Women who deliberately self harm are 75 times more likely to report physical abuse, verbal abuse, or both by a partner than women who do not harm themselves, according to an article in the September issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal.
The findings are based on a 2-week study of patients in the emergency medicine department at a large British hospital. During that period, 270 people out of a possible 307 agreed to complete a questionnaire on whether actual or threatened domestic violence by a partner had obliged them to seek emergency care. Data from 256 questionnaires (95 percent) were assessed.

There was no evidence that domestic abuse was linked to alcohol or to greater use of emergency medical services. However, the data indicated that roughly 1 in 100 patients had been a victim of partner abuse that required emergency medical treatment. When patients were asked if they had ever suffered domestic violence, 1 in 5 women and almost 1 in 5 men said that they had.

Based on these numbers, the authors calculate that among 55,000 patients presenting for emergency care at any given hospital, the cause would be domestic violence in roughly 500 adults. This is likely to be a significant under-representation of the magnitude of domestic violence-related cases, the authors suggest, because roughly a quarter of all emergency department patients are under the age of 16 years.

The average age of men seeking emergency care during the study period was 38 years; the average age for women was 47 years. Although there was no obvious age difference between men reporting domestic violence and those denying it, women who reported abuse tended to be younger than other women patients.

The authors believe this gender difference suggests that either domestic abuse is becoming more common or that it has become less of a taboo subject and younger generations of women are more willing to admit to it. Nevertheless, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that many victims of partner abuse are unwilling to report it to healthcare professionals, the authors noted.

Women who self harmed were 75 times more likely to report partner abuse than women who did not. Men who self harmed were over 2 times as likely to report partner abuse as those who did not. The authors say that domestic violence can lead to self harming behaviors or that self harm itself could be associated with certain personality traits that dispose a person to an increased risk of an abusive relationship.

The authors caution that theirs is a small study, reflecting practice in just one unit. However, they concluded "large proportions of both male and female patients attending emergency departments suffer ongoing domestic violence. This is often not disclosed to medical staff."