Help understanding these statistics?

NeuroticIntrovert · 2012-11-18T20:23:56+00:00

It's easy for us, and feminists, to say 'the system is biased against us, this research is from the system, therefore this research is biased.'

Thing this, that can be used to justify a complete disregard of, well, science, and reduces the debate from a discussion of reason and evidence to the Oppression Olympics.

It's much harder, but much more useful, to take a study like this one, read the methodology, and figure out what the methodological biases are. There is no such thing as a perfect research study; every method of collecting data in the social sciences has some weakness compared to other methods, and thus, some bias, in one direction or another. That doesn't necessarily mean the research is trash, but it does mean social science research must be interpreted with a critical eye.

In regards to your specific questions:

Under 4. Family homicides: Women continue to be more likely than men to be victims of spousal homicide. In 2007, almost 4 times as many women were killed by a current or former spouse as men.

That's a specific type of violence. This quotation refers only to spousal homicide, which is one kind of intimate partner violence in one kind of relationship. Couples that are living together but are unmarried, not living together, or whose abuse does not escalate to homicide, are not included in this statistic. I think most MRAs are arguing that domestic violence is 50/50, which is a much broader category than spousal homicide. On that note, let's move to your next quotation:

Under 2. Police-reported spousal violence in Canada The majority of victims of spousal violence continue to be females, accounting for 83% of victims.(1)

Again, this is spouses only, not intimate partners in general. Far more important however, is noting that this is based solely on police-reported data. On page 8-9 of this report, which is a profile of self-reported data, we get this quotation:

Overall, a similar proportion of males and females reported having experienced spousal violence in the previous 5 years (Table 1.2). When asked about their experiences within the preceding 12 months, the proportion of Canadians who reported spousal violence dropped to 2% (Table 1.3). Again, the finding was similar for males and females.

So we have two studies, looking at Canadians, across all age groups, within a few years of each other.

One looked at police reports, and found that 83% of spousal violence victims are females, and 17% are males.
The other did a survey, and found that 50% of spousal violence victims are females, and 50% are males.

Why the difference? Let's move down to page 11 of the latter report (emphasis mine):

Most incidents of spousal violence that were brought to the attention of police were reported by victims themselves. While female victims were about three times more likely than male victims to state that they had reported the incident to police (23% versus 7%), the reasons for choosing to report were similar for both groups.

In short, the reason police-reported statistics tend to show that women are predominantly the victims of spousal violence is that male victims are far less likely than female victims to report the violence to the police. When we actually survey people, it's near 50-50. Particularly for something like spousal violence, if you look only at one narrow category, you'll come to a different conclusion about what's going on.

Keep in mind that this is assuming no actual bias on the part of the police, which is another unfair assumption.

We can also get into the social and cultural reasons why men are so much less likely to report, but that's another topic.

C0CKPUNCHER · 2012-11-18T18:20:25+00:00

My mother got my stepdad to run over my father (missed). If he hadn't missed, it is very unlikely this would have been recorded as my mother killing my father. It might have been recorded as an accident.

rightsbot · 2012-11-18T16:28:18+00:00

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ErasmusMRA · 2012-11-18T16:40:15+00:00

The majority of victims of spousal violence continue to be females, accounting for 83% of victims.

I haven't looked at your link in detail, but they usually make women look like victims by either redefining 'violence' to include nonsense like 'financial violence' or 'verbal violence' or use reported statistics instead of surveys. Men tend to heavily under-report domestic violence done to them.

Almost universally in Canada, US, UK, and Australia domestic violence is 50-50 when it's reciprocal, and sometimes as high as 70% of women are the aggressors in non-reciprocal abuse.

Title	Help understanding these statistics?
Author	Harkler
Upvotes	1
Comments	14
Date	November 18, 2012 4:26 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/13ehms/help_understanding_these_statistics/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/help-understanding-these-statistics.1008941 https://theredarchive.com/post/1008941

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