Can Sex Offender Classification Inform Typologies of Male Batterers?: A Response to Holtzworth-Munroe and Meehan

Etiologic and taxonomic research on rapists during the past decade suggests three dimensions that may be potentially useful for classification research on male batterers: (a) distinction between those whose anger is exclusively misogynistic and those whose anger is pervasive or undifferentiated with respect to target, (b) attitudes characterized by negative or hostile masculinity, implicit (if not explicit) in the BD and GVA subtypes, and (c) impulsive, antisocial behavior, again implicit in the GVA subtype. Hypothesized relationships of these dimensions to the three Holtzworth-Munroe subtypes are presented in Table 1. A more complex way of conceptualizing the role of anger is illustrated in Figure 1. Anger is bifurcated into acute and chronic conditions, depending on the frequency with which anger erupts and the nature of the precipitating stimuli. Situationally incited acute anger may be further bifurcated between situations that are stress related (as with the FO subtype) and situations more directly related to personality traits, such as narcissistic injuries or insults that inspire anger (perhaps the BD subtype). Chronic anger may be bifurcated into temporally stable conditions defined by the stimuli that elicit anger: an exclusive focus on women or nonexclusive, undifferentiated targets, similar to the distinction between spouse-specific and general anger made by Holtzworth-Munroe (Holtzworth-Munroe, Meehan, et al., 2000b). In summary, given the criticality of anger to the domain of behavior in domestic violence, further refinement of taxonomic models of male batterers may benefit from a more differentiated conceptualization of the role of anger.