Can Johnson's Typology of Adult Partner Violence Apply to Teen Dating Violence?

In 1995, Johnson proposed a typology of adult intimate partner violence that examined the role of power and control in such relationships and the mutuality of violence between partners. His theory aimed to resolve discrepancies in the adult literature showing gender symmetry in couple violence perpetration found among nationally representative survey samples in contrast to male-dominated violence in studies of shelter, clinical, and criminal justice popu- lations. More specifically, feminist researchers studying help-seeking samples had long posited that violence was a tool used by those in power as a form of control and that intimate partner violence was primarily perpetrated by men. Family violence researchers' findings that high levels of couple violence were in fact perpe- trated by women, based on results from national surveys, conflicted with this belief, prompting Johnson to more closely examine what the field was learning. In doing so, he identified a variety of types of intimate partner violence that varied in nature and form, based on the coexistence of control tactics and physical violence and the reciprocity of perpetration of control and/or violence. These types included situational couple violence, intimate terrorism, violent resistance, and mutual violent control (Johnson, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2008; Johnson & Leone, 2005; Leone, Johnson, Cohan, & Lloyd, 2004). Johnson argued that men were more likely to use violence coupled with controlling behavior as a form of coercion and that this more severe type of violence was responsible for the types of female victims feminist researchers had studied in shelter and court populations. By contrast, the type of couple violence that women in relationships had reported in national surveys was less severe violence without control tactics.This groundbreaking typology caused schol- ars in the field to call into question decades of research about the nature and context of victims' experiences and the appropriateness of victim advocacy and criminal justice responses to inti- mate partner violence when seen as one uni- form phenomenon (Zweig & Burt, 2002). With Johnson's resolution that not all types of cou- ple violence are the same, it became critical to understand the varying needs of victims being targeted by service providers and the nature of perpetrators being processed by law enforce- ment. Had victims been subject to coercive con- trolling behavior in combination with violence? Were perpetrators simply engaging in low-level violence without an element of control? It is important to note that since the development of his theory, Johnson and his colleagues have empirically documented the existence of all of these multiple types of intimate partner violence among adults.The goal of this study was to examine the relevance of Johnson's typology of adult inti- mate partner violence to teen dating violence by replicating it in a sample of youth. The term teen dating violence includes various types and degrees of abuse that can range from physical and sexual violence to forms of emotional abuse occurring between teens who are in dat- ing/romantic relationships with one another (Mulford & Giordano, 2008). Similar to adult intimate partner violence, past research has shown that both male and female youth are victims and perpetrators of dating violence, that some relationships involve violence and abuse that is reciprocal between dating part- ners, and that some relationships involve teen dating violence in which physical violence is coupled with emotional abuse and controlling behaviors (e.g., Mulford & Giordano, 2008). These differing reports of teen dating violence experiences are similar to the ones regarding adult intimate partner violence that prompted Johnson's development of a violence typology.In the current study, we further explored Johnson's typology and its relevance to youth's relationships in terms of reports of violence and controlling behaviors in these relationships. …