Past research has consistently linked cohabitation to a heightened risk of violence against women. However, recent evidence suggests that partner violence against women is decreasing in Canada. This raises the question of whether the decrease in prevalence of violence against women can, in part, be linked to a decrease in violence in common-law unions. To understand this trend, this study begins with a brief elaboration of the 2000 Brownridge and Halli theoretical framework and its application to current trends in cohabitation and violence in Canada. This framework analytically distinguishes risk markers of violence as either selection or relationship characteristics. An application of the theoretical framework suggests the possibility that as cohabitation becomes more common or normative in Canada, the selection bias of certain types of people predominantly entering into cohabitation may be reduced, lending them to become more like marital unions. The study then used a recently collected representative sample of Canadians to test the hypothesis that as cohabitation becomes more normative in Canada, the prevalence of violence in cohabiting unions would decrease relative to the prevalence of violence in marital unions. The study then tested the selection and relationship hypotheses derived from the framework to understand how selection and relationship factors operate in the relationship between cohabitation and violence at the turn of the millennium. Data for the study were from Statistics Canada’s cycle 13 of the General Social Survey (GSS). The results show that cohabiting women in Canada are more than twice as likely as married women to report experiencing violence over 1- and 5 year time frames. As hypothesized, cohabitating women in Canada remain at a heightened risk of partner violence relative to married women. Overall, several indications in this study suggest that if current trends continue, as cohabitation becomes normative, the selection bias will be reduced and it would be expected that the differential rates of violence in cohabiting and marital unions to converge. References