Researcher Brad Wilcox’s new book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands, has been getting some coverage (especially but not exclusively in right-wing and Christian news outlets), and I imagine will get a lot more in the weeks to come. (See, for example, Maggie Gallagher, David Warren, and USA Today). (Many links via the Family Scholars Blog, where Tom Sylvester wrote an impressively mean and unfair comment about Scott Coltrane).
One claim that I’ve seen over and over is that Wilcox’s work shows that “Evangelical Protestant wives whose husbands attend church regularly reported the lowest levels of domestic violence of any major religious or secular group studied.” In other words, attending evangelical church makes guys less likely to beat their wives.
Unfortunately, I can’t afford a copy of Wilcox’s book, nor does my library have a copy. So I could be entirely wrong about this. But from what I can tell, while Wilcox may be right to say that Evangelical dads spend more time with their kids and are terrific fathers, his study is worthless when it comes to measuring domestic violence.
According to the official press release, Dr. Wilcox’s book draws its data from “two well-regarded, national social surveys, the General Social Survey (1990-98), and the National Survey of Families and Households (1987-88 and 1992-94).”
The General Social Survey doesn’t include any data on respondents as victims or perpetrators of intimate violence, so we can ignore the GSS. The National Survey of Families and Households does ask about intimate violence, so Dr. Wilcox must have depended on the NSFH to draw his conclusions about intimate violence and church attendance. (This isn’t an original approach, by the way; Christopher Ellison, in particular, reached the same conclusion from the same data source years ago. See “Religious Involvement and Domestic Violence,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2001).
The NSFH is an excellent research tool for many things, but it’s lousy for measuring domestic violence.
1. The NSFH doesn’t make it safe for victims to answer questions.
First of all, the NSFH is terrible when it comes to giving respondents a private, safe way to answer the survey – but respondent safety and privacy is paramount when you’re trying to measure intimate violence. To give you an idea of how bad it is, sometimes the NSFH researchers will interview a husband, but if the wife is unavailable they’ll just leave her survey behind, to be completed and picked up a few days later.
Okay, now imagine that the husband is an abuser. He’s taken the survey, so he knows it includes questions about violence between spouses. The surveyors leave a blank questionnaire for his wife, and ask him to pretty please make sure she fills it out in total privacy, so she’s free to answer honestly. What are the odds a woman in that situation will actually be free to answer survey questions about how often her husband abuses her honestly? I’d put them somewhere between zil and none.
2. The NSFH’s questions aren’t well written to accurately measure intimate violence.
It would take a lot of space to describe everything researchers have learned in the past two decades about how to design interviews about intimate violence; suffice it to say that the NSFH gets everything wrong.
For instance, the NSFH doesn’t even ask about rape and sexual abuse – meaning that a major area of intimate violence is ignored. The NSFH asks about violence exclusively in the context of arguments that turn violent, ignoring instances of violence not preceded by an argument. The NSFH asks very few questions, and the questions each cover multiple possible events; research has shown that respondents are more likely to report intimate violence if they’re asked a longer series of more specific questions.
3. The NSFH isn’t useful for measuring alcohol use and abuse.
According to a study similar to Dr. Wilcox’s, and using the exact same data source, “respondents in the NSFH were asked whether they experience problems with alcohol or drug usage.” (“Religious Involvement and Domestic Violence,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2001.) As far as I can tell, that’s it. Asking the question so bluntly and crudely isn’t likely to bring about honest answers, and even when respondents answer honestly, the data given is too crude to be very useful.
Why does this matter? Because, statistically, the more alcohol people drink, the more likely they are to be involved with domestic violence; and, the more often people go to church, the less likely they are to drink. The least likely drinkers (aside from total abstainers) are evangelical protestants who go to church weekly. This means that the causation suggested by Dr. Wilcox may not be causation at all, but just a correlation caused by the fact that heavy drinkers don’t go to church much.
A 2002 study published in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion also looked for a connection between religious affiliation and intimate violence; but unlike Dr. Wilcox’s data source, this study asked respondents detailed questions about “11 alcohol-dependence symptoms and 15 drinking-related social consequences,” which means that this study’s data on alcohol consumption was far more useful and accurate.
(Also, it didn’t make the mistake of conflating alcohol use with other drug use – for example, while alcohol increases the odds of intimate violence, pot-smoking may actually decrease those odds. That means that any study of intimate violence that conflates alcohol and pot usage is, frankly, hash.)
The results? On first glance, their data appeared to show a connection between going to church every week and low rates of intimate violence. Using a multivariate (that’s a mathematical means of measuring the importance of multiple variables) analysis, however, the results looked quite different. “For men, the results indicate that weekly religious attendance and importance of religion was not associated with increased or decreased risk of [intimate violence] perpetration. Instead, men who reported alcohol problems were at a fourfold increased risk of [intimate violence] perpetration compared to men who did not report alcohol problems.”
(“Religious affiliation, denominational homogeny, and intimate partner violence,” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Mar 2002, Vol. 41, Issue 1)
* * *
I don’t completely dismiss Dr. Wilcox’s study. In many cases – for instance, regarding his finding that evangelical men are particularly affectionate towards their children and spend a lot of time with their children – his data sources are probably useful and accurate. Furthermore, I haven’t read Dr. Wilcox’s book, so any critique I make of his work is indirect and must be taken with a grain of salt.
But the bottom line is, no study relying on the NHFS for information about intimate violence is going to produce meaningful results. Despite the press reports, anything Dr. Wilcox’s study finds about domestic violence can probably be dismissed..
Fundamentalist patriarchs have always been on to something. The tender mutual suffocation of brainwashing and the shared terror of a world filled with imaginary demons can be so much more effective than mere beating for ensuring that everyone stays in their life-numbing box.
Hey Amp, you do send these sort of comments to new outlets right?
There is another possiblity you may have missed (or I may have missed reading it.) It is possible that a woman who feels she must submit to her dh would not consider certain actions most of us would classify as abuse as abuse.
Or she may feel it abuse but not feel she has the right to state anything opposing her dh’s will or the will of the church.
I would love to see the questions; when you start really reading the studies, reading the question, sometimes you get a totally different opinion of the results.
DRA: Regarding sending posts like these to news outlets: No, I wouldn’t know where to send them.
Rachel Ann: Good point! You can read the questions regarding intimate violence at this ftp link. Scroll down to question 8.
Since they were smart enough to ask about specific acts and outcomes, rather than just asking a totally subjective question like “does he abuse you,” I think your suggested critique doesn’t really apply. But you may disagree – take a look.
I don’t mean the whole posts Amp, just abridged letters to the editor and such.
I allways think of the article in Transforming a Culture of Rape where the preacher says that as soon as he started talking about marital rape from the pulpit, all these women started approaching him privately, and he wondered why HIS congregation had such an epidemic of abuse. Took awhile for him to figure out it wasn’t just his congregation.
I don’t completely dismiss Dr. Wilcox’s study.
Even though it references a study that has *no* findings about domestic violence?
Not all studies have to cover all topics, Mythago. I wouldn’t use Dr. Wilcox’s study if I were discussing domestic violence, but that doesn’t make its other findings worthless.
Right–but what I mean is that if the study claims its findings rest on studies A and B, and A in fact doesn’t deal with the book’s topic at all, that’s a credibility hit. It sounds as though A was used for out-of-context tidbits.
It looks like the book looked into a variety of things, not just domestic violence. The domestic violence part was what made the most headlines.
Of course all this fundamentalist chest-beating about how abuse free their marriages supposedly are doesn’t look that impressive when compared to the distinct possibility that divorce is measurably more frequent among them:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
Clearly there’s some kind of trouble in “paradise.”
Who needs battery when their stunted, repulsive personalities do all the psychological crippling and torturing? Killing each other gently, all fake smiles and sunny facades…
From my experience (not personal, but concerning someone in my extended family) a woman in at least one type of a fundamentalist church would define abuse differently. She would not see herself being beaten necessarily as abusive, and she would most definitely not say that she has been abused in a public survey. I don’t know how common this would be, but I would at least consider this possibility when interpreting the results.
I tried to print off the relavent questions but I couldn’t get it to print.
However, what really interested me was the number of people who answered INAPPLICABLE to various questions, one’s in which one would think would be easily answered.
For example, question 8 which asked about physical abuse during arguments, the weighted percent of people who answered “Inapplicable” was 40.13…
(50.14 said no abuse ocurred.) I can understand the subsequent questions receiving an “Inapplicable” because the answer to the first was “No” but I find it curious that so many people found this question inapplicable in the first place.
However, even if the survey is true, it is important to find out WHY it is true. It could be that many evangelical wives are so submissive that they simply rarely argue or rarely do something that would go against the desires of the dh. If everytime someone issued an order to someone else, it was obeyed, well there probably would be less arguements.
And if a woman felt that any type of “discipline” she received was warranted, she wouldn’t list it as abouse either, as Echinde has said.
Are there any questions regarding the role the husband vs. the wife must take? Also, is there any stats on the diffrence between the husbands answers and the wifes?
a woman in at least one type of a fundamentalist church would define abuse differently. She would not see herself being beaten necessarily as abusive, and she would most definitely not say that she has been abused in a public survey.
I don’t that the mental double-think is the sole realm of the fundamentalist church. I think that the double-think is equally spread amoungst all abusers and abusees (I hate the word victim) alike. Particularly when discussing intimate violence, you’ve probably been raised from a very early age (it tends to “run in the family”) to NOT see what is happening to you as abuse.
If abuse happens to someone else, there is this odd, uncomfortable feeling that “Hey, that was wrong!”. Especially if the someone else is a child (and not your child), then the violence is no longer intimate, and therefore it shows up on your radar as “A bad thing”.
When it happens to you? This is the base you’re working from, if you’ve been abused long enough: You aren’t a person. You deserved it. Others have it worse. Three very basic, very insiduous, very common (in my experience) basic tenants you live with as an integral part of your being, as to live with any other belief would be too painful.
You can still feel sad and frightened and experience pain, but it doesn’t matter… you aren’t a person. Just as true sociopaths objectify their targets, there is a level of objectification that takes place in the familal violence stage as well (on both sides).
I have no education or research to support these claims, I’m just soapboxing. I’m more of a “lurker” than an active researcher in this area.
In my mind, this fundamentalist report is probably just a media blow out… it sounds like the study was targeting entirely different things, but some minor “proof by induction” of “abuse free marriages” made a bunch of headlines.
Out of curiosity, does anyone have data on say, hospital admissions for things like broken bones, bruising etc. and religious persuation?
domestic violence isn’t just dad hits mom.
i tend to see interacting cycles of violence.
dad hits [or yells at] mom.
mom hits kids.
older kid hits younger kid.
younger kid kicks dog.
dog bites mailman.
dad pays war taxes.
older kid grows up, joins army, commits abuses.
mom serves murdered animals three times a day.
dad smokes cigars around the baby.
principal hits older kid.
younger kid grows up to be next stalin.
etc.
trying to change just part of these cycles, while ignoring the others, might not work.
we tend to be hostile to w aroujnd here, with good reason.
but let’s try for a moment to be compassionate conservatives.
his dad was george bush, aka spooky mcspookerson.
think how that would warp your mind.
no wonder the guy tried being a drunk, found that didn’t work, and has deeprooted feelings of inadequacy he compensates for by trying to take over the world.
scratch a dictator and you usually find a scared lonely confused kid.
in the same way a surrendered wife with patty hurst syndrome is going to deny being abused, a lot of us are blind to some of the cycles of violence we live in, and we’ve come to identify with our captors.
[i’m just back from a men’s gender discussion group, where we got to talk about some of this stuff in more detail than usual.]
Alright,
Stupid question.
How do dominant/submissive relationships fit into this? Are these just sexual in nature? Is this a mind set? Are such relationships inherently abusive despite the declaration by the parties that the submissive gets satisfaction from the relationship? I know that is off topic, but it has been sort of running through my mind that there could be a connection between the two groups,
Am I just off the wall on this?
As I see it, dominant/submissive relationships are not necessarily sexual in nature. If you read a little about the family structure in the Utah Kingston Clans, you can find a lot of dominant/submissive structure in their philosophy on polygamy. There are people, who in their view, are by their nature “future gods” and people who live to serve them.
In this structure, it’s possible for the girls, especially, to grow up believing many things most consider abuse to be normal.
So do you feel submissive/dominant relationships (in terms of partnerships) as inherently bad? I’ll have to go do a google on these clans. I believe there is a group of women called taperstry? I think that is trying to fight these people… unless I got my groups mixed up. Do you know anything about that?
I did try googling stats on religion and hospital viists. There are several problems I think using some stats but they would be informative. Unfotunately, I wasn’t able to turn anything up.
Rachel Ann — I assume you are talking about consensual BDSM?
The magic of the internet has taught me that at least some kinky Christians feel their religion validates consensual BDSM — as long as the man is the top and the woman the bottom.
But also, I think consensual BDSM is something totally different than relationships of dominance and submission fostered by abuse.
>submissive/dominant relationships (in terms of partnerships) as inherently bad
Inherently bad? I don’t know. It’s possible someone could work it out in a way where submission isn’t quite… submission. Everyone submits to something— for example civil authority to some extent.
I think teaching people that their role is to be constantly submissive to others who are by nature “dominant” tends to be dangerous, and often has ill consequences. The way the Kingstons do it is particularly bad. If you do searches on “Kingston” and “beating” , “incest” or “polygamy” you’ll find things like this: Polygamy or abuse? The kingston girls are brought up to pretty much submit in all ways. They are not allowed to be educated. Their father’s pick their husbands, marry them off to uncles (who may already have 14 other wives) and they are not allowed to demur.
Oh.. the Tapestry against polygamy is a group of women who escaped polygamous families. Most were raised in polygamous societies and eventually fled.
Erika and Lucia
1rst, Erika, I am not certain I know what all the intitials mean but I am pretty certain we are on the same page.
It was just an idle thought on my part; but I was
neglecting the raised to part–as in raised to be submissive, not a choice…though I do wonder if people who take part in such relationships aren’t somehow “raised” towards this anyway—that is somehow their nurturing was lacking…but I don’t know enough of the mindset to know for certain.
I did a search on Kingston, and what a sick group.
I thought it might all be part of a continuum; but on second thought I think I’m barking up the wrong tree.
Why not look at prosecuted cases? Does the religious affiliation of convicted wife and/or child abusers or killers differ from the population at large? This doesn’t give you a direct population prevalence of lesser degrees of abuse, but at least no-one can dispute that serious abuse did occur in these convictions, and reporting bias is smaller than for lesser degrees of abuse. Easy to say the doorknob did it if you have a black eye, police may not be inclined to press further. Police more likely to pursue matters if woman beaten unconscious and left for dead.
So many times we read in the newspaper, concerning a man who murdered his wife and children – “but he was such a nice, God-fearing man”.
So many times we read in the newspaper, concerning a man who murdered his wife and children – “but he was such a nice, God-fearing man”.
Depends where you live, I suppose. I’ve never seen the word “God-fearing” in the coverage of a murder case, and very rarely in an abuse case (only when it happens to be the focal point of the case… “I beat my children because the Bible tells me too”)
I think as a whole, I’m concerned we’re getting away from the point, which is NOT to say that religious people abuse/are abused more, but that there is no conclusive evidence to indicate a change in abuse level or frequency with religious affiliation, even though some media and studies might like to spin it differently.
Hooray. Assholes are completely NON-demoninational (sorry for the language).
I think this article by Amy Doolittle could shed some light on things:Amy Doolittle
Doolittle:
>> Q: Which group has the highest rate of domestic violence?
Wilcox:
>> A: Interestingly, the nominal evangelicals who don’t attend services with any regularity have the highest rates of domestic violence.
The study splits the Evangelicals into two groups.
Interestingly, given Amps suggestiong that this is a victory for feminists….
>>Q: What do you think has brought evangelical men to this place?
>> A: I think it’s important to note that I think one of the reasons they do such a good job nowadays is that they take to heart the feminist concern that historically men have not done such a good job paying attention to the needs of their wives and children.
So, even if Tom Sylvester thinks this study gives Feminists a black eye, the author of the study seems to think that this is a victory for feminism! (But, I’ll admit, I haven’t read the book.)
My unstudied, unresearched opinion is that domestic violence is a function of alcohol consumption. The more drinking, the more fisticuffs. If the fundamentalists are off the sauce they very well might be avoiding physical abuse.
Good point, Lowlife. That didn’t occur to me.