Victim-Offender Overlap & The Cycle of Violence

Victim-Offender Overlap (V-O Overlap) & The Cycle of Violence

Reading

  • Berg, M. T., & Mulford, C. F. (2020). Reappraising and Redirecting Research on the Victim–Offender Overlap. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 21(1), 16–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838017735925
    • Focus = interpersonal violence, broadly
    • Terminology – “victim” and “offender”

Lecture Overview

  • Definitions and related concepts
  • Prevalence and importance
  • Explanations
  • Justice system responses
  • Future directions

Introduction - Victim-Offender Overlap

  • Victim-offender overlap is one of the most “robust” and “substantial” phenomena within criminology, across locations and demographics – particularly for violence, young men, people of colour (Godsoe, 2021)
  • "[N]o one enters violence for the first time by committing it.“ - Danielle Sered
  • People who have experienced trauma, abuse, pain are more likely to inflict harm on others
  • But we often think of “victims” and “offenders” as two distinct groups, needing and deserving different types of intervention

Definitions

  • “Victim-Offender Overlap” = The witnessing or direct victimisation of and perpetration of psychological and physical violence, in either direction (Berg & Schreck, 2022; Berkley et al., 2018; Reingle, 2014)
  • “Cycle of Violence” = A cyclical pattern where an individual experiences violent victimisation, and goes on to commit acts of violence themselves (Samuels, 2001; Widom, 1992)
  • Violence = intentional and direct physical violence that is intended to injure, impair or kill (Dahlberg & Krug, 2002; Thompson & Tapp, 2022), some studies include witnessing, psychological or sexual violence, other types of abuse/neglect (e.g., ACEs, trauma/PTSD)

Directionality / Causality

Perhaps…

  • Being victimised leads a person to develop “risk factors” for offending or to act violently in self-defence (i.e., to the person who used violence against them)
  • Offending leads a person to situations/environments (e.g., prison, gangs) where they are more likely to be victims
  • There are risk factors (e.g., impulsivity, hostility, drug and alcohol use, environments) that make a person more vulnerable to both victimisation and offending

Related Concepts - Trauma

  • “Trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being” (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2012, p. 2).
  • “… it can manifest in different ways, but two common pathways are "hypervigilance and over-reactivity … . to perceived threats of harm," and numbness and flat affect. … these common responses to trauma are frequently misinterpreted by law enforcement, judges, and others, as a lack of empathy or remorse.” (Godsoe, 2021, p. 1329)

Related Concepts - ACEs

  • “… those with four or more ACEs were 15 times more likely to have committed an act of violence during the last 12 months” (Jahanshsahi et al., 2021)
  • Impact is cumulative - “Each additional ACE increased the odds of becoming a victim-offender, compared to a victim-only or an offender-only, by approximately 12%” (Arseneault et al., 2018)
  • "expanded ACEs" including exposure to neighbourhood and community violence, racism and poverty – higher correlation (Cronholm et al., 2015)
  • Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) = potentially traumatic events during childhood that are linked to detrimental long-term health outcomes, mental illness, and substance use, etc.

Prevalence - Size of the ‘Overlap’

  • Most victims do not go on to use violence, but (as a group) victims of violence are 55% more likely to commit a violent crime than non-victims (Berg et al., 2012)
  • Most people who offend have been victimised at some point in their life (Godsoe, 2021)
  • Internationally - Men in prison are ten times more likely to suffer from PTSD than men in the general population (Godsoe, 2021)
  • NZ – 24% of people in prison have lifetime diagnosis of PTSD (52% women, 22% men) compared to 6% of general population (Indig, Gear, & Wilhelm, 2016)
  • NZ - 57% of people in prison have experienced (lifetime) sexual and/or family violence – 75% of women, 56% of men (Bevan, 2017)
  • NZ - 82% of a sample of men in prison (STU-V) had experienced at least one type of abuse or neglect (Te Hiwi, 2023)

Importance of Understanding V-O Overlap

  • Explanation / aetiology – highlights the complexity of violence and its cyclical nature, can understand behaviours as trauma responses (i.e., as opposed to lack of remorse, criminal thinking)
  • Prevention, early intervention, rehabilitation – victim support, target factors causally linked with violence, ability to engage
  • Particularly important given the current inquiry into abuse in care in Aotearoa and the Governmental focus on preventing family violence and sexual violence, over-representation of Māori
  • Prison as re-traumatising environments - should we be dealing with violence perpetration without addressing victimisation experiences?

Challenges (Godsoe, 2021)

Reasons the binary persists:

  • The social control function of criminal law – focus on individual (over social/structural) causes
  • Framing violence as exceptional and deviant – system cannot exist without ‘othering’ people
  • Focus on personal responsibility and accountability – no tolerance for excuses or justifications

Harms of ignoring overlap and seeing victims and offenders as separate groups:

  • Influences public attitudes towards people who use violence
  • Re-entrenches the false and racialised narrative of individual blameworthiness – obscures structural factors
  • Masks and fails to address the root causes of violence – i.e., violence as a public health issue

Challenges – Measuring and Understanding

  • Defining variables – e.g., what constitutes victimisation (direct, witnessing), experiences not always recognised as victimisation (Godsoe, 2021)
  • Non-discrete events, repeated/concurrent victimisation/offending
  • Challenges capturing the situational dynamics through surveys – victim/offender in the same incident (Berg & Mulford, 2020)
  • Measurement of variables - detection/reporting, self-report, anecdotal evidence
  • Different types/sources of violence (e.g., FV, IPV, gangs, prison), should these be aggregated or not?
  • “perhaps the sources of the overlap are not located at the individual-level unit of analysis but in other analytical units, which heretofore have not received sufficient theoretical or empirical attention” (Berg & Mulford, 2020, p. 16)

Relationship Between Victimisation and Offending

  • Theories of Crime

Social-Ecological Model

  • Differential exposure
  • Cultural perspectives
  • Individual differences
  • Situational perspectives

General Personality and Cognitive Social Learning

Agency Theories (Heffernan & Ward, 2017)

Protective Factors and Resilience

  • Why doesn’t every victim of violence go on to use violence?
  • “Resilience refers to phenomena such as healthy development despite a high-risk status (e.g., growing up in a multi-problem milieu); maintaining competence under specific stressors (e.g., coping with parental divorce); or recuperating from severe trauma (e.g., child abuse).” (Losel & Farrington, 2012)
  • Protective factors decrease risk - inconsistent terminology and conceptualisation
    • E.g., social/professional support, life goals/motivation, presence of social controls, pro-social beliefs/identity, self-control, coping strategies, intelligence, empathy

Justice System Responses - Current

  • S 27 Cultural Reports (Sentencing Act, 2002) – the court hears from persons called on by the defendent about personal/family/whanau/community/cultural background and how this relates to their offending
  • Trauma-informed care – ways of working with people who have committed offences (i.e., in courts, prison) that recognise the links between trauma and violence, and seek to avoid re-traumatising
    • Five principles: safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness, and empowerment
  • Counselling vs rehabilitation – often treated as separate issues

Recent Research – Aotearoa (Fortune, Bowe, & Heffernan, 2025)

  • Quantitative - Based on IDI data, approx 7-12% of people with a police record involving physical violence (including sexual violence) have experienced both victimisation and used violence towards others.
  • In terms of pathways, roughly even amounts of people seemed to fit within a victim to offending pathway, and an offending to victimisation pathway.
  • Correlates of V-O overlap included: being younger, female and having a record of physical assaults (as either a victim or offender) as opposed to sexual assault. Māori were also overrepresented when compared to the general population.

Recent Research – Aotearoa (Fortune, Bowe, & Heffernan, 2025)

  • Qualitative – interviews with people (n= 10) who have experienced both interpersonal violence victimisation and used violence
    • Key themes:
      • The Nature of Violence
        • Violence as a cycle, it is learned and normalized
        • Violence seen as sometimes not avoidable or not serious – justification and minimisation
        • Role of substance use in violence – perpetration and victimisation, reciprocal violence
      • Key themes: Improvements to the Justice System
        • Support needs to be on-going, integrated, and tailored to specific needs
        • Services need to provide wraparound support for the whole family, including children

Practice Example: FV Multi-Agency Responses

Aim to break the cycle of family violence by providing an urgent and intensive collective response to the highest risk cases, including children. Lower risk cases are referred to specialist FV services.

How can these respond to victim-offender overlap?

  • Look at family or whānau as a whole, dynamics, resistance lens, patterns of violence across episodes
  • Take a trauma-informed approach to engagement
  • Views children and young people exposed to violence as victim-survivors in their own right, provide support as early as possible to build up protective factors and mitigate the impacts of exposure to violence.

Future Shifts - General

  • Recognition of overlap, changing the narrative around who offends and why – Justice system, public
  • Avoid use of labels, dismantle the binary
  • More effective, fair, compassionate, humanising Justice System – trauma informed at every step
  • More effective interventions and prevention – address underlying causes, personal and structural, recognising and addressing trauma/victimhood, understanding the complexity of interpersonal violence and dual roles within patterns of abuse
  • Public health approaches, holistic – over punitive approaches
  • Societal changes beyond the CJS, addressing inequality, racism, poverty, meeting basic needs

Conclusions

  • Victim-offender overlap refers to a wide range of patterns, caused by a range of psycho- social mechanisms
  • Victimisation does not excuse violence, but offending cannot erase victimisation
  • Understanding the links between these is ethically and aetiologically important, to enhance prevention, interventions, and CJS as a whole
  • Further research is essential if we are to break the cycle of violence and create meaningful change within families and communities in Aotearoa