Male Abusive Behavior Analysis

When attempting to understand couple violence, there are of course, numerous risk factors that contribute to it. Aside from the role sociocultural factors play, certain kinds of personality characteristics seem to provoke abusive behavior in abusers. Abusers may feel this need to control their partner because of low self-esteem, extreme jealousy and difficulties regulating anger and other intense emotions. Inappropriate coping methods can start and continue the brutal continuum of power and control. These personality differences parallel across both DV and IPV in college aged and older men. Given that patriarchal explanations for male abusive relationships is incomplete, it is critical to examine these shared personality traits.
Anger has …show more content…
The abuser may have suffered some sort of childhood trauma, like intense psychological abuse. Depression and low self-esteem and contribute to relationship issues because if you don’t love and respect yourself, how can you attempt to love anyone else? A common way in attempting to conceal these emotions is consuming alcohol, which can increase risk of violence. There is much debate over alcohol being a cause or causally related to to IPV but much more men commit more severe and frequent acts of violence when intoxicated. Drinking to deal with one’s problems is a type of avoidance coping method that perpetuates unhealthy outcomes for both parties in the relationship. In such cases perpetrators try to minimize the outcomes of these situations by saying “it’s not my fault, they deserved it”, while the victim will typically claim “I deserved …show more content…
This paper focused on possible personality traits abusers may hold stronger than non abusers. These traits may be brought out in certain types of situations, which an interactional approach would stand by. It is possible people may hinder certain traits and they are expressed because of the context they are placed in. None the less, when a partner holds more personal characteristics such as anger, jealousy and hypermasculinity, it sets up a situation for more risk of violence. In discussions about couple violence, most of the information available to us, comes from heterosexual couples and it is difficult to present results in a gender neutral way. Hypermasculinity is obviously a trait males can develop through socialization and peer support but girls are susceptible to accepting such masculinity and inheriting similar traits of low self- esteem and depression. Most personality characteristics lead back to the issue of power and control and needing to feel powerful in one’s relationship when other aspects of their life aren’t living up to potential and