|
In Reply to: Re: Paradox is a good word for this topic posted by chain breaker on July 29, 2005 at 10:47:57:
Yes, violence occurs in every strata of society, but the research I've seen on violence & trauma strongly suggests that it is not an equal opportunity condition, and that the poor are significantly over-represented in the population of people who experience domestic and community violence.
Calling the local DV shelter and asking for a service population profile is not the way I was taught to do epidemiology. I do it by going into the census databases that report income distribution by geographic locale and then into the criminal justice databases that report number of violent crimes/crime reports by census tract and running a regression on the dependent variable, i.e., census tract as a proxy for poverty. Guess what? There is a statistically significant correlation between census tracts where median income is below the federal poverty threshold and the number of DV calls that police handle in a given time-span.
The research on the epidemiology of child sexual abuse is still coming in, but when we look at child maltreatment in terms of physical abuse and neglect, it is overwhelmingly correlated with poverty. How do I know? Because I do this type of analysis for a living. What I know about the prevalance of sexual abuse in the generation population from my own research is that it is highly correlated with transiency, i.e., frequent housing relocations. Fits right into the Family lifestyle, doesn't it?
