{"id":1095,"date":"2004-09-21T01:51:44","date_gmt":"2004-09-21T09:51:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/09\/21\/hooray-for-no-fault-divorce\/"},"modified":"2004-09-21T01:51:44","modified_gmt":"2004-09-21T09:51:44","slug":"hooray-for-no-fault-divorce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1095","title":{"rendered":"Hooray for No-Fault Divorce!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over on the Family Scholars Blog,<\/a> Brad Wilcox (who I’ve mentioned before on “Alas,” here<\/a> and here<\/a>) writes:<\/p>\n

Clearly, we need to do a better job of making men better husbands and fathers. And we cannot tolerate documented cases of domestic abuse. But we also need to change public policies and social norms that allow for “easy divorces” that often hurt women, children, and — truth be told — men also.<\/div>\n

So if an abused woman can’t document her abuse, she should be forced to remain in the marriage?<\/p>\n

La Lubu,<\/a> recalling her own abusive marriage, writes:<\/p>\n

I’d’a had a helluva time trying to “prove” abuse, since I had not been severely injured (the stereotype of the abused female as always having been beaten to within an inch of her life….as if the rest of us are supposed to tolerate occasional slaps, punches and kicks…roll with the punches literally, at it were). Even if he had never escalated into physical abuse, I still felt I had a fundamental human right not to be married–legally tied–to an alcoholic who refused to work and spewed an incessant barrage of verbal abuse and insults during the moments when he wasn’t asleep! Because of my conditioning, I put up with it. I put up with it until I realized it was killing me. No-fault divorce literally saved my life.<\/div>\n

It may be that “easy divorces” (it’s amazing that Wilcox has talked to so many men who have been through painful no-fault divorces and can still use the ridiculous, inaccurate phrase “easy divorces”) have hurt women, although nothing in Wilcox’s letter supports that contention. But it’s beyond doubt that “hard divorces” hurt some women by trapping them in abusive marriages. Protecting the interests of only those abused women who can document <\/i>their abuse (“honey, stop hitting me for a minute so I can set up the vidcam”) is no solution.<\/p>\n

For an ironic contrast to Dr. Wilcox’s letter, check out this study (.pdf link<\/a>) on the effects of no-fault divorce on family violence. According to one of the study’s authors:<\/a><\/p>\n

The findings reveal that under no-fault laws a wife can threaten to leave an abusive husband, and this becomes a credible threat. Under the old regime, this was not so. Our theory is that the fear of divorce creates a strong incentive for abusive partners to behave.<\/p>\n

More generally, easy access to divorce redistributes marital power from the party interested in preserving the marriage to the partner who wants out. In most instances, this resulted in an increase in marital power for women, and a decrease in power for men.<\/p>\n

Our analysis of US data revealed the legislative change had caused female suicide to decline by about a fifth, domestic violence to decline by about a third, and intimate femicide – the husband’s murder of his wife – to decline by about a tenth.<\/p><\/div>\n

So what causes the decline in suicide, domestic violence and intimate femicide? According to the authors of the paper, it’s a change in power dynamics within marriage – men are less likely to become abusive if women have more power to pack their bags and leave. (La Luba is a bit skeptical of that explanation).<\/p>\n

Personally, I would have liked to see the authors do a multivariate analysis accounting for the growth of battered women’s shelters, which occurred at about the same time, probably took place in mostly the same (relatively liberal) states, and could reasonably be expected to have similar effects. It’s possible that some of the beneficial effects they attribute to no-fault divorce were in fact the result of the growing availability of other resources to help battered women leave abusive relationships.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the same basic principle – that the harder it is for women to leave marriages, the more danger abused women are in – applies whether we’re talking about battered women’s shelters or about no-fault divorce. And it makes me extremely skeptical of folks who, like Dr. Wilcox, want to do away with “easy divorces,” and seem heedless of the consequences to women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over on the Family Scholars Blog, Brad Wilcox (who I’ve mentioned before on “Alas,” here and here) writes: Clearly, we need to do a better job of making men better husbands and fathers. And we cannot tolerate documented cases of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1095","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\/1095","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=1095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}