Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the current state of wife abuse in Seosan and the relationships between wife abuse and the related variables. A total of 132 couples took part in this study. All couples live in Seosan city, range in age from their 20s to 50s and each couple has at least one child. Stratification sampling method was used to select the couples. They were asked to complete self-report questionnaires. Subjects completed a Korean version of the self- esteem scale, marital conflict scale, communication style scale, family history of violence scale, alcohol dringking, and wife abuse scale. In order to examine the current state of wife abuse, such as, frequency, mean, standard deviation and paired t-test, t-test were calculated and analyzed. Next, to identify differences in wife abuse between the upper group and the lower group, t-test was peformed. Finally, to investigate the relative influences of independent variables upon wife-abuse, multiple regression analysis was peformed. All these analyses were conducted using SPSS 10.0 program. The results were as follows; 1) In terms of the current state of wife abuse, there are three main observations. First, $23\%$ of respondents answered that they had beat their spouse or been beaten by their spouse before and after their marriage. Second, compared with physical violence($2{\~}16\%$), other types of violence such as verbal($7{\~}4\%$), emotional($41{\~}64\%$), economical($3{\~}29\%$) and sexual violence($4{\~}38\%$) were reported to occur more often in these relationships. Third, following the abuse most wives tend to tolerate the situation instead of taking an active action like reporting the abuse to police. 2) As for the husbands, subjects that drank a high level of alcohol, blaming and super-reasonable communication style, and family history of violence reported more frequent cases of wife abuse. As for the wives, subjects with high levels of self-esteem, irrelevant communication style, marital conflict, and family history of violence reported having more cases of that abuse. 3) In the case of husbands, alcohol, communication style and family history of violence explained $40\%$ of wife abuse. In the case of wives, marital conflict and family history of violence explained $77\%$ of their experiences with abuse. This study makes the contribution to aims to develop education programs and family therapy relevant to prevent wife abuse and to reconsider the existing laws governing domestic violence in Korea.