Question

Should counselors who work with families to assess each and every family for domestic violence? 

Answer 1

Domestic violence in heterosexual relationships is a serious issue, with 20% of women reporting they have been assaulted by their partners, and this is true among married adult women as well as dating college women (IPARV, 2002). Stats are that 3 in 10 couples walking the street have had a violent episode at some point in the relationship, but 1 in 2 couples in your office have had an incident of violence. Worse, Williamson (2000) reports that two-thirds of couples seeking therapy did not report domestic violenceuntil asked. They also found that 40% to 75% of the children of abusers, in addition to witnessing parental abuse, suffer child abuse themselves. McDonald et al. (2006) found the chances of couple violence are greater when there are children in the home, and estimated that 15.5 million children live in families experiencing violence.

Holtzworth-Munroe and colleagues cite Quigley as finding that 76% of violent first-year husbands carried this violence into the second or third year of the marriage, with higher carryover for more severe violence. McDonald et al. (2006) found that in their in-home interviews with over 1,600 cohabitating and married couples obtained through probability sampling across the US, 21% reported an act of violence in the last year against one of the partners, with 14% of the men and 18% of the women in the sample initiating some violence against their partner.

Therapists often don't know what to do. Harway et al (1997) found 40% of clinicians did not recognize signs of violence in a vignette, and another 15% recognized it but did not suggest any intervention to deal with it. Cursing and name calling alone do not predict violence, as about 77% of nonclinical couples do this, as do 93% of clinical couples. Holtzworth-Munroe and colleagues recommend using a standard instrument, like the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS or CTS2) to assess violence.