Effects of unscreened spouse violence on mediated agreements

Abstract

A sample of 149 couples was assessed for spouse violence prior to family court mediation. Standard mediation was conducted without the participants or mediators knowing who was classified as violent or nonviolent. The 65 couples who reached full agreement were grouped according to whether they had ever had a violent dispute during the relationship. Violent couples who reached agreements chose terms granting wives significantly more power in terms of control over custody and visitation than the nonviolent couples chose. This suggests that wives of violent husbands were empowered sufficiently during standard mediation to negotiate somewhat more powerful, safer terms for themselves than was necessary for wives of nonviolent husbands. Nevertheless, 57% of all agreements between violent couples specified a form of shared custody, which is thought to promote too much future contact between the violent ex-spouses. This tendency for violent spouses to choose shared custody is interpreted to mean that wives need violence screening and special protective intervention measures to successfully negotiate safer, more restrictive sole custody agreements.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.