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The Forum > Article Comments > Domestic violence - a statistical 'shock and awe' campaign? > Comments

Domestic violence - a statistical 'shock and awe' campaign? : Comments

By Michael Gray, published 8/6/2005

Michael Gray argues manipulation of domestic violence statistics oscures the true facts.

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I have to agree that many people have terrible skills when it comes to interpreting statistical data, but that does not mean the data is necessarily false.

While in the case of domestic violence, the definition used to accumulate this data is alot broader than what I would consider normally accepted as domestic violence within society and indeed many people quote that particular statistic without the "within their lifetime" clause. That does not invalidate the data.

Being part of well educated democratic society, I believe it is my responsibility to fully understand information presented to me. If the terms and definitions of a statistic are not presented to me I will question how has the subject of survey been defined.

I know alot of people do take these things at face value, but it is condscending to think that people are incapable of understanding nature of statistics and while they can be a useful tool, they are limited. So if I am being sold a statistical lie, then I am not in the market.
Posted by Javaira, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 11:48:26 AM
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I think this an excellent article as it begins to look at the very serious question of domestic violence studies.

"One in four Australian women (25 per cent) experience domestic violence within their lifetime".

However this “one in four” figure seems to be almost universal, as it is regularly quoted in issues ranging from mental health http://www.one-in-four.co.uk/ to ID fraud http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4311693.stm to use of nuclear weapons against terrorists http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000819252

There is so much talk about “Domestic Violence” the logical question becomes “What constitutes domestic violence”. Unfortunately each study on domestic violence seems to have its own interpretation or definition of what is domestic violence. This then means that domestic violence cannot be adequately monitored to see if it is increasing, decreasing, changing etc.

There are laws regarding domestic violence, and these laws apply penalties that are increasing in severity over time. The rational behind this appears to come from a belief that domestic violence is increasing, so it becomes necessary to increase penalties. However this has lead to the situation in Tasmania, where a person can be put in jail and no bail allowed.

“TASMANIA'S leading judge blasted the state's controversial new domestic violence laws yesterday, after being forced to refuse bail to a man accused of assaulting his former partner. Supreme Court Chief Justice Peter Underwood said he would have granted bail to the man, had he not been restricted by the Family Violence Act. “http://www.themercury.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,15357727%255E921,00.html

The granting of bail requires a Family Violence Risk Assessment, but people who have attempted to get a copy of the Risk Assessment have been told that they have to apply under the Freedom of Information Act, so the definition of Domestic Violence in the Risk Assessment is also not widely known at present.

So when it comes to domestic violence, no one seems to have a clear idea of what it is, although the “one in four” figure is repeated over and over.
Posted by Timkins, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 12:59:17 PM
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Top article Michael. How many genuine victims of DV suffer unnecessarily because of the repeated cries of "Wolf, Wolf" by those running agenda's which are not about stopping actual DV?

If we can get a focus on truth into the DV debate then maybe we have a chance of dealing with the real issues regardless of who the victim is.
Posted by R0bert, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 2:35:30 PM
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Isn't it sad that such a litany of mistruths originates from "respectable" government departments? Thanks for highlighting this Michael.

One correction - my information on the results of the WSS shows that about 30% of the women who have at some point in their lives since the age of 15 been physically harmed or threatened were the victims of feamle perpetrators (not 2% as Michael notes). (See http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/0b565c403b0a0356ca2569de0025631c?OpenDocument

ALSO, and far scarier, is that the Australian Parliamentary Library (you know, the one that our pollies turn to for a quick update on social issues and facts) has somehow found that the WSS shows a level of violence that I cannot calcualte from the WSS, no matter how hard I try to fudge the figures. The relevant exageration is quoted below:

The best indicators available to date about the levels of violence against women in Australia are from the 1996 ABS Women’s Safety Survey which gathered information about women’s experiences of violence. In its findings, the ABS estimated that 1.2 million women (18 per cent) had experienced sexual violence and 2.2 million (33 per cent) had experienced physical violence since the age of 15.

From:
Parliament of Australia Parliamentary Library

“Measuring violence against women: a review of the literature and statistics”
E-Brief: Online Only issued 06 December 2004
Janet Phillips, Information/E-links, Social Policy Section
Malcolm Park, Analysis and Policy Statistics Section
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/ViolenceAgainstWomen.htm

If this totally false picture can obtain such prominence in an august Library, what hope is there for a little bit of truth? And when we do get some attention to the real data, who is going to hold accountable all of those politicians, academics, journalists and commentators who have sown such social dissent on lies - and built a DV industry to provide "jobs for the (misandrist) girls"? (over $10 million dollars per year of Commonwealth funding alone goes to the DV industry).
Posted by MHIRC, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 3:00:27 PM
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While I vehemently diagree with the general tone of this article (the whole "men as victim" paradigm seems on the whole kind of pathetic - right up there with those "men don't know their place in society any more" arguments), the author has manged to miss the single most important argument in favour of his cause. That is that over-reporting of domestic violence (if it is occuring) could well normalise this sort of action in the minds of potential perpetrators (eg. "a quarter of the blokes out there are hitting their wives, why shouldn't I?")
Posted by chris_b, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 4:30:57 PM
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chris_b
The idea that it is a “quarter of the blokes” (or “one in four”) out there hitting their wives is quite suspect, if the studies are carefully analysed. The 1996 ABS study into domestic violence only surveyed women who wanted to be in the survey, so it is more than likely that women who had been involved in domestic violence would volunteer to be in the survey, thereby creating bias in the results.

The “one in four” is routinely stated in all types of studies and media announcements , and it could be that this figure more readily captures the imagination of people, but is not necessarily an accurate figure.

EG
'One in four of all crimes dealt with by the Metropolitan Police is a domestic violence incident. This is proof of the scale of the problem.' This comment by John Grieve, head of the Metropolitan Police's Racial and Violent Crime Taskforce” at http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/000000005423.htm However further investigation found this figure to be actually 4%, not 25%

In the UK, the Home Office also carried out a domestic violence study that was very similar to that undertaken by the ABS in Australia in 1996, and they also found the “one in four”. However there were questions regards bias in that study, including exaggerating the results.

EG
“But behind these figures lie some pretty questionable assumptions. Take the much-quoted Home Office Research Study in 1999, that found that 1 in 4 women had suffered domestic violence (1). This category contains a broad variety of incidents, some of which would not be generally be considered as a serious crime of violence. Indeed, only 17 percent of incidents recorded in the survey were considered to be crimes by their victims. And only a third of women victims agreed that their experience made them 'a victim of domestic violence'. http://www.spiked-online.co.uk/Articles/00000006DC52.htm

If further investigated, the results of the 1996 Australian ABS survey would probably be very similar.
Posted by Timkins, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 8:49:09 PM
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