Violence and condom use in couples where one partner had HIV: a 1990s California study
Interviews with both partners in 145 San Francisco Bay Area couples, recorded in the late 1990s, linked partner violence and threats to less consistent condom use; the paper appeared in 2014.
What the study did and found
The paper “Partner Violence and Condom Use in HIV-Discordant Heterosexual Partnerships” appeared in 2014 (Eaton et al., 2014). Abigail Eaton and colleagues used baseline interviews from the California Partners Study II, which recruited 145 heterosexual couples, in each of which one partner had HIV, in 1996–1999.
Both partners were asked about violence or threats from their current partner and about condom use. Of 290 people, 82 (about 28%) reported violence or threats, at similar rates among women and men, and after adjustment they had 2.2 times the odds of not always using condoms (Eaton et al., 2014).
Why it is cited
The paper’s distinctive feature is data from both members of each couple, whereas the authors note that most earlier work on violence and condom use relied on women alone. It can be cited for similar reported levels of violence in men and women and for violence being mutual in some couples.
It cannot support the abstract’s phrase that the risk was double: from the paper’s tables, about 70% of those reporting violence and 49% of the others used condoms inconsistently, a risk about 1.4 times higher (Eaton et al., 2014).
This is a single cross-sectional analysis of self-reported answers, so it shows an association rather than a cause. Threats and attacks were merged into one measure, injury was not recorded and 23 couples disagreed about their own condom use. Some printed figures, including two confidence intervals, do not add up.
Later reviews link partner violence to HIV infection in women and to poorer treatment adherence (Li et al., 2014; Hatcher et al., 2015), and a prospective study of African couples tied recent violence to lower PrEP adherence (Roberts et al., 2016).
The topic today
Condoms are no longer the only protection for such couples: WHO states that people with an undetectable viral load do not pass HIV on sexually, and it now recommends several forms of PrEP (World Health Organization, 2025).
For the current picture, see our explainer Partner Violence and Condom Use in HIV-Discordant Couples.