Prominent nursing professor accused of fabricating DV stats

Article here. Excerpt:

'Jacquelyn C. Campbell, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, is accused of fabricating “key statements [about domestic violence] and then representing the statements as findings of a government survey.” On January 14, the victim-advocacy organization Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE) filed a formal complaint with the Office of Research Integrity of the Department of Health and Human Services. SAVE wants the unit to “investigate these allegations of research misconduct by Dr. Campbell and colleagues, and take appropriate corrective action.” (As of January 31, the complaint has been rejected and the rejection is being appealed.)

In two highly respected journals, Campbell and various colleagues claimed that “the leading cause of death in the United States among African American women aged 15 to 45 years” was homicide. In the American Journal of Public Health Vol. 93, No. 7, 2003, page 1089, the deaths were described as “femicide, the homicide of women.” In the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Journal 2003, page 18, the deaths were ascribed to “intimate partner violence” or domestic violence homicide.

Attorney General Eric Holder repeated the domestic violence version of the statistic in a 2009 speech; he stated, “Disturbingly, intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45.” The statistic was posted in at least two places at the Department of Justice (DOJ) website. The conservative feminist Christina Hoff Sommers took exception. In USA Today (Feb. 4, 2011), she wrote, “That's a horrifying statistic, and it would be a shocking reflection of the black family, and American society generally, if it were true. But it isn't true.”
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Where did Holder get such a dramatically inaccurate statistic? Kessler fast forwarded to the 2003 studies in which Campbell was the principal researcher. The American Journal of Public Health study was published earliest, and it referred to “femicide” as the leading cause of death for African-American women aged 15 to 45. The later NIJ study stated “intimate partner violence” was “the leading cause of death.” The 1998 BJS study was cited as a source in both cases but, as Kessler commented, “these facts cannot be found in the original BJS report.”
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Mike Perry is not surprised at the DOJ's failure to make a genuine correction. Perry is an economics professor at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The Washington Post fact checking occurred only because Perry pursued that avenue as a last resort. In an AEI article (Dec. 5, 2013), Perry stated that the false data was “being extensively quoted by universities, journalists, in books and YouTube videos, and by the American Bar Association.” Perry called the DOJ failure especially disturbing in light of Obama's 2009 declaration, “Under my administration, the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over... To undermine scientific integrity is to undermine our democracy.”

Christina Hoff Sommers is also unsurprised. For years, Sommers has been battling bad data produced by politically correct feminism. She is perhaps best known for constantly correcting statistics which exclude men and boys or inaccurately represent them.
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As Sommers notes, PC feminism approaches males as perpetrators and women as their victims. The data frowns on this interpretation. The CDC's 2010 Summary Report of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reported the rates at which men and women had been victims of physical violence during the preceding year. The rate of male victimization was 6.5 percent; the rate of female victimization was 6.3 percent.
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Research misconduct includes the fabrication or falsification of research or in the reporting of research results. The SAVE complaint alleges that Campbell and her colleagues “made up key statements, presented them as the results of a prior Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, and then reported them in two journal articles. In the American Journal of Public Health report, the fabricated claim appears in the first sentence of the article and sets the tone for the remainder of the discussion.”

Intentional falsification is a key aspect of research misconduct. But outright fabrication can be difficult to prove because it requires a judgment about the researcher’s inner motives. In the presence of Campbell's silence, such a judgment must be based on the preponderance of evidence. The evidence includes: the lack of correction to debunked statistics; the absence of supporting data in the BJS report she cited; and, Kessler's observation that “[l]ogically, Holder’s statement does not make much sense.” Kessler continued, “Intimate-partner homicide is the leading cause of death? At the very least, intimate-partner homicide is a subset of all homicides, so one can easily see that a broader category of murder would be even higher. And, then, what about diseases?”
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Another reason that academics have falsified data is to gain more grants and academic respectability or power.

Whether intentionality can be proven in regard to the black “femicide” claim may be irrelevant in the end. SAVE clearly wants to shine a bright light on bad data upon which government policies and programs are based. The complaint and the appeal could accomplish this in and of itself. The respect for truth in domestic violence research will depend on the same factor that allowed falsehood to flourish: the media. Will the truth have the same media appeal as sensationalized falsehoods? Will cancer as a leading cause of death be reported with the same breathlessness as domestic-violence homicide? It remains to be seen. Perhaps the media can be shamed into valuing the truth.'