Citation

Campbell KM. Crime Prev. Community Safety 2001; 3(2): 19-42.

Affiliation

Criminology Department, University of Ottawa, 25 University, Ontario, Canada

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group -- Palgrave-Macmillan)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Wife assault has proven elusive to attempts to measure its actual incidence. Reliance on police statistics, official records and clinical data appears to present only part of the picture. Societal taboos serve to deter people from calling attention to this behavior, and therefore formal methods of compiling data are somewhat flawed. Surveys appear to provide a more complete portrayal of the incidence of wife assault, in part due to their anonymity and direct nature. Three different types of surveys are critically examined and efforts made to glean rates of severe, recurrent wife assault from each. While surveys may provide more information on this behavior, various factors inherent to the design of the surveys contribute to their own inaccuracies.