{"id":1052,"date":"2004-08-31T13:26:27","date_gmt":"2004-08-31T21:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/08\/31\/is-a-live-in-boyfriend-more-dangerous-than-a-husband\/"},"modified":"2004-08-31T13:26:27","modified_gmt":"2004-08-31T21:26:27","slug":"is-a-live-in-boyfriend-more-dangerous-than-a-husband","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1052","title":{"rendered":"Is a live-in boyfriend more dangerous than a husband?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sara Butler (who nowadays blogs at the Family Scholars Blog<\/a>) criticizes a Washington Post <\/i>article<\/a> about intimate violence:<\/p>\n

Since Ms. Pirro has been prosecuting domestic violence cases for decades, she must know that most domestic violence happens in households where the couple is not married. You’d think that since we’re so concerned with helping women avoid becoming victims of domestic violence you might want to mention that, but no.<\/div>\n

Sara seems to be saying that in order to help “women avoid becoming victims of domestic violence,” we should publicize that “most domestic violence happens in households where the couple is not married.” That’s oversimplifying matters.<\/p>\n

It’s true that live-in boyfriends are statistically more likely to abuse their partners than husbands are. However, the differences between the two are often exaggerated – many Christian websites claim that live-in boyfriends are 60 times as likely as husbands to commit intimate violence, which is ridiculous.<\/p>\n

Responsible studies have found that live-in boyfriends are about twice as likely as husbands to commit intimate violence, and even this might be an overstatement. Most of the relevant studies in this area have a sample size of fewer than 50 cohabitating couples, which would make it easy for the frequency of abuse to be overestimated. Significantly, the one study I know of to use a solid sample size of over a thousand cohabiting couples (“Understanding Male Partner Violence Against Cohabiting and Married Women” in Journal of Family Violence Dec 2002 – pdf file<\/a>) found that boyfriends are about 11% more likely to be abusers than husbands – a significant difference, but not as enormous a difference as some folks suggest.<\/p>\n

It’s also important that we not mix up causation and correlation. Just because husbands are less likely to abuse, doesn’t mean that a woman is less likely to be abused if she marries Bob rather than just moving in with Bob. Marriage itself probably doesn’t provide any protection against abuse.<\/p>\n

When the previously-mentioned study took into account non-marriage factors such as age (the average cohabitor is 32, the average married person 44), boyfriends were no longer more likely to be abusers than husbands.<\/p>\n

One of the non-marriage factors that made a large difference is if either the woman or the man had a violent father. Women are apparently less likely to marry men who they believe had violent fathers; and also less likely to get married themselves if their own father was violent.<\/p>\n

There are other factors to be considered. It’s possible, for example, that women who are married have more invested in the relationship than women who are cohabiting, and are therefore less willing to admit problems (such as abuse) to an interviewer. It also seems possible that abusive boyfriends are simply less likely to get married, because some proportion of women actively avoid marrying men they suspect might be abusive (but might be willing to do a “try-out” live-in relationship).<\/p>\n

Perhaps the oddest finding is that it makes a difference – even after accounting for non-marriage factors like age and abusive fathers – if the woman has ever cohabited with a man other than her husband. Husbands of women who cohabited with other men before the marriage are more likely abusers than either live-in boyfriends or than the husbands of women who have never cohabited. (I suspect this could indicate some sort of jelousy or possessiveness.)<\/p>\n

In any case, to help women “avoid becoming victims of domestic violence,” I don’t think it’s useful to tell them to avoid live-in boyfriends and shack up only with husbands. What seems more important, from the research I’ve read, is to look at how one’s potential partner managers anger; how egalitarian they are; if they drink to unhealthy extremes; if there’s a problematic age difference; if they (or you) have unresolved issues with an abusive father, if they’re controlling; and so forth. (Not living in or <\/i>marrying until one is older is good advice, as well.) A wedding ring won’t make an abuser decent; and lack of a wedding ring won’t make a decent guy abusive.<\/p>\n

(Thanks to Bean for suggestions she made regarding this post.)<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Amanda at Mouse Words comments<\/a>.
\n
\nFull disclosure: The authors of the study I cited – who are strongly committed to the “boyfriends and husbands are very different things” thesis – might disagree with me that it’s significant that their study found a smaller difference between live-in boyfriends and husbands than other, smaller-scale studies have. They write:<\/p>\n

…in the absence of controls for duration of relationship, one would expect a smaller difference in rates between cohabitors and marrieds because marrieds, whose unions tend to last longer than cohabitors’will have had a greater chance to accumulate incidents of violence.<\/div>\n

The authors seem to be assuming that abuse is even distributed throughout the life of a marriage, but this isn’t always true. Studies have shown that in many abusive marriages, a large portion of abuse occurs near the end of a marriage (perhaps because the abuser, sensing the approaching end of the marriage, feels the need to violently reassert control). If so, then this study’s methodology – which measured violence only in current relationships, ignoring separated and divorced couples – may have had the effect of underestimating the violence of husbands.<\/p>\n

In any case, the authors would certainly agree with me that the link between marriage and reduced intimate violence is a matter of correlation and not causation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sara Butler (who nowadays blogs at the Family Scholars Blog) criticizes a Washington Post article about intimate violence: Since Ms. Pirro has been prosecuting domestic violence cases for decades, she must know that most domestic violence happens in households where … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}