Wife beating is disturbingly common

I have a theory that wife beating explains a much bigger percentage of recent marriage rate declines than any of us cares to admit.

I don’t have the very specific polling data I’d need to prove that I’m right. I do, however, have enough data to prove that my theory is plausible.

The first reason I think fear of intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major factor in growing singledom is that it’s extremely, disturbingly normal.

Let’s dig into the data.

We’ll begin by defining our terms. IPV comes in various forms. Today I’m focusing on physical violence because it’s the most straightforward, easiest to measure form of IPV.

One-third of women around the world experience literal, physical intimate partner violence at some point, according to that 2018 WHO report with the pithy title Global and regional estimates of violence against women: prevalence and health effects of intimate partner violence and non-partner sexual violence.

Source: 2018 WHO report

“Violence against women is not a small problem that only occurs in some pockets of society, but is a global public health problem of epidemic proportions, requiring urgent action,” the WHO authors wrote.

According to

Zawn Villines

, peer-reviewed research shows that one-fifth of marriages are physically violent. “There is nothing else in life, no other single choice, that carries a 1 in 5 risk of violence,” Villines wrote. “Heterosexual relationships with men are the single biggest public health threat to women’s safety and well-being.” Other data shows that roughly 1 in 5 men admit to assaulting their spouse or partner, making the actual figure very likely much higher. The Body Keeps the Score estimates that a quarter of relationships include physical violence.

Dr Emma Katz

recently wrote:

1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men in the United States experience physical violence from a partner. 1 in 5 men in the U.S. admit to attacking their spouse or partner. Almost 1 in 3 male university students say they would have sexual intercourse with a woman against her will if they wouldn’t have to face any consequences and no one would find out. Many men translate this willingness to rape into action in their intimate relationships: 1 in 10 women in the U.S. have been raped by an intimate partner.

Nearly a third of men (30%) and 26% of women believe it’s acceptable for a man to beat his wife under certain circumstances.

The WHO report also confirms what we already knew. People in countries where sexism is stronger and sexual repression is higher have higher rates of IPV.

Yet, IPV is hardly rare in more feminist and sexually permissive countries. In the UK, for example, domestic violence and/or sexual offenses comprised 22% of recorded crimes in 2022. Finland, which ranks eighth in the EU Gender Equality index, provides another example. More than half of Finnish women reported having experienced domestic physical, sexual, or psychological violence since turning 15.

Rape is a very common form of IPV. It’s also very normalized. Marital rape was legal in a third of countries as of 2018. In every country, the vast majority of survivors never report their rapes to police. Many more don’t recognize what happened to them as rape. Women are even less likely to accurately describe or report a rape when we’re married to the perpetrator. Just 12% of Zawn Villines’ survey respondents said their partners had raped them. That number jumped to half when the question concerned whether their partner had ever coerced them into sex they didn’t want.

Not content to merely beat or rape their wives and girlfriends, many, many men kill them.

“For every high profile story you hear about abusers who eventually kill their victims, there are dozens more that don’t make the news,” Zawn Villines wrote. “I work with victims every day. Their stories are bone-chilling. They seem newsworthy, but you’ll never hear them. Because it’s the norm for men to get away with violence against women.”

“Women are significantly more likely than men to be murdered by an intimate partner,” Villines wrote. When it comes to who murders women, it’s far-and-away their own male partners. When US women die via homicide, an intimate partner is the perpetrator 51% of the time. For men, that number is 7%. Globally, intimate partners are responsible for up to 38% of all murders of adult women.

We simply do not know how many women experience other forms of domestic violence such as emotional abuse, financial sabotage, emotional estrangement from friends and family, or reproductive coercion. We do not know how frequent or severe this abuse is. We don’t know what percentage of women feel they can’t leave without risking violence, poverty, loss of children, reputational harm, job loss, etc.

We can, however, reasonably assume that it’s a far, far larger number.

IPV is, clearly, very common. The average woman has good reason to fear it. But is every woman equally likely to partner with an abuser?

First, it’s helpful to know that bottom-half women, almost exclusively, are behind recent marriage declines.

Now, if only wealthy, well-educated women ever got beaten by their partners then one would expect the fear of getting beaten to feature much less prominently in bottom-half women’s romantic choices.

As it turns out, the opposite is true. Bottom-half men are much more likely to beat their intimate partners. “Those teenagers who engage in violence against girlfriends are, predominantly, at the bottom of the economic order,” RW Connell wrote in Masculinities. Thus, bottom-half women have the highest likelihood of experiencing IPV.

A Latin American woman told Dr.

Alice Evans

that when a woman’s face is busted up in her community, no one blinks. It’s normal. But if someone who lives in a middle-class building sees a woman step into their elevator with a bruised face, they’ll ask her what happened and offer to go to the police with her to report. I think that’s how it is everywhere, if we’re honest.

Overall, between 20% and 37% of women experience overt physical violence, threats of overt physical violence, and/or rape at their partners’ hands, depending on the source and country you’re looking at.

Let’s just say just one in five women experience IPV in that beacon of feminist hope, the US of A. If a bottom-half woman is twice as likely as a top-half woman to get beaten and/or raped by a partner at some point, that gives the average bottom-half woman a 50/50 chance of escaping adulthood unbeaten and unraped by a partner. Even if she’s just 10% more likely, that’s still a 30% likelihood.

Those odds, for my fellow math-challenged babies, are not good!

Asking a bottom-half woman why she isn’t married is like asking any person on the street why they haven’t made fun of Mike Tyson’s speech impediment to his face. It should not be a mystery why a person might say no to any activity that carries a 30% risk of an ass-beating. Talking about why marriage rates are down without mentioning IPV seems akin to discussing why a person might have taken an Uber home without mentioning that their other option was walking down a street the locals call “murder alley.”

I guess it’s possible that bottom-half women don’t know how risky marriage and dating are for them. I guess it’s possible that they do know, but it’s not factoring into their decision for some reason. But that doesn’t seem as likely as the more obvious explanation. Bottom-half women know full-well. The top-half folks remain ignorant. We’re insulated from experiencing most of the violence ourselves. We stigmatize anyone who does experience violence with questions like “Why did you stay?”

I guess that’s fine. Not everyone can know everything about everything. But it really does seem like every single person who decides to weigh in on why rates of marriage, fertility, and dating are down has a moral responsibility to look the most obvious answer in its swollen, purple face.

[Update: I’m reading Masculinities by RW Connell and this bit on page 146 struck me: “…half the fathers took dominance as far as violence towards their wives. … The family constellations, in brief, fell within the range of what was numerically normal or socially conventional in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.” Yuck.