According to Sue, Sue and Sue (1994) domestic violence can be defined as physical abuse committed by a spouse, a former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, or a cohabitant upon another person in the family. Reiss and Roth (1993) report that domestic violence occurs, on average, every 15 seconds in the United States alone, which translates to more than 2.5 million victims each year. The authors further note that males are far more likely than females to be the perpetrators of domestic violence.
While there are many factors that play an etiologic and/or contributory role in acts of domestic violence, one of the most important of these is anger (Sue, Sue & Sue, 1994). The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of anger as it relates to
That anger plays a role in domestic violence, perhaps even a stronger role than in other forms of violence, can be seen in a study conducted by Tweed and Dutton (1998). In their research, the authors studied two types of violent men. One group (Type 1) consisted of men who demonstrated suppressed physiological responding during conflicts with their wives, but tended to use violence in nonintimate/non-domestic relationships. The second group tended to manifest violence in the domestic relationship only.
Methods involved the use of a cluster analysis to assess personality disorder in both groups and to relate findings to
each group's attachment style, anger, trauma scores, and scores
on a self-report of Borderline Personality Organization (BPO). Findings revealed that the Type II males who showed violence only
in domestic settings had significantly higher chronic anger
scores than the Type I males. In other words, those who engage in
domestic violence tend to feel angry most of the time, even if
It should also be noted that women arrested for domestic
violence are qualitatively different than males who are arrested
for domestic violence. In this regard, studies have sho...