Screen men, not women, for intimate partner violence

Key takeaways:

• Researchers found it is feasible to screen men in health care settings for perpetrating intimate partner violence.
• Among studies assessing screening, more than half used a single screening tool.

SAN FRANCISCO — To identify and prevent intimate partner violence, screening men for perpetration may be more useful than screening women for victimization, according to data presented at the ACOG Annual Clinical & Scientific Meeting.

“In general, the [U.S. Preventive Services Task Force] does not recommend screening men for perpetration of intimate partner violence. That’s because there’s limited evidence for effectiveness — people are tentative to screen men because they feel they may not tell the truth about perpetration,” Omnia Soliman, BS, associate director of research at the Empower Lab at NYU Langone, told Healio. “In the past, only women have been screened for victimization, and that has also been shown to [be ineffective], because there’s really not much that we can do about victimization unless there’s hard-core proof.”

To explore feasibility of screening in the health care setting, Soliman and colleagues conducted a scoping review and identified 184 peer-reviewed studies with the primary objective of determining prevalence of intimate partner violence perpetrated by men. Among the studies 88.3% concerned female victims, 8.7% concerned male victims and the remaining concerned both. Type of victimization was physical for 94% of studies; sexual for 59.2%; verbal, emotional or psychological for 50.5%; financial for 3.8%; and cyber for 1.1%. Some studies included more than one type of violence, and 4.3% were designated other. Study participants were recruited in school or university settings for 33% of the studies, from phone lists for 15.9%, in health care settings for 8.8%, in substance abuse treatment programs for 4.4%, and other for 37.9%.

The studies used 32 different screening tools, but 23.1% used the Conflict Tactic Scale (CTS) and 29% used a revised version of that scale, the CTS-2.

“That was pretty big news to us,” Soliman said. “Not only was it feasible to find papers that screened men for perpetration, but over half of them use just one screening tool. ... Since the Conflict Tactic Scale as a screening tool is a little bit long, we suggested a shorter, validated version be created for use in clinical settings.”

Soliman said working on creating that tool is likely to be the next step for the researchers.

“Honestly, it’s a little bit hard to believe that people would admit to doing something, but these studies show that it is a feasible to find these men and that perpetrators are willing to change,” Soliman said. “And that’s why this suggests that by identifying the perpetrators, we can go forward to more intervention and education programs for perpetrators.”