Callous Lovers and Frightening Victims: How emotional contradictions affect young people’s navigation of sexually abusive relationships

From research on adult intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization, we know that IPV victims often have contradictory and ambivalent ways of relating to their abusive partner, both during the relationship and after it has ended. The ambivalent and shifting quality of abusive relationships can be experienced as binding, thus making it more difficult for the victim to leave. However, young people’s experiences of IPV is still an under-researched topic, and it is unclear if and how youth IPV differs from adult IPV. This paper explores how young victims of sexual IPV in Sweden and Norway describe and understand their abusive partners and their relationships to them. Drawing on an ideal-type analysis of interviews with 27 young people who had experienced IPV during their teenage years, we want to develop our understanding of the emotional dissonance and contradictions often experienced by victims in abusive relationships, especially among young people, and to explore the gendered dynamics of such dissonance. We find that the young people understand and interpret their abusive partners in two discrete ways. We have developed two figures or types, representing differing interpretations by the young people of their partners, their interactions with them, and the emotional contradictions arising from these dynamics. These types will be presented in the paper, alongside our analysis of both the differing consequences that such dynamics may have for young people’s experienced opportunities to leave harmful or abusive relationships, and how these dynamics may be better understood in the light of a sociology of emotions.