It's been a while since I did all this stuff.
Started writing a site on it and the way "factoids" mutate.
http://dvresearch.tripod.com/id21.htm1 out of every 4 American women (26%) report that they have been physically abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives.
That isn't one of the classic lies. It may well be true for a suitable definition of "physically abused". For such a definition its likely men would be more likely to have been physically abused by their spouse, and certainly far more likely to have been physically abused by any means. It sounds like a NVAW (National Violence Against Women) statistic. Here's the NVAW:
http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdfIntimate partner violence is pervasive in U.S. society. Nearly 25 percent of surveyed women and 7.6 percent of surveyed men said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their lifetime;
So the details seem to be exagerated even from the NVAW (incidentally the NVAW is known to exagerate white female victimisation levels relative to minorities including men, and used a slightly different methodology to ask men the slightly different questions). The question (for women) that the statistic relies on is as follows:
Not counting any incidents you have already mentioned, after you became an adult, did any other adult, male or female, ever:
Throw something at you that could hurt?
Push, grab, or shove you?
Pull your hair?
Slap or hit you?
Kick or bite you?
Choke or attempt to drown you?
Hit you with some object?
Beat you up?
Threaten you with a gun?
Threaten you with a knife or other weapon?
Use a gun on you?
Use a knife or other weapon on you?
I have no particular issue with this statistic based on the fairly open ended question that was used to get the statistic. Actually I'm suprised the figure is so low. However the statistic is a probably a measure of how much the person identifies as a victim than how much they were victimised (as per the under-representation of minorities and men). Do you know about this stuff Dr Evil?
Every 15 seconds a woman is battered in the United States by her husband, boyfriend, or live-in partner.
This is domestic violence factoid number one in Gelles' list:
http://dvresearch.tripod.com/id24.htmIt's false but extremely popular. I recorded seven variant formats to the sentence but this is a new one on me. It's odd that your leaflet doesn't give a source. Typically this would be just another feminist publication but usually something is given as a source.
Women are 85-95% of the victims of intimate violence.
I haven't seen this one either. It seems rather vague don't you think? If there was a source that quantified victims then the source would have a figure, not a range like that. Certainly whether you think this statement is true depends on how you define "victim". Feminists will seek to define victim for these purposes, as someone who is recorded by the police as a victim somehow. Taking police arrest figures rather than research figures gives them a far larger amount of bias of course, but even so, these days arrest figures are not so one sided, so these are probably based on old arrest figures from the 1980's. I am quite happy to accept that police arrests are themselves a source of sexism and that women are arrested a lot less than men when they commit an act of domestic violence.
Violence by an intimate accounts for about 21% of the violent crime experienced by women and about 2% of the violence sustained by males.
Again by looking at crime figures the bias of the justice system is expected to make women look like victims --- but the interpretation of these figures is another question. I would expect the figures would be UCR based if they are based on anything. Another source of bias is the fact that men experience a great deal more non-intimate violent crime than women, and therefore even if they experience the same level of intimate violence an absolute terms, women's percent would be higher. It's a classic trap feminists often use.
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/nibrs/famvio21.pdfAccording to this page on the FBI site (UCR = Uniform Crime Reporting, run by the FBI, and yes you WILL be tested on these acronym's)
Focusing on the relationships of the violent crime victims to their offenders reveals family relationships accounted for 23 percent. Specifically, 11 percent were spouses; 2 percent, common-law spouses; 2 percent, parents; 2 percent, siblings; 2 percent, children; and the remainder, otherwise related. (See Table 2.)
I don't know if the form if the statistic supplied has any validity, and the FBI don't give it, but you can calculate it from the data given here as about 15% for men and about 33% for women. Again this is only for reported crimes which biases it towards women by a great deal (unbelievably the FBI claim more violent crimes against women are reported dispite violence against men running at about 2-3 times the rate).
At least 25% of domestic violence victims are pregnant when beaten.
This sounds like a variation on the classic, "THE MARCH OF DIMES REPORTS THAT BATTERING DURING PREGNANCY IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF BIRTH DEFECTS AND INFANT MORTALITY" as debunked by Sommers and also by Gelles. Seems like this variation is now quite popular on the internet. Most of the pages quoting this statistic gave no specific source (an exception gave your own Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence). Those that gave a source usually had copied every "factoid" in a set list verbatim and credited "Department of Justice Stats" (spelled exactly like that) which is not a source.
I eventually traced one comment sourcing it as:
At least 25% of domestic violence victims are pregnant when beaten. (Helton, A. McFarlane, J. and Anderson, E. Prevention of Battering: Focus on Behavioral Change, Public Health Nursing, Vol. 4 (3), September 1987)
The actual title appears to be: "Helton, A.; McFarlane, J. &, and Anderson. Prevention of battering during pregnancy: Focus on behavioral change. Public Health Nursing. 1987; 4(3):166-174."
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/drh/violence/slides/sld001.htm#2The CDC site on DV and pregnancy mentions figures which might suggest 22% of female victims are pregnant. Their bibliography mentions a lot of stuff by the researchers mentioned above. They do not say which sources (certainly two different sources) they use to get the 22% comparison.
Apparently their research suggests "Up to half of all battered women are abused during pregnancy, with physical abuse often beginning or escalating in pregnancy."
http://gocadvs.ky.gov/gidv.htmIt seems that the researchers definition of "abuse" includes non-violent disagreements:
"Abuse can be physical, emotional, sexual, or economic
(Helton, 1987)"
http://www.gov.ns.ca/heal/publichealth/content/pubs/01-11919Pregn_cy%20Abuse%20Fact.pdfIn general the level of reported "abuse" of women is so wildly changeable that to use two figures from very different studies and with different methodologies and definitions as a basis for this calculation is extremely unlikely to give a result worth anything (for example if I used the FBI's figures for overall abuse of women -- from the previous section -- I would conclude that aboutt 270% of women who are abused are pregnant).
Reading between the lines the researcher is saying that if a woman is being battered then, looking back to the time that she was pregnant, it is 50% likely that she was being abused at that time too, even if abuse might meen only being shouted at. Again this figure is only suprising in being so low, but it says little about whether women are more likely to be battered when pregnant.
Domestic violence is the leading cause of serious injury to American women between ages 15 and 44, more common than automobile accidents, muggings and rapes combined.
This is a straightforward and classic lie. It is on the Gelles list. I found many variants. Eight are listed. This is a new variant.
http://dvresearch.tripod.com/id23.htmHere is the real list of most common injury categories listed by the CDC in 1996 for women between 15 and 44. Intimate violence ranks #9 just ahead of animal attacks. Car accidents are the most popular. Attacks by strangers are ranked #6.
http://www.responsibleopposing.com/facts/leadcaus.htmlIncidentally this is one of the most popular lies out there. I found it at literally hundreds of sites.
To be continued......