A study out of Penn of domestic violence incidents in Philadelphia finds that over 82% of domestic violence incidents are among people who are only "dating", versus about 18% for those who are, or have been, married. Granting the caveat "this is just Philadelphia and they may be culturally different from other Americans", we would infer that the ~50% of single adults have 82% of the problem, while the 50% of married/divorced adults have only 18% of the problem.
Long and short of it is that the relative risk for domestic violence among the single appears to be, at least in Philly, about 18x higher than that for the married. Just one city, and likely skewed towards the young, who are more likely to commit crimes. That noted....wow. It's pretty scary IMO.
4 comments:
If you won't put a ring on it, you might hit it...
What Hearthie said. Think renter vs. homeowner.
Yes. It's amazing what peaceable effect having a shared set of ground rules for a relationship has, versus "making things up as you go."
That said, I'm personally shocked at this estimate of how great that effect might be. It's something of a condemnation of sociologists that nobody appears to have thought of doing this before.
Of the three "race, class, gender" ways to discuss sociology, pseudo marxist sociology NEVER does research on things which are class based that can't be blamed on race.
Why? Because Americans get very squicky talking about social class and we kinda like to blame racism for all the things. Domestic violence though - that happens a lot more in concert with other things that go with poverty, like drug use, being in awful situations, high ACE scores, etc. And the marriage rates of the lower socioeconomic rungs are very low, while those other factors are very high. It's natural that there would be a correlation.
And equally natural, with no one to blame except generational trauma, that studies don't get done ... or if done, not publicized.
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