When the first written report of spouse abuse appeared in England in the 1760s, family violence was initially perceived as a lower-class problem. Further research has discovered that domestic violence is especially prevalent among the poor. Murray Straus, a noted researcher and director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, wrote:

for the ordinary violence in family life, the pushing, slapping, shoving, there’s not much difference by socioeconomic status or race. But when you come to the more serious kinds of violence, then the lower the socioeconomic status, the higher the level of violence, by very large amounts.

Other research supports Straus’s conclusions. Gerald Hotaling and David Sugarman looked at eleven studies of domestic violence and found that in nine of the studies, a low socioeconomic status was a significant risk factor for...