If I suspected a man (or woman) of being an abuser, I wouldn’t get married to him or her before I knew for sure. It’s much easier for a person to control or hide their anger problems from people they aren’t around 24/7; therefore, it seems the logical way to find out if they have a serious anger/abuse problem is to live with them. A “trial period,” if you will.

Did they account for whether or not the couple was engaged or had any plans for marriage in this study?

I also think that married women are more likely to have children than women who cohabit. A lot of mothers, especially in this climate that is fast turning against custodial mothers, are afraid of leaving an abusive marriage because he may threaten to take the kids. He stands a good chance of getting them, too - at the very least joint custody. Protections for women in abused marriages are being taken away. For instance, in California, a report recently came out where abused women are being told by domestic violence workers not to mention abuse to mediators because they do better in mediation if they don’t bring it up. That’s not good.

I also think pseu may be right about the reporting issues. We’ve seen in a longitudinal study I work on that women report that there WAS abuse in the relationship after it’s over, even though when we asked the question when they were still together, they said there was no violence. violence.

On a more serious note, good article and links. Thank you.

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Karpad, since we are discussing stastics, which tally up the behavior of many women and men, it’s quite possible that both the effect that I suggest, the effect you suggest and others effects affect the statistics. The question is “how much”? I think it’s difficult in the social sciences to figure this out.

The sort of larger point is: How do we know it’s not something about a man’s potential to batter that causes the couple to chose to cohabit rather than marry? (As opposed to the choice causing or inhibiting the battery.)

I also have a comment on Trish’s thoughts that women don’t avoid marrying abusers because at first they don’t know they are abusers. My thoughts are, on the one hand, she is right. Obviously, most women don’t know they man is eventually going to abuse them otherwise, they wouldn’t get into this situation.

On the other hand, people do develop some sort of radar or gut feeling about other people as they get to know them. So, it’s possible that someone doesn’t “know” something, yet acts on the “knowledge”. (Yes, this sounds stupid– either you’ll unerstand what I mean or not.) Alternatively, some friends or family might counsel a woman if they have the heebee- jeebees about a guy. Or, something could happen that, on average, causes women (or man) to decide to cohabit instead of marrying men who have a propensity to abuse the woman.

Of course, no social scientiest could ever picks some of these things on any survey! How would you even design the question?

1. Did they control for socio-economic differences in the population studied so that results weren’t skewed by the incidence of marriage in the studied population? Among other things, getting a doctor or lawyer’s wife to report abuse is really difficult but there may be other subtle differences as well about the willingness to report — African American women, less likely to be married, may be more willing to report abuse than white women, who are more likely to be married.

2. If you don’t count the divorced and separated as married, well then, that’s game set and match right there. In my brief but intense career as a volunteer counsellor for abused women, most women could not admit that they were being abused until they left, they couldn’t admit it to themselves or anyone else unless it got really out of hand and required ER or police intervention.

3. Anecdotally, almost all of the women who called me on the hotline and needed help were married. There is something skewed about this study.

We’re so easily reduced.

I heard that also. Although I understand the logic it is unconscionable for it to come to that point. I am the legal representative to a federal family advocacy board, many of the victims who have perps referred to the board are between a rock and a hard place. The mediators, who do not have the resources to investigate abuse will ask, why did you not report the abuse before the divorce proceedings? If the victim reports the abuse before the divorce, there is fodder for the perp to say, they are just doing this to take my kids away from me.

My advice has always been to report it now and get out. If you don’t feel you can or don’t want to report it now — then wait until you are abused again. Then you should have some physical evidence corroborate your story. I really hate to give my advice that way. My hope is the next time it happens they will think that if they don’t report it, the possibilty of them losing their children will increase. CPS here takes children away from the abused parent if they do not report the spousal abuse in time.

Here’s the link to the post where I wrote about this. It’s at the end of a post I had written about Jeri Ryan.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Domestic violence workers are telling abused women in California to not mention abuse when they go through mediation. I believe mediation is now required in California. There was a recent study released about mediation in California that had shown that women received worse mediation if they revealed that they were being or had been abused. Even when restraining orders were brought out, they fared worse than if they had not mentioned the abuse at all. This is a very troubling finding. Women get better treatment if they don’t mention abuse. Plus, abusers are gaining unsupervised visitation and sometimes partial custody even when abuse is revealed. The only thing that seems to put a damper on this practice is evidence of documented police presence at any time in the abusive relationship.”

“California’s mediation system is supposedly superior to mediation in other states. This study shows that it isn’t superior in any sense of the word.”