The Washington Post Misused the Data on Violence Against Women [View all]

snip:

The op-ed focused on marriage, but marriage isn’t the only thing that could affect intimate partner violence. There could be other factors at play. Intimate violence rates are lower among married women, but we can’t rule out the possibility of confounding variables. To put the point more plainly: “the marrying kind tend to be more educated, wealthier and whiter,” so the focus on marriage should come with some exploration of the fact that education, income and race could also partly explain trends in intimate violence.

In 2000, the U.S. Department of Justice did try to control for other factors, such as age and geography. It found:

“Couples with status disparities experience more intimate partner violence than do couples with no status disparities.”
“Women were significantly more likely to report violence by a current partner if their education level was greater than their partner’s.”
“Having a verbally abusive partner was associated with the largest change in the odds that a woman would be victimized by an intimate partner. … These findings support the theory that much of the violence perpetrated against women by male partners is part of a systematic pattern of dominance and control, or what some researchers have called ‘patriarchal terrorism.’”