Alcohol Abuse, Women, and Domestic Violence (Part 4)

To the shame of our society statistics from as early as 2003 were revealed by the U.S. Bureauof Justice reporting that in 2001, 588,490 non-fatal assaults were perpetrated against womenby their current or former husband, or partner1These women were beaten by the very men theybelieved in and loved. As early as 1996, a study by the American Psychological Association(APA) announced that one out of every three women in America will experience at least onephysical assault by their partner during adulthood, and 92% of American women surveyedin 2003 ranked domestic violence and sexual assault as amongst their major concerns.2Thehealth-related costs of what has come be called, ‘Intimate Partner Violence’ (IPV) exceeded 5.8Billion U.S. dollars a year. Of this total, nearly 4.1 billion U.S. dollars represented the costs fordirect medical and mental healthcare, with productivity losses estimated to be 1.8 billion USdollars.3It is estimated that approximately 50% of all incidents of domestic violence are dueto alcohol abuse, and in a survey of in excess of 2000 American couples, the rate of IPV was15 times higher in households where the husbands were often intoxicated, as opposed to thosehusbands who were never drunk.4The World Health Organization (WHO) describes the levelsof violence experienced by the world’s women as ‘a global public health problem of epidemicproportions, requiring urgent action’. We were in the midst of a crisis of injustice and inequitythen, and we still are as far as domestic violence is concerned. As long as we fail to resolve theproblem of alcohol abuse, we will have inadvertently preserved the ineluctability of drunkenassaults on the women they call their wives or intimate partners, while pretending the spuriousposture of a veritable partner of his loving wife. The time has truly come to extirpate the violentassaults of men who make their intimate partners suffer the terror of their alcoholic rage.