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The following article was printed in The Brown Daily Herald on Friday, April
7, 2000.
Reading between the numbers
Statistics don't always tell the whole story in sex crimes
By Nicholas Krippendorf
Herald Opinions Columnist
Twenty-two to thirty-five percent of women who visit emergency rooms are there for injuries related to ongoing abuse. This statistic, printed on a table slip by Brown University's Women's Center last year, was shocking. This table slip turns out to be more disappointing than shocking because the statistic is completely misleading.
The statistic comes from the 1984 article "Domestic Violence Victims in the Emergency Department" published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was conducted in a downtown Detroit hospital. The authors admitted that this sample group was not representative of the American population at large.
Ninety percent of the 492 patients questioned were from inner-city Detroit and 60 percent of them were unemployed. The 22 percent figure represents both men and women. Either the Women's Center was unaware of this information, or they deliberately misled the entire Brown community. I'd like to think the former.
Christina Hoff Sommers, women's activist and author of Who Stole Feminism, might not be so forgiving. According to Sommers, many academic feminists "are imposing a narrow political agenda, diluting traditional scholarly standards, and using up scarce resources." Sommers' book identifies and debunks dubious feminist research promoted by irresponsible, narrow-minded, chronically upset and whiny feminist academics.
She discovered that many statistics feminists use to promote their agendas are either misleading or completely false. If you think you can avoid feminist misinformation at Brown, think again.
Attempting to whip up support for the Vagina Monologues, the Brown Women's Center once again distributed table slips with shocking statistics. On one slip I found, "Somewhere in America a women is raped every two minutes."
This statistic comes from the 1996 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), sponsored by the US Department of Justice. Rape is not only the most underreported crime but it is also the most terrible. The incident of rape should be dealt with responsibly and seriously.
Although the Department of Justice seems like a reliable source, the reality that a woman is raped every two minutes in America seems almost unbelievable.
If you read the survey you will most likely be surprised by what the NCVS counts as a rape. According to the survey, "A completed rape is a report of a respondent physically forced or psychologically coerced to engage in sexual intercourse. An attempted rape may consist of verbal threats of rape."
These definitions are surprisingly broad. Do you consider someone who has not been physically forced or threatened but merely psychologically coerced to have sex a rape victim? Would you count a woman who receives a verbally threatening phone call a victim of an attempted rape?
A candlelight dinner and a few drinks persuade a women to have sex with her date. The next morning the woman feels guilty and regrets her behavior. She realizes that, had it not been for the romantic ambiance and her alcohol buzz she would not have had sex with her date. The NCVS counts her as a rape victim and her date as a rapist.
The NCVS also found that about 330,000 sexual assaults occur each year. What would you count as a sexual assault? (Maybe behavior which results in physical force or violence.) The NCVS claims that a sexual assault "may or may not involve force"[and]"also include verbal threats." The survey goes on to claim, "Sexual assaults also include incidents in which the offender's motive was not clear."
Apparently when a women misinterprets a man's dinner and a movie proposition as an attempt to "get her in bed" the US Department of Justice counts the women as a victim of sexual assault. The NCVS's definitions make it difficult to believe that this survey is a well-designed study without an agenda.
Many feminists are masters at creatively interpreting and transforming statistics to mislead people. On another table slip printed by the Brown Women's Center was, "Somewhere in America a women is battered every 15 seconds." This statement is a half-truth and misleading.
The statistic comes from a study by the FBI. The FBI study relied on the book "Behind Closed Doors: Violence in The American Family", by Murray Straus and Richard Gelles. Gelles and Straus did find high levels of violence in American families; but they also found that women were as likely to engage in it as men.
They did find that women are more likely to be seriously injured as a result of violence. However, they found the percentage of women who are seriously injured to be smaller than inflated claims of irresponsible feminists - fewer than one percent. Surveys about violence often distinguish between minor violence, such as pushing, shoving, grabbing, and slapping (no injuries) and severe violence, such as kicking, trying to hit with an object, and beating up (injuries).
Often feminists create misleading statistics by deliberately ignoring the distinction between minor and sever violence and counting all acts of violence as abuse. No effort is made to distinguish between non-threatening aggression and physically harmful aggression.
According to the 1998 National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAW) "approximately 5.9 million assaults [were] perpetrated against women" in the previous 12 months. Seems like a high number. Why?
According to this survey a physical assault was defined as "behaviors that threaten, attempt, or actually inflict physical harm." Furthermore, the NVAW survey counts a "push, grab, or shove" as an assault. If a man gets in an argument with his girlfriend and he pushes her out of the way as he stomps out of the room, the NVAW counts the women as a victim of assault.
Many feminist activists want you to think society shortchanges females. To convince us they are quick to discard all comparison of boys and girls in areas where boys are in trouble. We'll hear that girls are more likely than boys to attempt suicide but not that boys are four times more likely to die from suicide. We'll hear that girls score lower than boys on math and science exams and boys get more attention from teachers. We're not as likely to hear that boys significantly trail girls in national reading and writing tests, get lower grades in school, suffer from more learning disabilities, are more likely to drop out of school, abuse drugs or be assaulted.
We should not become fixed on the victimology game. Women's problems are no more and no less important than men's. When irresponsible, narrow-minded, and usually chronically whiny feminists promote sham and misleading information, such as some information here at Brown, the real victims of abuse are cheated. This is a real tragedy.
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