Episode #18
Intimate Partner Violence - The Targeted Violence Podcast - Episode 18 with Benjamin Spivak
In this episode of The Targeted Violence Podcast, I’m joined by Associate Professor Benjamin Spivak from Swinburne University of Technology to explore what we know about people who repeatedly abuse intimate partners, how our understanding of domestic violence perpetrators has evolved, and Benjamin's views on the challenges involved in assessing the risk of serious and fatal violence. Domestic violence has received unprecedented public attention over the past decade, yet preventing repeat and escalating intimate partner violence remains a significant challenge for practitioners and researchers. We discuss whether domestic violence is becoming more common or whether we are simply getting better at recognising and reporting it, what the research tells us about repeat offending and intimate partner homicide, and the growing recognition of behaviours such as coercive control and stalking. A major focus of our conversation is risk assessment. We explore the current state of the science, the strengths and limitations of different approaches, and the difficulty of predicting rare but serious outcomes such as intimate partner homicide. We also examine commonly cited risk indicators - including strangulation, stalking, and coercive control - and consider how much value they actually add to risk assessment. We also explore the debate between overestimating and underestimating risk. While there are concerns that some approaches may overestimate the likelihood of serious and fatal violence, death review findings often identify multiple warning signs that were present but not adequately recognised before a homicide occurred. Finally, we look ahead to the next decade of research and consider where our understanding of intimate partner violence, repeat offending, escalation and risk assessment needs to go next. This fascinating discussion for anyone working in the field, especially in respect to how we make risk decisions on these perpetrators.
