The Causes of Wife Abuse - Who Are The Offenders?

Like victims of domestic abuse, batterers come from all socioeconomic groups and all ethnic backgrounds. They may be male or female, young or old. They share a common characteristic—they all have personal relationships with their victims.

In the Bureau of Justice Statistics report Criminal Victimization (Washington, DC, September 2004), statistician Shannan M. Catalano analyzed general crime trends and confirmed that most female violent crime victims in 2003 knew their offenders, while most men were victimized by strangers. Rape and sexual assault victims were the most likely victims to know their assailants. Of the 5.4 million violent crimes that took place in 2003, Catalano found that intimates were offenders in 19% of the violent assaults on females; intimates were involved in only 3% of violent assaults on males. (See Table 2.5 in Chapter 2.)

Marital status was a factor in much of the violence. Never married, divorced, and separated men and women experienced higher rates of victimization than persons who were married or widowed. (See Table 3.3.) In addition, rates of violent victimization by an intimate partner toward women increase as household incomes go down, according to Callie Marie Rennison and Sarah Welchans in "Intimate Partner Violence" (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, May 2000, NCJ 178247).

The Effects of Poverty

Murray Straus, a highly regarded researcher and codirector of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, found that serious physical acts of wife abuse are more likely to occur in poorer homes. His research shows that for lower levels of violence, such as shoving or slapping, the differences in socioeconomic status are small. For more serious types of violence, the rates increase dramatically as the socioeconomic status drops.

University of Massachusetts researchers Gerald T. Hotaling and David B. Sugarman found that in eight of eleven studies of socioeconomic status, low socioeconomic status was consistently related to wife assault ("A Risk Marker Analysis of Assaulted Wives," Journal of Family Violence, vol. 5, 1990). Hotaling and Sugarman proposed two interpretations of this finding. First, men of lower socioeconomic status are exposed to greater stress and possess fewer resources to cope with it, such as economic security or education. Second, the relationship between lower socioeconomic status and wife abuse is a response to a subculture of violence that makes these individuals more likely to hold values permitting the abuse of women.

The 1985 National Family Violence Survey, based on 6,002 households, provided researchers with the primary data to test their observations against a database large enough to produce statistically significant, valid findings. In the survey, families living at or below the poverty level had a rate of marital violence 500% greater than more affluent families.

More recent research funded by the National Institutes of Health offered additional support for the relationship between socioeconomic status and abuse. Deborah Pearlman et al. presented the findings of an analysis of policereported domestic violence in relation to variables including socioeconomic conditions, age, race, and ethnicity (Neighborhood Environment, Racial Position and Domestic Violence Risk: Contextual Analysis, Academy for Health Service Research and Health Policy, Annual Meeting, June 24, 2002). Researchers found a complex but strong relationship between poverty and domestic violence. They speculated that one explanation for the increased risk of domestic violence in poorer neighborhoods might be differences in law enforcement availability and practices—economically deprived communities might have less police notification, attention, and documentation.

TABLE 3.3

Rates of violent crime and personal theft, by household income, marital status, region, and location of residence of victims, 2003
		Victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older
		Violent crimes
					Assault
Characteristic of victim	Population	All	Rape/sexual assault	Robbery	Total	Aggravated	Simple	Personal theft
Note: The National Crime Victimization Survey includes as violent crime rape, sexual assault, robbery, and assault. Because the NCVS interviews persons about their victimizations, murder and manslaughter cannot be included.
*Based on 10 or fewer sample cases.
SOURCE: Shannan M. Catalano, "Table 7. Rates of Violent Crime and Personal Theft, by Household Income, Marital Status, Region, and Location of Residence of Victims, 2003," in Criminal Victimization, 2003, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey, September 2004, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cv03.pdf (accessed September 19, 2004)
Household income
Less than $7,500	8,335,120	49.9	1.6*	9.0	39.3	10.8	28.5	1.2*
$7,500–$14,999	15,893,630	30.8	1.8*	4.0	25.0	7.9	17.0	1.1*
$15,000–$24,999	24,560,390	26.3	0.8*	4.0	21.5	4.5	17.0	0.7*
$25,000–$34,999	24,252,930	24.9	0.9*	2.2	21.8	5.0	16.9	0.8*
$35,000–$49,999	32,082,950	21.4	0.9*	2.1	18.3	4.8	13.5	0.7*
$50,000–$74,999	35,174,290	22.9	0.5*	2.0	20.4	5.2	15.2	0.5*
$75,000 or more	47,855,860	17.5	0.5*	1.7	15.4	2.7	12.6	1.0
Marital status
Never married	76,429,290	41.6	1.6	5.2	34.8	8.7	26.1	1.4
Married	120,862,960	10.2	0.2*	0.8	9.2	1.8	7.4	0.3
Divorced/separated	25,907,600	35.1	1.9	3.5	29.7	7.8	21.9	0.7*
Widowed	14,297,780	3.5	0.0*	1.1*	2.5	0.1*	2.3	0.8*
Region
Northeast	44,525,430	21.0	0.2*	2.7	18.1	3.9	14.2	1.1
Midwest	55,886,090	23.6	1.5	2.7	19.4	4.6	14.8	1.0
South	86,489,420	21.1	0.9	2.5	17.8	4.4	13.4	0.5
West	52,405,050	25.2	0.6*	2.1	22.5	5.6	16.9	0.6
Residence
Urban	66,466,630	28.2	0.8	3.7	23.8	5.4	18.3	1.3
Suburban	115,814,150	21.3	1.0	2.3	18.1	4.3	13.7	0.7
Rural	57,025,210	18.6	0.6	1.6	16.4	4.2	12.2	0.3*