Help Seeking in the Aftermath of Intimate Partner Violence: Untangling the Effects of Gender, Violence Severity, and Sense of Social Belonging (WITHDRAWN)

Background:  Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant social justice concern. While a large body of research has examined the gendered nature of IPV perpetration and victimization within heterosexual partnerships, there remains a dearth of investigatory efforts which have assessed gender differences in the help seeking behaviors of survivors.  Research with female survivors has documented myriad factors that are associated with the selection of help seeking strategies, with socio-demographic factors and severity of violence consistently emerging as sources of variation in help seeking.  Further research has identified the potential salience of relational factors, such as one’s sense of social belonging, to survivors’ decisions to seek specific forms of assistance. We know less about the role of such factors in shaping the experiences of men.  The purpose of the present study was to address this gap in the literature.

Methods:  With this research, we sought to examine:  (1) Do male and female survivors of IPV differ in their use of formal and informal sources of support in the aftermath of IPV? And, if so, (2) To what extent are gender differences reduced when accounting for other factors (socio-demographic, violence severity, and sense of belonging) that may also be related to survivors’ help seeking behaviors?

This study involved a secondary analysis of data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a geographically stratified, nationally representative sample of Canadians (N = 19, 422).  Data was taken from the 2009 GSS which (as of January 2016) was the most recent version of the GSS with microdata available to researchers that contained the spousal violence IPV module. Our analysis centered on the subsample of all GSS respondents who indicated that they had experienced at least one form of physical or sexual spousal IPV within the last 5 years (n = 381 males, n = 511 females).

Bi-variate relationships were assessed via chi-square or t-tests; multi-variate relationships were assessed via hierarchal logistic regression (block 1: socio-demographic factors, including gender; block 2: violence severity; block 3: sense of social belonging).  

Results: At the bi-variate level, females were significantly more likely to use all forms of help, and they sought help from a significantly higher number of sources than males.  However, in the regression analysis, the relationship between gender and overall help-seeking became statistically insignificant after severity of violence was entered in block 2 and remained statistically insignificant in the final model.  In the final regression models predicting use of specific types of help, gender was only significantly associated with three variables (seeking help from friends/neighbors, doctors/nurses, or family members).  Across all models, the most salient predictor of help seeking was severity of violence, with fearing for one’s life the most powerful individual predictor of all forms of help seeking.  

Conclusions:Findings suggest that gender and sense of social belonging may play a less significant role in the help seeking of survivors than severity of violence.  Implications of these findings for the further development of community education to improve bystander responses to IPV are provided.