Adding assault to injury

This is a truly horrifying thing I didn’t have the slightest inkling about: a new study reports that injured women are more likely to be assaulted by a boyfriend or husband. From an editorial by Dr. Sultan al Maskuri (about a paper by Madden et al.):

“The study presents a previously unknown fact that even women with no previous intimate partner violence experience are at an increased risk for IPV during their recovery from a musculoskeletal injury.”

Doesn’t seem to matter how cynical I get: it’s never enough for this world. 😡

It’s always good to have validation in the form of hard data, but these scientists didn’t “discover” this anymore than Columbus “discovered” America. This was news to me, a man, but it certainly won’t be news to many or most women, who are already well aware of this phenomenon, which is just one of many examples of how women are mistreated by men, and how tangled up it is with health and healthcare. For instance, men also abandon sick female partners at dramatically higher rates than the other way around. Once again, we see that pain treatment and social justice are inseparable topics.