Expanding Our Understanding of IPV Victimization and Mental Health: A Critical Review and Reflection Toward Solutions for Diverse Populations

Background and Purpose: Intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization rates and patterns of risk/protection vary according to IPV type and across social identity, including race/ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Mental health concerns such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD are common consequences of IPV, rates of which also vary across diverse populations. Preventing IPV, and limiting harmful consequences when it occurs, requires consideration of rates and patterns of risk/protection across intersecting social identities and how these relate to mental health following IPV. Broad limitations on our understanding of IPV victimization carry over into research on resulting mental health outcomes. This study synthesizes knowledge of risk/protection for IPV and subsequent mental health, across social identities to identify areas to extend research on this topic to inform interventions.

Methods: This study is an umbrella (review of reviews) narrative review (NR) of interdisciplinary research on risk/protection for IPV and subsequent mental health. In contrast to systematic reviews which may narrowly focus on an exclusive set of empirical research, NRs may be more expansive. NR in this case, aims to provide interpretive critical reflection of what we know about IPV prevalence, and risk and protection, and how applying this knowledge to the link between IPV and mental health can help expand the focus of related research. This in turn, can help develop targeted interventions for diverse populations experiencing IPV.

Results: Prevalence rates vary across studies due to methodological, measurement, and sampling differences. Much of what we know about risk and protection for IPV victimization comes from research on cisgender (assumed) heterosexual women experiencing physical IPV and does not attend to differences by race/ethnicity, or age. Links between IPV and mental health outcomes, though well established, also lack attention to differences across social identities and IPV types. This, despite research showing differential impacts of certain types of IPV on mental health outcomes. Across both areas, research is limited on minoritized racial/ethnic groups and cisgender men and sexual and gender minority individuals. Research is lacking on community- and societal-level risk and protective factors for IPV and especially for mental health outcomes following IPV.

Conclusions and Implications: Richer knowledge of IPV victimization -- what it is, what gives rise to it, and what the consequences of it look like according to diverse intersecting identities and social locations -- is essential to developing solutions. Gaps in our knowledge about the variation in experiences of, and risk and protective factors impacting IPV, and subsequent poor mental health produces research that collapses forms of violence and individual experiences, limiting understanding. Extended to practice and policy, this means attending to the needs of only some victims, resulting in inaccessible, ineffective, and sometimes harmful interventions. Social work researchers should actively resist generalizing and overstating the state of knowledge on IPV victimization. We should attend to the nuances and variation in IPV experiences and consequences in our own research, the review, interpretation, and application of others’ research, and in government and community-based research, practice, and policy spaces.