• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
• /
• v.58 no.4
• /
• pp.141-168
• /
• 2006

The present study explored and compared the risk factors of two subtypes of maritally violent men with those of a nonviolent comparison group. One type of batterers consisted of a community sample, and the other was sought from the criminal justice system. The identities of the male community batterers were not exposed to the society since their victims did not contact any of the social service agents related to domestic violence. To identify the different characteristics associated with two subtypes of woman abusers, a total of 152 nonviolent men, 82 male community batterers, and 336 offenders in a criminal justice system were considered. The results of the descriptive analysis showed that the level of physical violence of the community batterers was two times lower than that of the batterers who received legal punishments. The results of the multinominal logistic regression were as follows: (1) The variables that distinguished the male community batterers from the nonviolent men were the use of physical violence towards children, marital decision power, and income. (2) Four factors had been found to distinguish batterers in the criminal justice system from nonbatterers, namely: attitudes towards woman battering, education, violence towards children, and level of jealousy. (3) The community batterers showed a higher level of education and of stress as well as a longer period of marital relationship compared to the batterers in the criminal justice system. On the other hand, the batterers who received legal punishments had more severe alcohol problems and had an accepting attitude towards the use of violence. This study also investigated psychopathology among batterers using MCMI-III, based on 333 subjects. In terms of the mean scores, there were no subscales associated with personality pathology in all the male groups. Based on the logit model, the community batterers showed a stronger tendency towards having a passive-aggressive personality than did their counterparts, and they recorded a higher level of narcissism compared to the court-referred battering men. Post-traumatic stress was the only symptom that distinguished the batterers who received legal punishments from the other groups. The theoretical and practical implications of these results were pointed out and discussed in the paper.