What do you think of these?

Started by dr e, Oct 18, 2002, 12:10 PM

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dr e

I am planning to respond to this and wanted any feedback you all may have to offer.  How many would you put a :pinocchio: on and why?

In a booklet I received in the mail from the Maryland Family Violence Council the first page after the table of contents begins the little 22 page booklet by saying:


If you are a victim of domestic violence, now is the time to protect yourself and those who count on you for saftey.
You don't deserve to be abused.  There is help.


FACTS

  1 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.

 Every 15 seconds a woman is battered in the United States by her husband, boyfriend, or live-in partner.

 Women are 85-95% of the victims of intimate 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.

   At least 25% of domestic violence victims are pregnant when beaten.

  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.

 Between 50% and 70% of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children.

 At least 3.3 million children between the ages of 3 and 19 are at risk of exposure to parental violence every year.

 One third of high school and college students experience violence in an intimate relationship during their dating years.
Contact dr e  Lifeboats for the ladies and children, icy waters for the men.  Women have rights and men have responsibilties.

DavidByron

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.htm

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1 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.pdf

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Intimate 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:

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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?

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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.htm

It'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.

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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.  

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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.pdf

According 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)

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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).

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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:

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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#2

The 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.htm

It seems that the researchers definition of "abuse" includes non-violent disagreements:

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"Abuse can be physical, emotional, sexual, or economic
(Helton, 1987)"


http://www.gov.ns.ca/heal/publichealth/content/pubs/01-11919Pregn_cy%20Abuse%20Fact.pdf

In 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.

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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.htm

Here 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.html

Incidentally this is one of the most popular lies out there.  I found it at literally hundreds of sites.

To be continued......
size=9]I am the victim of unregulated sarcasm[/size]

DavidByron

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Between 50% and 70% of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children.


Yeah I've heard this one before but its not so common.  Of course the statistic as printed is too vague to have an actual source and subject to your definition of "abuse" to include non-physical abuse, you could make a good case that ANY relationship where domestic violence is going on is abusive of the children.  I would have no problem with that, although this figure is trying to suggest something else.

Generally child abuse is by women, and feminists have various ways to try and get around that inconvenient fact...  I was able to trace a source for this comment on this page:

http://www.serve.com/zone/everyone/factsdv.html

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Bowker, Arbitell and McFerron. "On the Relationship Between Wife Beating and Child Abuse, Feminist Perspectives on Wife Abuse, eds. Kersti Yllo and Michelle Bograd (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1988).


Doesn't sound all that unbiased a title I'd say ;)

Again no comparison with women is available but common sense strongly suggests that any woman who is battering is much more likely to be battering the kids since she is likely to have far more access.  What is less obvious is that even women who are themselves battered often abuse their children.

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At least 3.3 million children between the ages of 3 and 19 are at risk of exposure to parental violence every year.


That's a screwy statement. Surely all children of any age are AT RISK.  I wonder if ther statement is supposed to imply something else? It's also not clear if by "exposure" they just me, say, witnessing parents arguing?  Again this actually seems a very low figure to me, for a statistic that is so poorly worded as to be useless except as propaganda,.  But that's often the case with these statistics when they are not out and out lies.

I didn't even bother to look up this factoid.

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One third of high school and college students experience violence in an intimate relationship during their dating years.


Again not one I recognise and it seems quite weak for feminist propaganda.  Given some definitions of what counts as violence this seems a reasonable figure.  There's no attempt to identify male or female victims so likely whatever the source was was not helpful to feminists in that regard.  The statement seems to be derived from this variation:

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One third of high school and college students experience violence in an intimate relationship during their dating years. According to community-based surveys, more than half of adolescent girls who reported being sexually assaulted were assaulted while on dates. (Women's Health Issues, 1994)


That seems to be a reference to the NIH's ORWH - Office of Research on Women's Health (obviously there's nothing similar for men).  Digging a little further the more precise reference was, "Shen, 1993, as cited in Wolfe L.R (1994). “Girl Stabs Boy at School: Girls and the Cycle of Violence,” Women’s Health Issues, 4(2), 109-116 (1994)."
size=9]I am the victim of unregulated sarcasm[/size]

dr e

Many thanks for your comments David.  Very helpful.

I think I will make a complaint on monday via the phone to the maryland organization that sent me the brochure about the "injuries to women aged 15-44" factoid.  I will ask them to give me their source of information and go from there.  This really pisses me off that the government is being so totally duped and are active partners in this brainwashing crap.  

I think it is very clear why they put the vague message

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At least 3.3 million children between the ages of 3 and 19 are at risk of exposure to parental violence every year.  


where they did.  It followed the factoid about men who abuse their wives also abusing their kids.  The slow and unfocused mind would look at that and conclude "those terrible men" not only do they abuse their wives but then they go and abuse the kids.  This of course is hilarious since the women do most of the child abuse....they forgot to mention that little detail.
Contact dr e  Lifeboats for the ladies and children, icy waters for the men.  Women have rights and men have responsibilties.

DavidByron

A Canadian equality group successfully sued one of the DV shelters for their sexism on their leaflets.

http://fact.on.ca/news/news0006/oc000619.htm
size=9]I am the victim of unregulated sarcasm[/size]

Anonymous

These statistics are exagerated and embellished forms of feminazi propaganda. I noticed they so conveniently omit the the millions of men being falsely accused, imprisoned, murdered and abused. I loathe VAWA, the Sexual Haraassment scam and the feminazi crusade against Due Process. We need to amend or if possible repeal these phony scam laws and require every single accusation made in this country to require a witness and irrefutable physical evidence before anyone gets indicted for anything. Period. No evidence, no indictment. Ever!!! And one more thing. No Social Services department or feminazi on this planet is going to get away with falsely accusing me again. If they try to haul me in on a phony charge, then they'll be dodging my 99% accuracy with a Shuriken and a Composite Bow.

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