An Analysis of Domestic Abuse Discourse on Reddit

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2577–2583, Lisbon, Portugal, 17-21 September 2015. c⃝2015 Association for Computational Linguistics. An Analysis of Domestic Abuse Discourse on Reddit Nicolas Schrading1 Cecilia O. Alm2 Ray Ptucha1 Christopher M. Homan3 1 Kate Gleason College of Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology 2 College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology 3 Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology {jxs8172§|coagla§|rwpeec§|cmh†}@{§rit.edu|†cs.rit.edu} Abstract Domestic abuse affects people of every race, class, age, and nation. There is sig- nificant research on the prevalence and ef- fects of domestic abuse; however, such re- search typically involves population-based surveys that have high financial costs. This work provides a qualitative analysis of do- mestic abuse using data collected from the social and news-aggregation website red- dit.com. We develop classifiers to detect submissions discussing domestic abuse, achieving accuracies of up to 92%, a sub- stantial error reduction over its baseline. Analysis of the top features used in detect- ing abuse discourse provides insight into the dynamics of abusive relationships. 1 Introduction Globally, 30% of women fifteen and older have ex- perienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence at some point in their life (Devries et al., 2013). While domestic abuse tends to have greater prevalence in low-income and non-western coun- tries, it is still endemic in regions like North Amer- ica and Western Europe. In the United States, by an intimate partner, 9.4% of women have been raped, 16.9% of women and 8% of men have expe- rienced sexual violence other than rape, and 24.3% of women and 13.8% of men have experienced se- vere physical violence (Black et al., 2011). This translates to an estimated economic cost of $5.8 billion for direct medical and mental health care services, along with lost productivity and reduced lifetime earnings (Craft, 2003). Economic costs are calculable and provide concrete metrics for policy makers, but the physical and psychologi- cal effects felt by victims of domestic abuse are the true costs. Domestic abuse is the 12th leading cause of years of life lost (Murray et al., 2013), and it contributes to health issues including fre- quent headaches, chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, and depression (Black et al., 2011). The data used to calculate such statistics are often derived from costly and time-consuming population-based surveys that primarily seek to obtain insight into the prevalence and conse- quences of domestic abuse. Due to safety con- cerns for victims and researchers, these surveys follow strict guidelines set by the World Health Organization (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2001). Great care must be taken by the researchers to ensure the safety of the participants, and therefore the num- ber of participants is often quite small (Burge et al., 2014). One way to avoid the cost of wide scale surveys while still maintaining appropriate research conditions is to leverage the abundance of data publicly available on the web. Of particular interest are moderated forums that allow discourse between users. Reddit1 is one such website, …

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