Private Violence, Public Disorder
What riot cohorts reveal about the roots of collective aggression.
"The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world."
— Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970)
In the summer of 2024, riots erupted across English towns in the wake of the Southport stabbings, in which three young girls were killed. Cars were burned, mosques attacked, and a hotel housing asylum seekers in Rotherham nearly set alight with people inside. The disorder lasted roughly a week before being quelled, and in the months that followed, police forces across England compiled an unusual dataset on those they had arrested. When the figures were published in the summer of 2025, one number drew particular attention: roughly two in five of those detained during the unrest had previously been reported to authorities for domestic abuse. In some local cohorts — Bristol most strikingly, with more than two-thirds — the figure was substantially higher.
The instinctive read of this number is that it tells us something about the kind of person who ends up in a riot. That intuition is essentially correct, but the more interesting question is why it should be correct — what it is about the people who beat their partners that also disposes them, in moments of collective unrest, to throw bricks at police lines or set fire to buildings full of strangers. The answer turns out to draw on several decades of criminological and psychological research, and it has implications well beyond the specific case of the English riots.
A pattern, not a coincidence
Criminologists have long observed that violence is poorly compartmentalised. The popular image of the wife-beater who is otherwise law-abiding, or the bar-fighter who would never raise a hand at home, does not survive contact with the data. People who commit one type of serious interpersonal violence are markedly more likely to commit others. Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi's A General Theory of Crime, published in 1990, framed this as a "generality of deviance": low self-control and a willingness to use force to resolve frustration produce versatile rather than specialist offenders. The thesis has been refined considerably since — most criminologists now treat it as one mechanism among several rather than a complete account — but the underlying empirical pattern has held up.
Nowhere is the pattern more visible than in the now-substantial research literature on mass shootings in the United States. Multiple independent datasets, including Everytown for Gun Safety's mass-shooting database and a parallel analysis by the Violence Project, have found that somewhere between half and two-thirds of US mass shooters have a documented history of domestic violence, stalking, or other gendered abuse. The FBI's own behavioural analysis unit has incorporated this finding into its threat-assessment protocols. The Lautenberg Amendment of 1996, which bars those convicted of misdemeanour domestic violence from possessing firearms, was passed on essentially the same logic two decades before the recent surge in research: that the dispositions which produce violence against intimate partners are not safely separable from those which produce violence against the wider world.
What the 2024 UK figure does is extend this empirical observation from individual acts of public violence — the mass shooting, the workplace attack, the targeted assault — to collective political violence, a domain where the connection had been less systematically tested. The implication is the same: the population that beats its partners and the population that takes part in a riot are not distinct populations. They are overlapping populations drawing from the same psychological well.
Operational knowledge in policing
This is not a new finding to people who do threat-assessment work for a living. UK domestic violence specialists have argued for years that a serious DV history is among the strongest predictors of later lethal violence in stalking cases, workplace shootings, and targeted attacks on public officials. The Crown Prosecution Service's own guidance treats coercive control history as a risk-amplifying factor for subsequent harm, and the police domestic abuse risk assessment tools (DASH and its successors) operate on the assumption that what happens behind closed doors is informative about what may happen on the street.
What changed in 2024 was that police forces had a discrete, well-defined cohort — those arrested during a specific wave of disorder — against which to run the analysis in aggregate, rather than case-by-case. The result was a number that could be reported as a single striking figure. It is worth noting, as several domestic abuse charities pointed out at the time, that "previously reported for" domestic abuse is not the same as "convicted of," and that the statistic should not be read as a moral indictment of individuals who happened to be on a police database. Some of those reports will reflect malicious or contested claims; underreporting in the opposite direction is also pervasive. But the aggregate picture is robust enough — and consistent enough with the broader literature — that the headline finding survives the methodological caveats.
Prior domestic-abuse history across violent cohorts.
Why the overlap exists
If the empirical overlap is well-established, the more interesting question is what produces it. Here several strands of theoretical work converge on a consistent picture.
The first strand is the personality-and-attitudes research tradition descending from Theodor Adorno's mid-century work on the authoritarian personality, refined into more rigorous instruments by Bob Altemeyer (the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale) and by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto (the Social Dominance Orientation scale). High scorers on these scales endorse a hierarchical ordering of society in which dominant groups are entitled to use force against subordinate ones. The same trait cluster predicts tolerance of violence against women, immigrants, racial outgroups, and political enemies. From this vantage, the DV-and-riot overlap is unsurprising: you are looking at the behavioural manifestations of a single underlying disposition expressed in two different settings.
The second strand, more focused on the specific question of intimate partner violence, comes from Evan Stark's reframing of domestic abuse as "coercive control" rather than discrete violent incidents. Stark's argument, which has been influential enough to shape legislation in several jurisdictions including the UK, is that the defining feature of abuse is not the assault but the project of domination — the systematic narrowing of a partner's autonomy through surveillance, humiliation, threat, and ultimately force. Once you frame domestic violence this way, the link to public political violence becomes intuitively clearer. Both behaviours are responses to a perceived violation of rightful hierarchy. Both are exercises of force aimed at restoring an order the perpetrator believes is owed to him. The target is different — a partner who has become insufficiently compliant, an electorate that has voted the wrong way, an outgroup that is "taking over" — but the underlying logic of entitled enforcement is recognisably the same.
Kate Manne's philosophical work on misogyny pushes this analysis further. Manne argues that misogyny is best understood not as the hatred of women but as the enforcement arm of patriarchy: the mechanism by which women who fail to provide expected goods (deference, care, sexual availability) are punished. Crucially, the same enforcement logic generalises beyond gender. It is the logic of someone who believes the social world owes them a particular shape, and who experiences any deviation from that shape as an injury requiring redress. The man who feels entitled to his partner's compliance and the man who feels entitled to his country's demographic stability are operating from structurally similar premises.
The third and probably most directly applicable strand is Michael Kimmel's work on what he calls "aggrieved entitlement" — the particular emotional state of men who believe that something rightfully theirs has been taken away, whether economically, racially, sexually, or politically. Kimmel's interviews with men in white-nationalist movements, men's-rights communities, and the broader ecosystem of radicalised masculinity find a consistent affective profile: not anger at being deprived of something they never had, but rage at being deprived of something they understood as their birthright. This same affective profile, he argues, is present in much domestic violence. The wife who pursues her own career, the partner who refuses to comply, the election that delivers the wrong outcome — each is read as a theft of an expected good, and each can trigger the same retributive response in someone disposed to that frame.
A fourth strand, less about individual psychology and more about group dynamics, comes from Kathleen Belew's history of the American white-power movement and from Cynthia Miller-Idriss's research on contemporary far-right radicalisation. Both emphasise that participation in collective violence is not purely instrumental. It is bonding. It generates a sense of brotherhood, meaning, and reaffirmed masculine identity that is itself the reward. Domestic violence often serves a parallel intrapsychic function — the reassertion of a masculine self that feels threatened by economic precarity, status loss, or partner autonomy. The man who finds in a riot a momentary sense of mastery and the man who finds it in dominating a partner are not, on this account, doing different things at the level of motivation. They are doing the same thing on different stages.
The American test case
The January 6 attack on the US Capitol provides a useful, if methodologically imperfect, test of how far this framework travels. No aggregate count of prior domestic abuse reports has been run against the roughly 1,500 people charged — the question has not been put in that form. A Seton Hall University demographic study found that 22.2% of the 716 defendants it examined had prior criminal records of any kind, but the breakdown by offence type was not published. What partial evidence has surfaced points in the predicted direction. Among defendants tracked by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, at least nine had prior records of violence against women — documented domestic violence convictions, rape or sexual battery convictions, or active restraining orders — and at least six faced child sexual abuse charges, a pattern that has sharpened considerably since Trump's mass pardons in January 2025. Andrew Paul Johnson, pardoned for his Capitol role, was convicted in February 2026 of molesting two children under the ages of twelve and sixteen and was sentenced to life in prison the following month. David Daniel entered a federal plea agreement for producing child sexual abuse material, having enticed a child under twelve into explicit conduct in 2015 and 2016 — conduct that predated January 6 by years and was entirely unconnected to it. The broader CREW tally of at least 33 pardoned defendants subsequently charged with additional crimes includes domestic violence by strangulation, rape, conspiracy to murder FBI agents, and multiple further child sex offences.
Robert Pape's demographic analysis at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats found that the strongest county-level predictor of producing a January 6 defendant was a declining white population share — that is, exposure to a perceived demographic status threat. This is not the same construct as domestic violence motivation, but it rhymes with it: an aggrieved sense that something rightfully one's own is being taken.
The cohort-level question — what fraction of January 6 defendants had documented histories of intimate partner abuse — remains genuinely open: no one has run the aggregate analysis the way English forces did after the 2024 disorder. But the individual-case record is no longer merely suggestive. The child sexual abuse cluster in particular fits the theoretical frame precisely: the same logic of entitled domination that the research literature links to intimate partner violence appears in these cases without the intermediate step of political violence at all. That the Capitol cohort contains a detectable concentration of men who had already acted on that logic at home is, at this point, established in individual cases if not yet measured in aggregate.
Caveats and limits
A framework that explains a great deal also risks explaining too much, and it is worth being explicit about what this analysis does not claim.
It does not claim that all domestic abusers will riot, nor that all rioters are domestic abusers. Both behaviours have substantial non-overlapping populations. It does not claim that the psychological story exhausts the explanation: economic precarity, online radicalisation pipelines, opportunity structures, and contingent triggering events all play roles that no personality-level account can substitute for. And it does not claim that women's participation in political violence — which is real and historically important — fits the same template; the literature on women in far-right and insurrectionary movements suggests a meaningfully different motivational profile, more often mobilised through family networks or grievance-by-proxy than through personal status threat.
What the analysis does claim is that the modal participant in collective political disorder of the kind seen in Southport's aftermath or at the US Capitol is psychologically continuous with the modal perpetrator of intimate partner violence — and that this continuity is not an embarrassing accident to be explained away, but a clue about what these behaviours are for, in the lives of those who engage in them.
What this means
The practical upshot is that the analytical wall between "private" and "public" violence is largely artificial. Threat-assessment professionals have known this for decades; criminologists have documented it; and the 2024 UK data has now extended the demonstration into the domain of collective political violence specifically. A society serious about reducing political violence is therefore not engaged in a separate project from one serious about reducing intimate partner violence. They are the same project, working on the same population, addressing the same underlying disposition.
That this disposition has political content as well as personal content does not make it less personal, and it does not make the violence done in service of it less continuous with violence done at home. The thrown brick and the closed fist tend to belong to the same hand.