Intimate Partner Violence Among Adolescents in Cape Town, South Africa

This study aimed to describe potentially preventable factors in intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration and victimization among South African 8th grade students. Data were collected during a pilot evaluation of a classroom 8th grade curriculum on gender-based violence prevention in nine public schools in Cape Town through self-completed interviews with 549 8th grade students, 238 boys and 311 girls. Structural equation models (SEM) predicting IPV were constructed with variables a priori hypothesized to be associated. The majority of students (78.5 %) had had a partner in the past 3 months, and they reported high rates of IPV during that period (e.g., over 10 % of boys reported forcing a partner to have sex, and 39 % of girls reported physical IPV victimization). A trimmed version of the hypothesized SEM (CFI = .966; RMSEA = .051) indicated that disagreement with the ideology of male superiority and violence predicted lower risk of IPV ( p