As The New York Times reported on February 21, Fox had been besieged by questions about Rockwell's background and the propriety of having a woman agree to marry a man she had seen for about a minute before the ceremony. Despite the ongoing heated and confusing statistical war about the prevalence of abuse, even conservative estimates maintain that between 10 and 15 percent of women experience relatively serious violence in an intimate relationship over the course of their lifetimes. But it does mean that abusive men are out there in sufficient numbers that Fox should have recognized the necessity to screen them out of its groom pool. Perhaps Fox producers instead believed that while abusers are common enough, they are unlikely to show up among white multimillionaires. This represents another illusion that many still cling to, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Domestic abuse crosses all economic, class, racial, and ethnic lines.
There is room for argument that the incidence may be greater in subcommunities where cultural tolerance for male dominance is still more entrenched, or where social stressors like poverty and unemployment add further pressures to the already charged arena of intimate relationships. It, too, raises interesting questions. We use that caution only when someone has not yet proved his or her case in a court of competent jurisdiction. This report left open the possibility of an understandably distraught Rockwell voicing a one-time threat devoid of any real consequence. The Globe did little better, commenting only that the woman had alleged in court documents that Rockwell had assaulted and threatened her.