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I mean this sort of thing both should not be, and is, an assumed risk in any relationship, mainly because abuse is bad. Talking about "risks" at all muddies the water, since there will always be a risk of something bad happening, and there's virtually nothing we can do about that no matter how draconian our laws.
People can (and should) more easily switch jobs than spouses, so again I have to disagree here. People are (and should be) much more psychologically harmed by switching spouses than jobs too.
This is just such a strange perspective. I don't like the phrase "victim-blaming" but it really feels like you're putting the moral responsibility on the victim here. I think the closer the relationship the more responsible you are for not mistreating your partner. Sure, in closer relationships you should try much harder to forgive the perpetrator before giving up the relationship, but that's not really relevant to how bad the perpetrator's actions are.
We have obligations towards our children which we don't have towards strangers. It is a moral obligation for the former relationship to be better than the latter. Therefore, should our treatment of our children be equal to our treatment of strangers, we are neglecting our duty to our children, whatever that treatment is. If you don't feed a stranger, that's fine. If you don't feed your children, that's abuse. If you hate a stranger, who cares. If you hate your children, they will be deeply scarred psychologically.
The same goes for a spouse. You're more morally responsible for your spouse than your employees, so you bear more moral responsibility for mistreating the former than the latter.
Let me premise by saying my feelings about a spouse are not applicable to my feelings about children. Spousal relationships are at least in theory voluntary, being someone's child is not. And children are a special class anyway because they lack other rights and capabilities.
But, speaking only about spouses: I'm not sure how much we disagree vs. how much we're asking different questions.
I think there are two axes here, the perspective we're judging morality from, and the difference between harms vs obligations.
I would agree that, from the perspective of a husband, the husband has moral duties and obligations to his wife that he doesn't have towards other people.
I think you agree with this?
I also believe that, from the perspective of society, we should more harshly sanction a husband doing harm to a stranger than to his wife. The wife made a choice to be in that situation, and has legal recourse to leave it; strangers did not and do not, generally.
I think you don't agree with this, and call victim blaming? My feeling there is that, again from the perspective of society, 'blame' is not a useful construct and we should instead be thinking about systems of harm minimization. We want to minimize the amount that society or the state interferes with voluntary marriages, giving people a free escape hatch if they want out but otherwise letting the couple negotiate the nature of that relationship mostly for themselves. We want society and the state to interfere with the relationship between employers and employees, or random people with strangers, a lot more closely stringently than that.
I think usually it's harder for the wife to leave than for a stranger to leave, though. And theoretically the wife didn't choose to be in that situation either (though, knowing relationships in real life, it does seem that the red flags exist and are usually quite obvious long beforehand).
Emotional abuse--as a stranger, walk away. As a spouse, get a divorce. Way harder. Same with almost anything else, it really is harder for the spouse to leave than a stranger, or an employee. Maaaaybe it's harder for some employees to leave their jobs than for some spouses to leave the marriage, but this is a very rare case and I think can generally be ignored.
As far as whether the government should be interfering more, idk, I was just talking about moral culpability, not legal. Legally I think we generally should treat this stuff similarly no matter the victim's relationship to the perpetrator.
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