Divorced From Reality

In a rather interesting discussion at the Mountain Goat Report, MGR makes this statement:

I’ll remind you again that my argument was not an attempt to make a judgment, good or bad, about marriage. My argument was that domestic violence is not bound by marital status. The data is there and it does not show what Thayn and others have tried to claim: that domestic violence is caused by what they call a breakdown in the traditional family structure. You have to admit that a 44.5% incidence among married couples is troubling whether or not you agree with my methodology in calculating the population percentage. The data show that domestic violence occurs in all segments of society with gender and age being more significant determining factors than marital status. This fallacious argument that encouraging marriage and discouraging divorce is somehow going to convince an abuser to stop is dangerous.

What’s actually fallacious is the understanding of the debate. If what Steve Thayn were saying was, “If we restore traditional family values, we’ll have no domestic violence,” then MGR would have a point. But Thayn himself admitted that families have never been perfect.

So let’s redefine the discussion here. The best of values, the best of principles will not obliterate domestic violence completely from our culture. Like any other crime, it has continued throughout human history and will be with us until Christ comes. That’s not the point.

My view of the situation is that our family problems are not unlike a medical condition. There are certain risk factors involved in medical situations. Smoking puts you at risk for lung cancer, so if you want to reduce lung cancer, you try and get people to stop smoking. If you want to reduce heart attacks, you get people to eat better, stop smoking, etc. Of course, you’ll still have heart attacks and cancer, but you’ll have less of them.

That age and gender are prime corollary measures of domestic violence shouldn’t surprise us. You could probably go back 200 years and find the same issues in domestic violence. There’s little people can do about either of those issues. What we have to look at is not just who suffers, but why. For that we look evidence, studies, etc.

The question ultimately comes down to an issue of why does domestic violence occur? Usually, it’s a result of something on the inside of the abuser, something wrong with them on a psychological level. What can cause that?:

Children in homes without the fathers present were at an increased risk for transmission of psychological disorders. Children who had lost their fathers were nearly twice as likely as those from intact families to manifest symptoms of psychological disorder (ratio 1.81; p<.03). Children who had experienced more than 12 months of lone-mother upbringing were twice as likely to exhibit psychological disorders as children who did not spend more than 12 months in a mother-only home (odds ratio 1.83; p<.03). Children who had experienced more than 12 months of stepfather upbringing were also nearly twice as likely as children in intact homes to exhibit symptoms of disorder (odds ratio 1.93; p<.04)

Compared to men who were convicted of non-violent crimes, men in this sample who were convicted of spouse abuse displayed more signs of aggression, more problems with control of movement or thinking, and more symptoms of Borderline and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

We might draw some conclusions. If we want a long-term reduction in domestic violence, then we better have a long-term focus on having well-adjusted children. And if we want well-adjusted children, maybe fatherlessness is not equal to marriage as a lifestyle for kids, particularly if we want to avoid domestic violence in the next generation.

Of course, we might look at Domestic Violence and say, “You know, if people didn’t get upset so much, that might solve the problem.” And we might ask, “What’s tied to folks getting upset?”

Husbands in couples with a history of multiple cohabitations exhibited more verbal aggression than husbands with no prior cohabitation. Husbands in couples with multiple cohabitation experiences also expressed more verbal aggression than their wives. Further, wives in couples who lived with their spouse prior to marriage expressed more verbal aggression than wives in couples with no prior cohabitation.

So maybe this cohabitation thing’s not a great idea. Of course, I’ve been accused of wanting a woman whose cohabitating (funny how nobody ever worries about men getting abused) to marry her abuser. That’s not true. What I think we need to do as a society is to be honest that the practice is unwise and not something that should be done, rather than pretending it’s “all right.” It’s not “all right”, it’s incredibly unwise and the relationships of those who practice it are more likely to end in abuse, and eventual divorce when marrying:

The longer couples cohabited before marrying, the more likely they were to resort to heated arguments, hitting, and throwing objects when conflicts arose in their subsequent marriage. A longer length of cohabitation was linked to a greater frequency of heated arguments, even when controlling for spouses’ age.

Compared to married couples who did not cohabit before marriage, couples who cohabited before marriage were 65 percent more likely to separate and only one-third as likely to reconcile following a separation.

These are well-established, well-document facts. Part of the issue is that we do need to change our overall societal view of marriage. Part of the problem in many marriages is that a secularist/pop-psychology mentality has poisoned the well. Plus many people don’t enter adulthood knowing what marriage will entail or what to look for in a spouse:

Wives of husbands who express familistic beliefs, including belief in the value of marriage and childbearing, belief in the importance of adult children caring for elderly parents, greater concern about divorce that involves couples with children and gender-role traditionalism are significantly more likely to feel appreciated for their household labor than wives of men who only express gender-role traditionalism without familistic beliefs.

In addition, perhaps one of the best things to do is something the state can’t do at all: send Protestant missionaries door-to-door converting men as quick as they can and get them active in the Church:

Active conservative Protestant husbands are significantly less likely than mainline Protestant or unaffiliated fathers to commit domestic violence, while their less religiously active counterparts are the most likely among these groups to commit domestic violence.

Now, you will always find exceptions to these rules, because we’re only dealing with risk factors and there may be something else going on, or a person’s personality may make things different. Thus, you will find some kids being abused in active Protestant homes, which is a shame. You’ll also find some kids who grow up relatively fine with a single mother.

However, when deciding what to encourage and what to discourage, you don’t look at anecdotal evidence. Otherwise, we should encourage smoking because a guy had an Uncle Jack who smoked until he was 90 and was healthy as a horse. You look at studies. What actually works well overall? That’s what you encourage. What generally gets messed up and leads to social problems, delinquency, etc? That’s what you want to discourage, and suggest is not an ideal situation.

Now, as to the issue of no-fault divorce itself, what MGR and the rest of the people crowing about this issue totally ignore that there are feminists who oppose No Fault Divorce. Marcia Pappas, President of the National Organization for Women in New York State spells out the reason for her opposition:

The National Organization for Women, New York State, Inc. strongly opposes no-fault divorce legislation that has been introduced in our Legislature. Opposition to unilateral no-fault divorce has been our long-standing position with strong support from the entire NOW body. We are an organization of advocates for equality for women. The majority of calls received by our chapters are from women in the midst of severe matrimonial problems.
The New York State Bar Association has stated that New York needs no-fault because New York is the only state without unilateral no-fault grounds. This is not a good enough reason, as we will explain. New York State is also the only state requiring child support until age 21. This is a shining example of protecting our children better than any other state.

The following is taken from the opposition memorandum of The Domestic Violence Task Force of the Bar Association of the City of New York: “We find the argument included in the memorandum of support of the proposed bill that no-fault should be adopted because otherwise a spouse who lacks economic resources may be forced to remain in a marriage that is not working for them to be entirely unpersuasive and not representative of our clients lives.

There are myriad reasons why spouses choose to stay in a marriage or to divorce. This is true for battered women as well as women who have never been battered. No-fault divorce takes away their options, it allows the spouse with no grounds, batterer or not, to obtain a divorce over the objections of the less powerful spouse without negotiating a divorce settlement.

Eliminating the requirement to reach a settlement will send more cases into court, thereby increasing rather than decreasing court backlog. This failure to negotiate drives the issues of child custody, child and spousal support, and property division into court where women continue to face gender bias, a fact that even the Office of Court Administration acknowledges.

Proponents of the bill argue that there is no need to “air the dirty laundry” in court. But advocates in the women’s movement know the importance of allowing the judges to hear the facts, behaviors and circumstances that led to the break-up of the marriage.

There is much need for change to the current Domestic Relations Law before we send the weaker party and the children afloat on the sea of no-fault induced poverty, as was the case in California, the first state to introduce no-fault divorce.

In addition, as reported in the Domestic Violence Task Force report previously referred to: “experience from other states shows that where grounds are unnecessary, domestic abuse [and other grounds] may be treated as tangential and therefore irrelevant to the allocation of marital resources. This has been precisely the result in some states that have adopted no-fault divorce grounds. For example, in Oregon, which has a no-fault divorce statutory structure, the Court of Appeals denied a wife’s claim for maintenance based on severe domestic violence in In re Koch, 648 P.2d406 (Or. Ct. App.1982). The court held that under Oregon’s law fault could not be considered a factor in dividing the parties’ marital property or in awarding spousal support. Physical abuse afflicted on the wife, could only be considered insofar as it rendered her unable to work, or in her possible increased need for financial support. Similarly, the Illinois court, in In re Marriage of Cihak, 92 Ill. App. 3d 1123 (Ill. App Ct. 1981) held that the [attempted] murder of the wife by the husband could not be considered and would have no effect whatsoever on the division of the parties’ marital property or any spousal support award because under “true” no fault divorce law a reward can only be based upon the financial needs of parties, regardless of fault.

In contrast, New York’s current fault provisions provide a basis for the introduction of evidence concerning domestic violence and its impact on the financial settlement of the divorce. For example, Justice Silbermann in Havel v.Islam, 273, A.D., 2d 164 (1st Dept. 2002), found that the husbands’ assault on his wife with a barbell was a critical factor in determining the allocation of marital resources. This hard won victory should not be undermined by enacting no-fault legislation that does not specifically address the role of fault in dividing marital property.”

Perhaps, the head of NOW, in one of the most liberal states in the nation, is far too conservative. Or perhaps MGR and the Idaho left need to take a step back and examine this issue with more of an open mind, rather than trying to score partisan points.