You will prepare and submit a term paper on Heterosexual and Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence. Your paper should be a minimum of 2000 words in length. According to the viewpoint of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, intimate partner violence is a case of psychological, physical or sexual abuse or harm caused by one partner to another (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010). In other words, IPV is an undesirable side effect of romantic relations between people, which can be observed in all countries and in all social, economic, religious and cultural groups. The key difference between intimate partner violence from a regular conflict is that the former occurs systematically and involves a combination of various types of violence. Banks and Fedewa state IPV to “occur to control, dominate, coerce, and isolate another individual within an intimate relationship, creating an imbalance of power between partners” (2012, p.194). Whereas a conflict has a clearly defined reason, violence is deprived of it and is generally aimed at gaining full control over the victim’s behavior and feelings.

The tendency for domestic and intimate partner violence is generally believed to be the outcome of power misbalance, gender roles and certain characteristics associated with them. Therefore, it could be stated that the gendered character of domestic violence is shifted towards acts of violence committed by the individuals playing gender roles that demand more manifestations of masculinity, as masculinity is generally associated with power, aggression and violence, while femininity is characterized by submission. Naturally, this means that male-female relations in the society predefine the tendency for IPV, whereby females, which are traditionally granted a gender role of a woman with all its attributes, tend to be victimized most frequently. Fontenot et al. (2014, p.67) state the following in their research focused on IPV affecting women: “25% of women will experience violence by an intimate partner during their lifetime”.