Situational Variations in, and Women's Accounts of, Avoided Acts of Serious Intimate Partner Violence.

This study explores how both situations and persons contribute to the probability that a serious incident of intimate partner violence (IPV) can be avoided. Data, on both completed and avoided acts of serious partner violence, were collected from jailed women in Baltimore. Factors that increase the odds of avoiding a serious incident of IPV are a woman's age, her partner's initiation of a threat/attack, and being accompanied by a family member. Factors that decrease the odds of avoided serious violence include an indicator of what the dispute was about, her partner's substance abuse, prior experiences with avoided acts of violence, and lifetime arrests.