If you haven't already, you'll want to read Part I and Part II of this series.
I found the hysterical, alarmist tone of the book distasteful. You can read right there on the jacket: "A child is one hundred times more likely to be abused or killed by a stepparent than a genetic parent" and yet when you get to the research that actually "proved" that theory, they admit that the study they got that data from was flawed:
"we were never entirely happy with our initial study, for several reasons. The population-at-large estimates were questionable; the 'abuse' criteria were not necessarily consistent from state to state; and the data were inadequate for testing additional 'confound' hypotheses other than poverty." (p. 29)
So they go on to complete a similar but better-controlled (and thus less-flawed) study in Canada, which ultimately shows only a forty-times greater rate of abuse among stepfamilies (p. 30).
Um, I have a math disorder so I could be wrong, but forty times more likely is not quite equal to one hundred times more likely, is it? So why the hysterical misleading on the cover? Oh, to sell books, that's right.
In any case, I don't dispute their overall point, that stepparents are more likely to hurt stepchildren than biological parents are. That makes a lot of sense to me, rationally and logically, as distasteful as I might find the concept.
Stay tuned for Part IV tomorrow.
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