Glenn Sacks wrote an interesting article about a lot of the statistical claims that Eve Ensler‘s nonprofit V-Day was spreading around about domestic violence. The entire article is worth reading, but I was especially intrigued by this claim which Sacks debunks,
1 in 3 murdered females are killed by a partner, versus 3.6% of males.
This statistic is both impressive and absurd at the same time. It is absurd because, of course, it is completely misleading, but impressive nonetheless because somebody obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about the best way to spin the fact that very few women are murdered and then turn that on fact on its head.
As Sacks notes, very few men or women are killed by a partner. According to Sacks the figures are about 1,300 women killed by intimates as opposed to 600 men murdered by intimates. In absolute numbers, of course, almost 2,000 people killed by intimates is a horrific tragedy, but in a nation of 260 million or so people, the risk of being killed by an intimate for both men and women is very low and, more importantly, the rate of intimate murder has steadily been declining (along with other murders).
Few people will look at that statistic, though, and realize that what it really means is that only about 4,000 women are murdered in any given year in the United States compared to almost 17,000 men.
So a completely different way to frame V-Day’s claims about violence against women is that almost 81 percent of murder victims are men and that we have a crisis of male murders and need to respond as a society to do more to reach out to the underserved male population with specialized violence programs offering men help and counseling.
But, of course, Ensler and her ilk take the opposite view and insist that violence (both being a victim of and a perpetrator of) is strictly a male vs. female phenomenon. Or as Sacks sums up his article,
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.
The obvious question being why do radical feminists prefer to live in this dark fantasy land of their own making rather than face the world as it is and work to improve it rather than simply regurgitating back their ideology through false and misleading statistics?
Source:
Eve Ensler’s V-Day: For Women, Afghanistan is Everywhere. Glenn J. Sacks, GlennJSacks.Com, February 22, 2002.