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

Abstract

To the shame of our society statistics from as early as 2003 were revealed by the U.S. Bureau 
of Justice reporting that in 2001, 588,490 non-fatal assaults were perpetrated against women 
by their current or former husband, or partner1 These women were beaten by the very men they 
believed 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 one 
physical assault by their partner during adulthood, and 92% of American women surveyed 
in 2003 ranked domestic violence and sexual assault as amongst their major concerns.2 The 
health-related costs of what has come be called, ‘Intimate Partner Violence’ (IPV) exceeded 5.8 
Billion U.S. dollars a year. Of this total, nearly 4.1 billion U.S. dollars represented the costs for 
direct medical and mental healthcare, with productivity losses estimated to be 1.8 billion US 
dollars.3 It is estimated that approximately 50% of all incidents of domestic violence are due 
to alcohol abuse, and in a survey of in excess of 2000 American couples, the rate of IPV was 
15 times higher in households where the husbands were often intoxicated, as opposed to those 
husbands who were never drunk.4 The World Health Organization (WHO) describes the levels 
of violence experienced by the world’s women as ‘a global public health problem of epidemic 
proportions, requiring urgent action’. We were in the midst of a crisis of injustice and inequity 
then, and we still are as far as domestic violence is concerned. As long as we fail to resolve the 
problem of alcohol abuse, we will have inadvertently preserved the ineluctability of drunken 
assaults on the women they call their wives or intimate partners, while pretending the spurious 
posture of a veritable partner of his loving wife. The time has truly come to extirpate the violent 
assaults of men who make their intimate partners suffer the terror of their alcoholic rage