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Eve Ensler's nonprofit organization
V-Day is marking Valentine's Day by sponsoring hundreds of
events across the country to "stop violence against women and
girls." One's first reaction is "great--sign me up!" But,
unfortunately, V-Day publicizes discredited statistics which
greatly exaggerate the extent of crimes committed by men against
women. Some examples:
Falsehood #1: "Every 21 hours on
each college campus in the US there is a rape."
This means that the average college
campus has over 400 rapes a year. Yet surveys of reported rapes
to police have repeatedly come up with rates of less than one a
year per campus, often far less. For example, the US Department
of Education's studies of reports to campus police show about
1,800 forcible sex offenses (including fondling) each year at
more than 6,300 post-secondary institutions--whose combined
female population is in the millions. While rape is certainly an
underreported crime, even if three out of every four rapes
weren't reported the number of rapes on campus per year would
still be around one a year--not 400.
Falsehood #2: "Somewhere in America
a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15
seconds."
This figure is generally taken from
the National Family Violence Survey conducted by researchers
Richard Gelles, Murray Straus, and Susan Steinmetz, who were
once hailed by the women's movement for their pioneering work on
violence against women. But according to Straus, "Family
conflict studies, without exception, show about equal rates of
assault by men and women." Thus the statement "...a man is
battered, usually by his intimate partner, every 15 seconds"
would be equally true. Straus also notes that 90% of the
incidents included in "15 seconds" did not cause injury, but
instead reflected minor acts which women commit as often as men.
Falsehood #3 "1 in 3 murdered
females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males."
The murder rate between male and
female intimates is far more equal than these statistics
indicate, and may well be equal. Excluding killings
ruled as negligent or justified, about 1,300 women and 500 men a
year are murdered by intimates. Since there are many thousands
more unsolved murders of men than of women, if even a small
percentage of these were committed by female intimates, the male
and female totals would be similar.
Also, women are more likely to
poison men than to shoot them, and poisonings are often recorded
as "heart attacks" and "accidents" instead of as murder by an
intimate. In addition, women are much more likely than men to
use "contract" killers, and contract killers often disguise
murders as accidents. Even when a paid killer is caught and the
truth is known, the murder is called a usually called a
"multiple-offender" killing and not a murder of a man by a
female intimate.
The percentage difference V-Day
cites exists because vastly more men are murdered than women. As
a result, the number of females murdered by an intimate accounts
for a much higher percentage of the number of females murdered
overall than a similar number of male intimate murder victims in
relation to all male murder victims. Women murdered by male
intimates account for less than 6% of all murders in the US.
Falsehood #4 "Battering is the
leading cause of injury to women aged 15 to 44 in the United
States."
According to Emergency Room (ER)
data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the
Justice Department, about 1% of women's injuries are inflicted
by male intimates. The origin of V-Day's figure is a 1984
article "Domestic Violence Victims in the Emergency Department"
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In
the article, 38% of the 492 ER patients who were counted as
"female victims" were men! The survey is also flawed because it
was a small sample taken at only one, violence-plagued and
poverty-stricken inner-city ER. The survey's authors never
claimed that it was comprehensive or representative of the
population as a whole.
Falsehood #5: "Nationally, 50
percent of all homeless women and children are on the streets
because of violence in the home."
According to Gelles, this figure,
brought to prominence by Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, has "no
actual published scientific research to support [it]."
While V-Day makes discredited
claims about male violence, it completely ignores the fact that,
according to data collected by the US Department of Justice and
the US Department of Health and Human Services, it is women, not
men, who are responsible for most child abuse, parental murder
of children, child neglect, and child endangerment in the United
States.
Ensler, whose popular play "The
Vagina Monologues" is the primary financial and public relations
force behind V-Day, says that, for women, "Afghanistan is
everywhere." Unable to find an Afghanistan for American women,
Ensler has used discredited statistics to invent one.
Glenn
Sacks' columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of America's
largest newspapers. Glenn can be reached via his website at
www.GlennSacks.com or
via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
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