Victim Reversal Syndrome: A Behavioral Analysis of Why Victims of Domestic Abuse Become Abusers

Abstract

Douglas H Ruben

Domestic abuse is often understood as a one-directional dynamic in which a perpetrator harms a victim. However, emerging evidence highlights a troubling cycle in which victims of abuse later become perpetrators in subsequent relationships. This paper examines the phenomenon of victim reversal of aggression (Victim Reversal Syndrome). This is where individuals, lacking healthy repertoires for conflict resolution, resort to familiar abusive behaviors that were reinforced in prior relationships. Drawing on behavioral and interbehavioral analyses, the paper explores susceptibility factors, predictors of intergenerational victim-to-abuser transmission, and the normalization of abuse within partner milieus. Previous research demonstrated that reinforcement histories, skill deficits, rule-governed behaviors, emotional desensitization, rigid gender roles, patriarchal norms, modeling, stimulus generalization, and conditioned emotional responses (i.e., trauma exposure) contributed to the replication of abusive dynamics. An expanded behavioral analysis includes the interbehavioral fields. These fields involve reciprocal patterns of behavior and role of reactional biography as the individual moves through behavioral segments.  Further refined are the causal variables of (1) rule-governed behaviors, (2) avoidance and escape behaviors, (3) response patterns (sequential and simultaneous responses, (4) matching law (allocation of behavior proportional to reinforcement availability), and (5) stimulus generalization (generic, metaphorical, and metonymical extension). Finally, discussion concludes with a proposed domestic abuse survivor recovery program to incorporate caveats against victims becoming abusers.  In sum, this paper underscores the importance of recognizing redirected aggression as a critical component of domestic violence research and intervention.

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