Dating violence linked to troubled family

DAVIS, Calif., Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Teenage boys who abuse girlfriends often describe growing up with troubled family lives, failing at school and witnessing violence, U.S. researchers said.

"Until now, we did not have much information on young men who hurt their partners," senior author Elizabeth Miller of the University of California Davis Children's Hospital said in a statement. "This is a critically important piece of the puzzle in terms of designing meaningful prevention and intervention programs to prevent adolescent relationship violence."

Miller and Elizabeth Reed, a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University in Durham, N.C., said that the study is from an urban sample of boys in programs for dating violence perpetration and, therefore, does not represent all boys who perpetrate abusive behaviors toward girlfriends.

"The themes that often came up in interviews included problematic home environments, inadequate support at school, community contexts characterized by violence and peer interactions that encourage the sexual maltreatment of girls," Reed said. "The findings of our study suggest that it will not be effective to focus on the influence of one of these contexts alone. We need to understand the complex interplay of how they influence boys' behavior within intimate relationships.

The study was published in the American Journal of Men's Health.