> mistreating their wives and children

...and husbands. Not all people who drink alcohol to excess are male.

Statistically it is far more men than women; and since this account is from an anecdotal point of view, it’s entirely possible female abuse of alcohol wasn’t witnessed.

Source on the statistics? I'm curious.

The honest statistics show that it’s about 50/50 male and female initiated violence. See Murray Strauss’s 30 Years Denying the Evidence.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Ye...

It’s just that some groups find the honest research inconvenient so they try, largely successfully, to suppress it. The suppression behavior on certain sides of issues has been discussed by plenty of reputable people, including Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate.

These days in order to believe the results of any research paper I need to read it for myself with an incredibly skeptical eye for what is being left out, how questions were asked, etc.

Most published research results are false, so it's not a good idea to believe individual papers whether or not they appear to be correct. It's not the purpose of publishing them either.

Basically why my Mom's side of the family barely drinks, myself included. My great grandfather was a drunken gambler who managed to drive the family into poverty to the point the only things the family owned were two chairs.

A version of this caused my grandfather and father to never touch the stuff - and acted like it was kryptonite when I grew up.