UNITED STATES
Slate
By Amanda Marcotte
The routine conservative exhortations to single women to hurry up and get married already became downright irresponsible on Tuesday with W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson’s piece in the Washington Post titled “One way to end violence against women? Stop taking lovers and get married.” It’s not a well-argued essay (clearly) but kudos to Wilcox and Wilson for managing both to blame women for male violence and guilt-trip them for not marrying the first man they meet with a pulse. If only they had worked in a dig about cats.
The headline is not misleading: The piece actually argues that marriage is the best prevention against violence for women. “The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father,” they write. Of course, while playing the game of manipulating statistics, they pointedly ignore the fact that domestic violence rates have been falling at the same time marriage rates are falling. I guess correlation only equals causation if it serves the right cause.
While Wilcox and Wilson tacitly admit that the correlation between marriage and lower rates of violence might be because “women in healthy, safe relationships are more likely to select into marriage,” most of the piece is an attempt to convince women that it’s the presence of a wedding ring itself that reduces violence more than the likelier story, which is that abusive relationships often fall apart before the marriage begins.
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