Is Dating Violence Distinct from Other Forms of Violence? : A Ten-Year Follow-Up Study of Post-Release Offending Trajectories Among Young Violent Offenders in Sweden.

Sammanfattning

Background. Dating violence (DV) perpetrators who receive custodial sentences represent a select and understudied subgroup of violent offenders. Whether their post-release offending trajectories are distinct from those of other violent offenders remains largely unexamined in longitudinal research extending beyond emerging adulthood. Aims. This study examined ten-year post-release trajectories of criminal justice contact among incarcerated young male violent offenders in Sweden, and tested whether trajectories differed by victim-offender relationship at the index offence. Methods. Participants were 260 young men from the Development of Aggressive Antisocial Behaviour Study (DAABS), a longitudinal cohort recruited from Swedish prisons between 2010 and 2012. Offenders were classified as dating violence offenders (DVO, n = 42), known victim offenders (KVO, n = 84), or unknown victim offenders (UVO, n = 134). Post-release criminal justice contact was operationalised as annual counts of criminal suspicions and convictions from national registers, examined in parallel using multilevel (mixed-effects) negative binomial regression models. Results. Criminal justice contact declined significantly across all groups, with each post-release year associated with approximately 17% fewer suspicions and 16% fewer convictions. Neither group differences in overall contact level nor group × time interactions reached statistical significance, though the DVO interaction coefficient was consistently positive across both outcomes. Conclusions. Among incarcerated young violent offenders, dating violence did not mark a clearly distinct post-release trajectory of registered criminal justice contact. Rather than demonstrating equivalence between offender groups, the findings suggest that victim-offender relationship at the index offence may be insufficient, on its own, to differentiate long-term trajectories within this high-risk cohort. Dating violence may coexist with broader patterns of early disadvantage, aggression and criminal versatility, while retaining gendered and relational specificity.