"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" comes to mind as I contemplate this study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Why? Well, I presume the underlying data are accurate, but notice how the data are presented; as a percentage of total murders, not as a raw number.
So as a public service, here are the raw numbers. Approximately 1700 women were murdered by intimate partners in 2021, and approximately 960 1080 men were victims of the same crime-approximately 36% 39% of the total. For comparison, in 2017, the numbers were approximately 1500 women murdered (13% higher) by intimate partners, and about 700 men were murdered by intimate partners (about 37% 50% higher). (corrections due to my initial math error)
For comparison's sake, overall population grew by only 2% in this period in our country, so we would infer that the "Violence Against Women Act" is doing a great job of ensuring violence against women--and men.
So why the misleading way of presenting the data? My hunch is that there is a cultural imperative in the BJS to present domestic violence in the same way the Duluth Model does; as an almost exclusively male phenomenon. But when we look at the actual data, we see that unless the LGBTQ+ community is doing a huge proportion of intimate partner violence (and we'd need to review some Supreme Court cases, ahem), we must infer that both sexes are likely to commit this particular crime, and our approach is simply not working.
Let's start by taking a look at the actual data a bit more closely. What portion of the deaths are of spouses? What portion involve adultery? What portion are unmarried couples? What portion are of prostitutes and johns? What portion are "couples for one night"?
Sometimes, we need to take our blinders off and look at data.
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