Impact of the Economic Status on Domestic Violence

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Economic Status of Families and Domestic abuse
Link between Childhood and Domestic Violence
Role of Poverty in Domestic Violence
Annotated Bibliography
Works Cited

Introduction

Domestic abuse, otherwise known as spousal abuse, battering, or even domestic violence, includes expressions of certain patterns of behaviors that are abusive towards ones partner in a relationship involving marriage, cohabitation, dating, or a familial affair.

Domestic violence is acerbated in a number of ways including assaults, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, economic deprivation, domineering, and intimidation among other forms of personal oppression. However, it is also crucial to note that domestic violence is not constrained to actions entailing physical and emotional abuse.

It also implies criminal coercion, unlawful imprisonment, and kidnapping. The main reason why domestic violence is acerbated towards a person is principally to acquire a total control of the person. To achieve this goal, abusers deploy tactics of instilling fear, shame, and guilt coupled with intimidation to wear down their targets physically and emotionally.

One of the fundamental characteristics of domestic violence is that it does not discriminate various people in the society. It occurs among heterosexual partners, homosexual partners, and among people of varying ages, economic status, and even across all ethnic backgrounds.

While women in majority of the situations are found to be the major victims of domestic violence, men also are abused domestically especially emotionally and verbally while not negating physically in some instances.

Nevertheless, whatever the source of domestic violence, be it from a woman, a teenager, or a man, the behavior is very unacceptable within a society. Unfortunately, domestic violence is still prevalent among various societies.

From this perspective, from a broad approach, the paper finds out if the economical status of families may be connected to domestic violence.

It also seeks to investigate why, and if ones, childhood may be linked to domestic violence. On the other hand, from an operational approach, the paper scrutinizes how, and if, poverty plays a role in domestic abuse.

Economic Status of Families and Domestic abuse

Among the many forms of domestic abuse, economic abuse is one of the ways of enabling one person to domineer against another person. It takes place whenever intimate persons take control over other persons to limit their accessibility to economic resources.

Essentially, the abusing partners deploy strategies for making sure that their partners have limited accessibility to economic resources. By doing this, the abused partner is incapacitated from having the ability to support him/herself financially.

The aftermath is to ensure that the victim is fully dependent on the perpetrator economically in terms of obtaining education, finding employment, maintaining or advancing their careers, and acquiring assets (Williams 161).

Alternatively, the abused partner may be given some tolerances by the perpetrator who closely supervises how he or she expends the finances and or may also use the victims financial resources without being accorded consent with the chief intent of creating financial debts on the part of the victim (Krishnan 137).

The perpetrator may also make sure that all the savings belonging to the victims are used in totality so that the victim has limited accessibility to financial resources.

From the dimension of economic domestic abuse, risks for domestic violence may result from a change of economic status of either spouse. The argument here is that there exists a relationship between economic status of family and domestic violence.

For instance, Krishnan et al. argue that changes in spousal economic status are associated with subsequent changes in violence risks (139). Basing their study on the Indian context, the authors claim that women increase their risks of being subjected to domestic violence by 80 percent when their economic status changes from unemployment to employment.

On the other hand, when men lose their jobs, they are 1.7 times likely to encounter domestic violence perpetrated by their wives (Krishnan et al. 141). In a study conducted in Malaysia by Awang and Hariharan, it is found out that the income status of survivors of domestic violence is a key determinant of domestic violence (459).

Therefore, economic factors are critical in examining the factors that may create prevalence of domestic violence among families in various societies. Arguably, the central concern of this argument is that domestic violence may be attributed to economic factors.

However, it is also arguable that domestic violence may lead to deterioration of the parties involved in the violence economically. Precisely, until recently, it was unclear whether victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking were eligible for unemployment insurance if they were fired or forced to quit their jobs because of the violence (Runge 16).

Consequently, in the states where the law has not been amended to give people opportunities to benefit from unemployment benefits when such people are laid off because of reasons related to domestic violence, battering acts as a means of worsening the economic status of the victims.

Research on the impacts of domestic violence on the ability of women to work such as the one conducted by Audra and Shannon shows that women who are abused have lesser probabilities of choosing to work than women who have not experienced domestic violence (1119).

This implies that battering influences the capacity of women to look for means of bettering their economic status. This has the impacts of making them even more dependent on the perpetrators of domestic violence. In this context, economic independency is a subtle mechanism of reducing the risk of exposure to domestic violence among women.

On the other hand, women who suffer divorce due to domestic violence exhibit an unemployment rate of 20% below that of non abused divorced women (Audra and Shannon 1120). From these findings, it sounds subtle to argue that working women have lesser probabilities of experiencing domestic violence.

Therefore, the hiked economic status for women resulting from the state of being employed is a key determiner of their exposure to domestic violence.

This argument is amplified by Audra and Shannons findings, &out of the sample of women that were abused in the past, 9.4% of women who are currently not working are abused whereas only 8.9% (3.48% out of 39.2% married women abused in the past) of women who are currently working are abused (1120).

The findings indicate that unemployment among women may result to a cycle of exposure to domestic violence. This follows because, the more women are exposed to domestic violence and the more likely they refrain from looking for employment, the higher the probability of being abused.

Since employment is directly correlated with the economic status of individual, the argument provides substantive grounds to infer that a relationship exists between domestic violence and economic status of families.

Link between Childhood and Domestic Violence

Numerous scholars have investigated the impacts of peoples exposure on domestic violence on childhood based on the capacity of such people to result into abusing their partners in adulthood.

For instance, Audra and Shannon argue that men who have experienced domestic abuse during their childhood have higher chances of abusing their wives (1119). This experience comes from seeing their fathers abuse their mothers. Nevertheless, employment status also plays central roles in making men abuse their wives.

For instance, Audra and Shannon argue, abusive husbands are also more likely to have experienced unemployment in the past 12 months and are much less likely to have a university education than non abusive spouse (1119).

Education is one of the ways of ensuring that societies are fully aware of the rights of all individuals including the right for not being abused domestically. However, based on the findings of Audra and Shannon, childhood experiences in battering seems like a force that is so strong that it out powers educational knowledge on battering.

The contribution of the experiences of children rendering them resolve to intimate partner violence is also noted by Mbilinyi et al. who claim that cognition of domestic violence in childhood has the ability to make people normalize domestic violence in adulthood (171).

Amid the above claim, it is also important to consider other counterarguments for the link between childhood exposure to domestic violence and their likelihoods of resulting to engaging in violence activities themselves in adulthood.

In this dimension, several scholars encounter mixed findings on the link particularly on incorporation of dimensions such as utilization of contextual barriers in their studies. Such barriers include social economic status and community violence.

Nevertheless, Mbilinyi et al. maintain that childhood domestic violence is an indicator and a factor that may help in predicting indulgence in adulthood domestic violence (183).

During perpetration of domestic violence acts, children are always caught in between the warring parties. Consequently, they develop certain psychological and behavioral attitudes towards either party. Sometimes, in this interaction process, children end up being physically abused once they intervene in defense of the weaker party.

Murrell et al. support this line of argument by further informing, Many women are abused by intimate partners, millions of children witness such acts, and many of these children are physically abused (523). Many of such children possess higher chances of portraying violent behaviors during their adulthood.

Hence, exposures to domestic violence in the family of origin may act as a subsequent factor that may result to the victimization of ones partner. Kerley et al. reinforce this argument by claiming, this relationship holds not only for direct exposure (experiencing violence), but also for indirect exposure (witnessing violence against a parent or sibling) (337).

Arguably, peoples indulgence in domestic violence following exposure to environments dominated by perpetration of battering may be seen as being caused by intergenerational transmission of battering behavior.

However, it is critical to note that there is scholarly evidence that the issue of children witnessing or experiencing violent acts being perpetrated to one of their parents by the other parent has probabilities of making such children practice similar behaviors towards their partners later in adulthood.

However, the extent to which their violent acts measures up to the threshold of their experiences remains unclear. Therefore, it remains questionable whether other factors such as social economic status serve to increase the abusive behaviors experienced during childhood or these factors act as independent factors that lead to the portrayal of the abusive behaviors.

Role of Poverty in Domestic Violence

Poverty and battering are essentially interwoven. This implies that any endeavor to run away from an abusive relationship may expose the victim to some economic challenges, which are often too hard to accept as the status quo.

Precisely, any attempt to vacate from one place to another in the quest to escape domestic violence would imply losing housing, jobs, accessibility to ones partner income, and childcare while also not negating quality health care.

This argument is amplified Evans who argues that, in Australia, there continues to be a higher prevalence of domestic violence, and more severe physical injury sustained as a result of domestic violence among population groups living with poverty (36).

In this perspective, where one partner is not economically endowed, chances are that, for her or him to continue with normal life economically, he or she needs to endure domestic violence. The severity of poverty in resulting to exaggeration of acerbating violent acts is exemplified by legislation and other state policies.

This follows because the policies and the legislation on domestic violence only provide mechanisms of isolation of the victim from the perpetrator without providing for or guaranteeing long-term financial security to the victim.

On the other hand, anti-poverty schemes primarily focus on hiking the accessibility to economic resources without paying attention to and inculcating measures to ensure that an abusive partner does not harm the job of the victim.

Poverty exposes women who are battered to minimal options. For those women who have low incomes, they have a high probability of being subjected to discrimination, which has the overall results of reducing their financial security and their safety.

For example, some property owners may shun away from renting their houses to women whose rents have been subsidized by their governments. Consequently, it sounds plausible to argue that women who live in low-income neighborhoods are likely to have low economic opportunities and accessibility to employment.

Hence, they are more likely to experience battering without escaping away from it. Directly congruent with this argument, Williams further argues that women with low incomes may be compelled to seek emergency housing whether they reside in domestic violence or homeless shelters (143).

Thus, poverty is critical in making victims of domestic violence to continue persevering maltreatments acerbated by their partners. Mogford supports this argument by further arguing, The effects of a womans status on her likelihood of experiencing abuse depend on the social realm within which status operates (835).

Additionally, the author confirms the prior arguments that poverty and domestic violence are intertwined especially in the context of rural areas. Arguably, poverty results to battering due to increased relationship and familial stresses, which have the utmost consequences of posing a limitation to the victims capacity to depart from an abusive partner.

For many demographic social groups, nonmetropolitan poverty is normally higher than metropolitan poverty. This truncates into making the survivors of domestic violence living in rural areas have limited means of transportation.

Consequently, this makes them unable to free from abusive partners to seek refuge in their friends and or families homes located far away from their rural dwellings. The argument here is that poverty leads to making the victims of domestic abuse persevere domestic violence acts perpetrated to them by their partners.

Annotated Bibliography

Audra, Bowlus, and Shannon Seitz. Domestic Violence, Employment, and Divorce. International Economic Review.

The article argues that women are normally caught in between a cycle of domestic violence akin to factors related to the likelihoods of seeking employment having priory experienced domestic violence acerbated to them by their husbands.

Additionally, a model for domestic violence is approximated with the objective of determining which party in marriage abuses the other one coupled with determining the manner in which women respond to abuses via divorce and unemployment.

It is asserted, Employment before the occurrence of abuse is a significant deterrent (Audra, and Shannon 1113). Additionally, the articles claim that mens indulgence in domestic abuse may be predicted by their encounters of domestic abuse in childhood.

Awang, Halimah, and Sharon Hariharan. Determinants of Domestic Violence: Evidence from Malaysia. Journal of Family Violence.

This article scrutinizes the factors that may determine the occurrence of domestic violence in Malaysian context. Its analysis restricts itself to impacts of marital capital and demographic factors on households and the manner in which these factors relate with domestic violence.

In making its inferences, the study utilized empirical evidence garnered from case files of Malaysian womens aid organization. The results indicate that three factors determine domestic violence. These are income status, number of children, and age of the perpetrator.

Evans, Susan. Beyond Gender: Class, Poverty and Domestic Violence. Australian Social Work.

Evans argues that it is crucial to understand clearly the relationship that exists between poverty as a form of marginalization and domestic violence. In the Australasian context, the author further suggests that poverty is a central contributor for continued perseverance for people to live with abusive partners.

Therefore, the article proposes that necessary efforts for preventing domestic violence needs to encompass the manner in which poverty interlocks with class (economic class) and other factors such as social identities that define the experiences of people in domestic abuses.

Kerley, Kent, et al. Exposure to Family Violence in Childhood and Intimate Partner Perpetration or Victimization in Adulthood: Exploring Intergenerational Transmission in Urban Thailand. Journal of Family Violence.

The article uses a sample size of 816 Bangkok women who are married to carry out an analysis of the impacts of their exposure on domestic violence on their capacity to perpetrate victimization and domestic violence on their partners in adulthood.

In the words of the authors, their results indicated, there are indeed long-term and significant effects of childhood exposure to family violence on the likelihood of Thai womens psychological and physical intimate partner perpetration (Kerley et al. 337). More importantly, the article claims that there is a direct correlation between childhood exposures to domestic violence and adult battering.

Krishnan, Suneeta, et al. Do changes in spousal employment status lead to domestic violence? Insights from a prospective study in Bangalore, India. Social Science & Medicine.

The authors of this article carried out study on the prevalence of domestic violence on changes in employment status of families in India. The study was conducted between 2005 and 2006. It used data generated from 744 married women belonging to the age group of 16 to 25 years.

The study used regression models to examine the prospective association between womens employment status, their perceptions of their husbands employment stability, and domestic violence (Krishnan et al 136).

Results indicated that womens chances of encountering domestic violence increased by 80 percent when their employment status changed from unemployment to unemployment. On the other hand, for the control group (men), chances of encountering domestic violence increase by 1.7 times when their status changed from employed to unemployed.

Mbilinyi, Lyungai, et al. Childhood Domestic Violence Exposure among a Community Sample of Adult Perpetrators: What Mediates the Connection? Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma.

This article scrutinizes the existing evidence on the association of domestic violence experiences in childhood with intimate partner violence or simply domestic violence in adulthood. In the study, 124 male adjudicated perpetrators of domestic violence who were non-treatment seeking were examined. The results evidenced that exposure to childhood violence leads to the normalization of IPV.

Mogford, Elizabeth. When Status Hurts: Dimensions of Womens Status and Domestic Abuse in Rural Northern India. Violence against Women.

In this article, a multiple regression analysis is conducted to determine the correlation between domestic abuse and status of women in a rural dwelling (Uttar) in India. The data used is obtained from national family health survey, which was conducted between 1998 to 1999.

The results show, the effects of a womans status on her likelihood of experiencing abuse depend on the social realm within which status operates (Mogford 835). Here, status is a measure of the perception of an individual economic status.

Murrell, Amy, et al. Characteristics of Domestic Violence Offenders: Associations with Childhood Exposure to Violence. Journal of Family Violence.

The authors of the article studied 1099 male adults who had differing extents of exposure to violent experiences in childhood domestically. The chief aim of the research was to examine differences in generality, frequency, and severity of violent offenses, nonviolent criminal behavior, and psychopathology within a battering population (Murrell et al. 523).

The results indicate that men who had experiences of witnessing domestic violence in their childhood engaged more frequently in battering. Additionally, males who were abused in their childhood were also likely to abuse their children while also likely to participate in general violence in adulthood.

Runge, Robin. The Legal Response to the Employment Needs of Domestic Violence Victims: An Update. Human Rights.

This article discusses various legal provisions relating to the needs of people experiencing battering. Other concerns that are given central consideration are the workers compensation when they leave work due to family violence reasons and insurance benefits accorded to persons rendered unemployed due to domestic violence.

The article holds that where these benefits are denied, persons afflicted by domestic violence may end up getting impaired economically by subjection into violent acts by their partners.

Williams, Jean. Domestic Violence and Poverty: The Narratives of Homeless Women. A Journal of Women Studies.

This article investigates the possible factors that may help in explaining the status of women who are homeless and their capacity to experience domestic violence. A particular emphasis is paid to scarcity of low-cost housing as a key contributor for women to continue persevering domestic violence.

This sway, the article establishes a magnificent connection between homelessness and experience of domestic violence among Arizona women.

The article claims, Women interviewed emphasize the impact of divorce, battering, and other family disruptions in combination with economic insecurity and primary responsibility for their children on their paths to homelessness (Williams 143). Therefore, perception of financial insecurity impaired by poverty makes women tolerate maltreatment.

Works Cited

Audra, Bowlus, and Shannon Seitz. Domestic Violence, Employment, and Divorce. International Economic Review, vol. 47, no. 4, 2006, pp. 1113-1149.

Awang, Halimah, and Sharon Hariharan. Determinants of Domestic Violence: Evidence from Malaysia. Journal of Family Violence, vol. 26, no. 6, 2011, pp. 459-464.

Evans, Susan. Beyond Gender: Class, Poverty and Domestic Violence. Australian Social Work, vol. 58, no. 1, 2005, pp. 36-43.

Krishnan, Suneeta, et al. Do changes in spousal employment status lead to domestic violence? Insights from a prospective study in Bangalore, India. Social Science & Medicine, vol. 70, no. 1, 2010, pp. 136-143.

Mbilinyi, Lyungai, et al. Childhood Domestic Violence Exposure among a Community Sample of Adult Perpetrators: What Mediates the Connection? Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, vol. 21, no. 2, 2012, pp. 171-187.

Mogford, Elizabeth. When Status Hurts: Dimensions of Womens Status and Domestic Abuse in Rural Northern India. Violence against Women, vol. 17, no. 7, 2011, pp. 835-857.

Murrell, Amy, et al. Characteristics of Domestic Violence Offenders: Associations with Childhood Exposure to Violence. Journal of Family Violence, vol. 22, no. 7, 2007, pp. 523-532.

Runge, Robin. The Legal Response to the Employment Needs of Domestic Violence Victims: An Update. Human Rights, vol. 37, no. 3, 2010, pp. 13-23.

Williams, Jean. Domestic Violence and Poverty: The Narratives of Homeless Women. A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 1998, pp. 143-165.

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