W. Bradford Wilcox, Asshole of the Day for June 10, 2014
Yesterday I mentioned with regards to George Will claiming that most women who claim to be raped are liars is that if you don't want to do something about a problem, the first step is to pretend it's not widespread. Well, today we have an op-ed at the Washington Post that doesn't deny the problem, but shifts the blame to avoid trying to solve the problem.
Under the headline One way to end violence against women? Married dads. we are treated to a series of statistics that discuss the violence done to women (a reaction to the #YesAllWomen campaign), but then don't suggest we do anything to change the behavior of men who commit violent acts, but instead suggest the solution is simple-- women should get married.
Yes, you heard right-- the blame for violence is on women who aren't married, and the solution then is get married. If this sounds both stupid and familiar, then it's because it resembles how women are counseled to take steps to avoid rape, but men aren't counseled to not rape.
But there's all these charts and numbers, so let's see why they don't work. The post starts by saying
Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers.
Women are also safer in married homes. As the figure above (derived from a recent Department of Justice study) indicates, married women are the least likely to be victimized by an intimate partner. They are also less likely to be the victims of violent crime in general.
Yes, but of course one reason that a woman might not marry someone is because he's violent.
This statement also incorrectly assumes all couples are the same-- meaning that an unmarried couple is just unmarried but otherwise just as healthy. There are reasons couples don't make it. The reasons couples fail are many, but making them get married is unlikely to solve those problems, and does anyone really believe that a man who beats women will suddenly presto-changeo! stop beating women because he has a wife? I sure don't.
And there's other reasons why a married woman might be safer-- like that married women are more likely to be around a man, which might deter an attacker. But do we want a society where women are dependent on men for protection? A society where we focus less on stopping the bad men who violently attack women and instead spend more effort limiting the independence of women? I sure don't.
And another reason why a married woman might be safer is that women in married homes are likely to be home on the couch watching TV with their spouse and not out at night. But until they find a good mate, being out meeting people is essential. Unless you are saying that arranged marriages is the solution, because those stats could easily justify that. And do we want to return to arranged marriages? I sure don't.
It's important to note that all of these stats are not a random sample. It's not like we randomly put half of adult women into marriage and the other half were prevented from marriage and then observed the outcomes. That would be significant (and also crazy, but it would at least allow you to draw conclusions from the data that don't include sampling bias). And the non-randomness is even noted:
For women, part of the story is about what social scientists call a “selection effect,” namely, women in healthy, safe relationships are more likely to select into marriage, and women in unhealthy, unsafe relationships often lack the power to demand marriage or the desire to marry. Of course, women in high conflict marriages are more likely to select into divorce.
But marriage also seems to cause men to behave better. That’s because men tend to settle down after they marry, to be more attentive to the expectations of friends and kin, to be more faithful, and to be more committed to their partners—factors that minimize the risk of violence. What’s more: women who are married are more likely to live in safer neighborhoods, to have a partner who is watching out for their physical safety, and—for obvious reasons—to spend less time in settings that increase their risk of rape, robbery, and assaults.
But after noting that it's not random, they conclude "marriage also seems to cause men to behave better". If you believe in selection, then that wouldn't suggest it makes them behave better-- it suggests that women chose a spouse who behaves better in the first place. And if you believe women are rational, then you'd tend to think that they choose men who behave better in the first place, or at least men who they think they can train to improve better, and that they would reject for marriage men who don't behave and don't seem trainable. That makes more sense to me than the argument that marriage makes men stop beating women, which is what they suggest.
And let's talk about one big reason for women not marrying a man, even if they aren't violent, and that is that the man doesn't have a good paying job. And it's not that women necessarily have to discriminate against poor men, but many men were raised with the expectation that they are the provider and that they don't have to be primarily responsible for their share of household duties and child-rearing. If a man does not have the means to support the family and doesn't plan on doing his share in the house and with the children, then how good a spouse and parent is he really? Why would someone marry him? I wouldn't. So until there are better jobs, you'd expect that there'd be fewer marriages. The average age at first marriage always goes up during recessions, for both men and women. Why aren't we talking about that? Is it because then you can't blame single women for their fate? Or because telling people to just get married is easier than trying to fix the problem of declining job prospects for the bottom half?
And then after we've talked about violence towards women that they happens to them personally, then we get to the protection of children:
children are more likely to be abused when they do not live in a home with their married father. What’s more: girls and boys are significantly more likely to be abused when they are living in a cohabiting household with an unrelated adult—usually their mother’s boyfriend
Notice anything missing here? There's no mention of the father's responsibility. Why is he no longer in the home? Is he in prison? On drugs? Violent himself? None of that is considered. The comparison is to the perfect 2-parent home, not to the choices that may really be faced here. Rather than seeing a single mother trying to do the best she can and sometimes failing, it's that this woman has let a violent man into her house. Here's what a lot of people got by reading that paragraph:
He is blaming single moms for the sexual abuse of girls
— Baeminist (@FeministaJones) June 10, 2014
Why so uncurious about the reasons that mother is not married to the father? Staying with a bad man-- who might also be abusive-- does not prevent violence to your children; it only prevents violence from the boyfriend.
This whole article is a traditional exercise in victim-blaming dressed up in charts and stats. So, for blaming single women for the violence done to them and single mothers for violence done to their children, Bradford Wilcox is the Asshole of the Day.
NOTE: Robin Fretwell Wilson was also credited on the article, but we only award to a single person, not a group. Since she was named second and Wilcox is the director of the National Marriage Project and clearly has an agenda to push, we gave Wilcox the award.
It is Bradford Wilcox's first time as Asshole of the Day.
