Why Did She Do It? College Women’s Motives for Intimate Partner Violence Perpetration

The goal of this study was to examine young adult women’s motives for engaging in psychological, physical, and sexual intimate partner violence (IPV). Participants were 484 college women in relationships who had engaged in at least 1 form of psychological, physical, or sexual IPV perpetration. Women who reported engaging in psychological and physical IPV typically reported motives of anger, retaliation for being hit first or for emotional hurt, and an inability to express themselves verbally, whereas women who reported sexual IPV perpetration reported motives of sexual arousal, to prove love, and a loss of control. These results suggest that women engage in psychological and physical perpetration for many of the same reasons and that women’s motives for sexual perpetration are somewhat different. These findings have implications for the ways in which interventions are tailored, suggesting that there are likely important factors that need to be addressed for all types of IPV (e.g., emotion dysregulation), and some types of IPV (e.g., sexual) might require tailored prevention and intervention efforts (e.g., education about appropriate ways of expressing sexual arousal and love). These findings also underscore the importance of investigating multiple forms of perpetration when studying motives for IPV and the relevance of motives in the development of IPV prevention programming with young women.