Study guide · Relationships & violence prevention
When violence and substance use collide
We asked 414 young sexual minority men of color about four different types of intimate partner violence and five kinds of substance use. The headline: violence isn't one thing. Each type of violence — physical, controlling, monitoring, emotional — traveled with a different pattern of substance use. Treating "IPV" as a single checkbox hides the patterns that matter for prevention.
Why we did this
Sexual minority men of color experience both intimate partner violence (IPV) and substance use at higher rates than their heterosexual peers — not because of anything inherent about them, but because of the compounding stress of racism and homonegativity (what researchers call minority stress). For decades, most studies measured IPV as a yes/no question. But "my partner hit me," "my partner controls who I see," and "my partner tracks my phone" are very different experiences. We wanted to know whether different violence types connect to different substances.
How we did it
Participants came from the Healthy Young Men's study, a cohort of young (ages 18–27), urban, sexual minority men of color in Los Angeles, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The 414 men in this analysis reported on their past six months: experiences of IPV — broken into physical/sexual, controlling, monitoring, and emotional types, both received (victimization) and used against a partner (perpetration) — and their use of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, poppers, and cocaine.
What we found
The specific links: experiencing any victimization — and controlling victimization in particular — went with more tobacco use. Physical victimization went with cocaine and poppers use. Curiously, monitoring victimization (a partner tracking your location, checking your phone) went with less cannabis and poppers use — consistent with the idea that being surveilled changes behavior. On the other side, men who reported any perpetration used more tobacco and binge-drank more, and emotional perpetration specifically traveled with binge drinking.
Why it matters
Screening tools and interventions mostly ask about physical violence. These results say that's not enough. A clinician who only asks "has your partner hurt you?" will miss the young man whose partner monitors his every move — and will miss the distinct substance-use risks that come with each experience. Violence prevention and substance use treatment are usually separate programs; for this population, they're the same conversation. These findings also feed directly into how I design safety features for digital health tools, like discreet modes for users whose partners check their phones.
Honest limits
This is a cross-sectional analysis — one snapshot in time — so it can show association, not causation. We can't say whether violence leads to substance use, substance use raises conflict, or both trace back to shared stressors. The sample is urban and from Los Angeles, so patterns may differ elsewhere. And all measures are self-reported, though the study used methods designed to make honest reporting easier.
What's next
Two threads continue this work: a federally funded project tracing trajectories of IPV among sexual minority youth over time (so we can get at sequence, not just snapshot), and my SQuARE study, which is building a validated IPV measure designed specifically for LGBTQ+ adolescents.
Everyone deserves relationships that feel safe. Love is Respect (for young people): text LOVEIS to 22522 or call 1-866-331-9474 · National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 · Crisis support: call or text 988.