rs) may actually increase a woman's future risk of assault, particularly when the abuser is unemployed (Schmidt & Sherman, 1993, Table 1, p. 604).
Yet Davis and Hagen (1992) suggest that two different theoretical perspectives--woman-centered and family-focused--"have dominated the analysis of wife abuse in recent years" (p. 15). In the former view, it is insinuated that "violence against wives is a major social problem that is deeply rooted in sexism and the powerlessness of women" (p. 15). In the latter, "violence against wives is one subset of the generic problem of family violence . . . (which) occurs within dysfunctional families" (p. 16). At the federal level, according to Davis and Hagen, woman-centered policies instituted under the Carter administration in the late 1970s gave way to "a family-focused policy that removed the issue of wife abuse from its social and economic roots" established during the Reagan years in the 1980s (p. 16).
In her extensive review of the clinical and empirical data on domestic violence, Carden (1994) sees t
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