The dramatic social media response to the UC-Santa Barbara shooting, captured by the hashtag #YesAllWomen, underlined an important and unpleasant truth: across the United States, millions of girls and women have been abused, assaulted, or raped by men, and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack. As Sarah Kliff wrote in Vox: a “national survey of American women found that a slight majority (51.9 percent) reported experiencing physical violence at some point in their life.”
This social media outpouring makes it clear that some men pose a real threat to the physical and psychic welfare of women and girls. But obscured in the public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers. The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.