Understanding family abuse: An intersectional approach to prevention and addressing family abuse perpetrators

This article provides an original contribution to understanding the motives for and perpetration patterns of family abuse that affects a range of minoritised communities, such as those minoritised on the basis of race, sexuality or transgender identity, and to contribute to debates around prevention. Negative and discriminatory societal attitudes, norms and behaviours towards these groups influence and justify family abuse. Based on empirical research, our study enhances the existing knowledge base to create practice and policy-focused recommendations for improving preventive and intervention efforts. We approached this from an ecological perspective, using a mixed-methods approach to interrogate quantitative and qualitative data to identify motivating factors underpinning perpetrators' behaviours. Our analysis, drawing on a phenomenological approach, shows an ecological framework with three interacting levels at which motivating factors occur: the individual, the community and society. Along with understanding who perpetrators might be, the types of family abuse and its impacts for victim/survivors, these three motivating factors provide a template for developing interventions with perpetrators of family abuse. The research also suggests that before interventions for perpetrators of family abuse can be properly developed, the field of domestic abuse needs to reconsider how family abuse is positioned as part of domestic abuse.