Measuring the cumulative impact of intimate partner violence across a lifetime finds women and sexual minorities most harmed

Source citation:

• Cunningham, M., & Anderson, K. L. (2026). The cumulative consequences of intimate partner violence victimization over the life course: Comparisons across gender and sexual orientation. Journal of Family Violence.

Data from the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) allowed authors Cunningham and Anderson to investigate how intimate partner violence (IPV) affects individuals differently based on their gender and sexual orientation over the course of their lives. The NISVS contains data from a nationally representative sample of nearly 18,000 adult men and women. Trained phone interviewers asked respondents about their history of victimization from psychological aggression, coercive control, stalking, and physical and sexual violence. This facilitated the creation of a comprehensive violence history calendar of all IPV victimization experiences across respondents’ entire lives. With this, Cunningham and Anderson could study the cumulative consequences of IPV over time. They created measures of four specific types: fear and safety concerns, PTSD symptoms, physical injury, and missed work or school. They found that marginalized groups tend to face their first abusive experiences at much younger ages, leading to a greater accumulation of trauma over time. They also found that women and sexual minorities experienced far more severe health consequences, such as PTSD, physical injury, and chronic fear, compared to heterosexual men. And women were as likely to experience IPV-related PTSD by age 18 as men were in their entire lives. The authors accessed 2010 NISVS data via a Restricted Data Use Agreement with NACJD. Check here for more publications using these data.

Posted on April 30, 2026