New Research from the Howard Center, the Family in America (April 2007) newsletter demonstrating that protecting women from domestic violence means encouraging marriage. A cause for concern are disadvantaged neighborhoods where there is a high incidence rate of single-parent households which was a clear indicator of the much higher frequency of domestic violence incidents. More cause to encourage equal custody, which is the next best thing to intact families.
Violent Homes, Violent Neighborhoods
Progressives never tire of decrying the evil of
domestic violence, particularly that directed against women.
Curiously, however, they rarely say anything about the cultural erosion
of the social institution that best shields women from such violence: namely,
marriage. Still, the evidence continues to accumulate
showing that marriage matters a good deal in reducing women’s vulnerability to
domestic violence. Indeed, a study recently published in
Public Health Reports indicates that a woman seeking safety will
want to live in an intact marriage herself—and in a neighborhood filled with
intact marriages.
Conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of
Cincinnati, the new study examines the effects of “contextual risk” on the
prevalence and severity of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV).
The Tennessee and Cincinnati scholars calculated the “contextual risk”
for IPV for a nationally representative sample of 2,273 couples with children
ages 5 to 17, using data collected from these couples in 1990 and 1994 by
interviewers and Census officials. Those calculations
highlight the importance of marital status as a predictor of Intimate Partner
Violence.
“As might be expected in a sample of households with school-aged children,”
the researchers report, “stably married couples . . . have the lowest rates of
I[ntimate]P[artner]V[iolence].” For stably married couples, the researchers
calculate an incidence of 16.2% for overall IPV and of 3.5% for IPV involving
“physical violence with injury.” In contrast, the
researchers find that “cohabiting couples show the highest rates of
IPV.” Among cohabiting couples the rate of overall
IPV runs more than twice as high as that found among stably married couples
(37.5% among “stable cohabiting couples”; 33.6% among “new” cohabiting
couples). The rate of physical violence with injury runs
four times as high as that found among stably married couples (16.1% among
stable cohabiting couples; 14.1% among new cohabiting couples).
Though the incidence of overall and severe IPV does run higher among newly
married or remarried couples than among stably married couples, it still runs
far below that observed among cohabiting couples. (The researchers report a
rate of overall IPV of 18.7% among newly married or remarried couples and a
rate of IPV with physical violence with injury of 7.0%.)
Nor is it just a woman’s own marital status that determines her vulnerability
to domestic violence. The authors of the new study
establish that “neighborhood context” also helps determine that vulnerability.
And in determining whether a neighborhood is “advantaged” or
“disadvantaged” the researchers look at—among other social and economic
characteristics—the fraction of households in the neighborhood that are headed
by single parents. When that fraction rises, the
neighborhood becomes more disadvantaged.
The researchers note that, compared to violence-free couples, “couples with
IPV are more likely . . . to live in neighborhoods of high disadvantage.”
Among couples who reported Intimate Partner Violence, 27.3% lived in
disadvantaged neighborhoods; among couples who reported no IPV, only 18.3%.
Among couples who reported severe domestic violence involving injury,
more than a third (35.2%) lived in disadvantaged neighborhoods, compared to
less than a fifth (19.1%) of those who reported no severe domestic violence.
Statistical tests identify all of these neighborhood-context effects as
significant (p < 0.001 for all neighborhood effects).
Those truly intent on reducing the incidence of domestic abuse are those at
work to reverse the national retreat from marriage.
(Source: Greer Litton Fox and Michael L. Benson, “Household and Neighborhood
Contexts of Intimate Partner Violence,” Public Health Reports 121 [2006]:
419-427.)
