Domestic Violence in Affluent Families Versus Impoverished Families OP-ED
Griffin Rustia
There’s is no question that domestic violence is abundant in our world regardless of income and should be addressed with more respect and concern. However, our society wants to put statistics on things to make explaining them easier. Domestic violence shouldn’t be compared between families and should be looked at as a single issue with no difference between survivors as we are all people with many different backgrounds and accessibilities. however, there are a lot of studies explaining the statistics of domestic violence within affluent families and impoverished families. I would argue this is in order to explain why there are different numbers of reported cases between those two groups. This is an important statistic in some cases but in face of the entire issue it doesn’t matter, and the only unreported domestic violence statistic should be the percent of cases reported to authorities versus the percent reported to a third party like a case study who haven’t reported their case to the police and find a way for more men and women to feel comfortable reporting their case regardless of social class. On one hand, knowing the statistics of the number of cases reported between impoverished households and affluent ones can help us try to understand the issues that reporting these cases can cause to some families versus others, but these issues seem to overlap. For example, one issue brought up in the article “Silence Suffering, And Abuse In Affluent Communities” by Cate Holahan is that individuals in a more wealthy family are less likely to report to authorities because of their concern of career impacts on police records. This is a fair point; however, this can also be the same for individuals reporting from low-income families as well. This argument almost feels like she implies that lower-income individuals report to authorities more because they aren’t worried about the police records affecting their career. Families all over the country will rather avoid a police record with their name on it if it impacts their career. Better reasoning for the difference in the reported case was brought up in an article titled “Poverty, Violence, and Health: The Impact of Domestic Violence During Pregnancy on Newborn Health” by Anna Aizer lower-income families with reported domestic violence cases statistically reported more life-threatening instances of physical violence than domestic abuse cases reported from higher-income families likely due to the strain of living conditions within said families. This would make us assume a more likely reason for the greater number of reports because the survivors face more violent acts that in turn must result in legal action taken. Another reasoning brought up in the article by Cate Holohan is that higher-income individual doesn’t report cases due to fear of losing their financial support variable in that family. Again, this can be said for lower-income families as well, a lot of these families of lower-income rely solely on one partner for financial support and are afraid to lose that support if and or when that partner gets arrested.
The domestic violence issue as a whole goes underreported not only by families with $7500 or greater yearly income. Statistically, there are less reported cases reported in families within that tax bracket so one can assume a lot of higher-income family violence cases go unreported. but lower-income families have a lot of cases that go unreported also meaning we can assume that high-income domestic violence doesn’t report more often than lower when we don’t know the number of cases as a whole that go unreported. With this, I think resources should be allocated to identify families with abusers and provide the survivors with insurance that allow them, and their children to be supported as they get out of the relationship and protected from their name being placed on a permanent record that may jeopardize their standing within a career or social standing.
Sources
https://www.purdue.edu/hhs/hdfs/fii/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/s_mifis04c05.pdf
https://crimereads.com/silence-suffering-and-abuse-in-affluent-communities/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4019993/