpetrators of dating violence. They provided narrative descriptions of their dating violence acts. For boys and girls, many acts considered violent by the acts scale were subsequently recanted or described as nonviolent. From the narratives, they identified four types of female perpetration that were distinguished by motives, precipitating events, and the abuse history of the partners. One type of perpetration accounted for most acts by boys. The findings are discussed relative to dating violence measurement, prevention and treatment, and development of theory.
Subject(s)
Adolescent Behavior/psychology , Aggression/classification , Interpersonal Relations , Juvenile Delinquency/classification , Violence/classification , Adolescent , Aggression/psychology , Courtship/psychology , Female , Humans , Juvenile Delinquency/psychology , Male , North Carolina , Rape/psychology , Risk Assessment , Risk-Taking , Sex Factors , Surveys and Questionnaires , Violence/psychologyABSTRACT
For several years I considered myself a resident enemy alien of public health research. This polemical article explores this enemy alien subjectivity by looking at an ethnographic case showing how race is figured in public health research, and it asks what this subjectivity might suggest for a medical anthropology struggling to be both more public and interdisciplinary, and more fundamentally ethnological. As I imbue my enemy alien subjectivity with uniquely anthropological images and references, I ask medical anthropologists to reflect upon the specialized nature of a contemporary anthropological imagination and, while doing this, to look to the Nietzschean notion of slave ethics in order to engage with questions of how we might use this self-awareness to create various modes of"postcritical"practice in public health.
