Abused statistics: domestic violence; like hydra heads or spreading kudzu, the false statistics keep proliferating

National Review, August 1, 1994 by Cathy Young

IT DID not take long for advocacy groups and some commentators to claim that the O. J. Simpson case could do for domestic violence what Anita Hill did for sexual harassment. If the Anita Hill analogy refers to gender politics eclipsing truth, common sense, and journalistic skepticism, then that is exactly what's happening.

We are barraged with horrendous figures. CNN's Sheryl Potts said at the end of a 3.5-minute segment on wife-abuse, While you were watching this, 13 women were severely beaten by someone who claims to love them' (i.e., one every 15 seconds). According to the Associated Press, "4 million to 6 million women are beaten [each year]. That means once every 5 seconds ... a woman is punched or kicked ... or held down and pummeled." On Crossfire, Miami radio talk-show host Pat Stevens upped the count to 60 million by reasoning that "there are 6 million reported cases," and "the FBI estimates" that only 1 in 10 is reported. This went unchallenged.

One AP report ran somewhat counter to the general tone, noting that murders of women by male partners had dropped 18 per cent since the late 1970s; but it went on to temper this unduly optimistic message with the assertion that non-fatal violence was up: "From 1980 to 1990, federal figures show, reports of domestic assault ... rose from 2 million to 4 million, according to Rita Smith, coordinator for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence."

Where do the numbers come from? One source for the 4-to-6-million figure is a 1993 Commonwealth Fund study, which included such acts as shoving, slapping, and throwing things in its definition of battering. The statistic of a woman beaten every 15 seconds is derived from the 1985 National Family Violence Survey by University of New Hampshire researchers Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, which estimated that about 1.8 million American women each year suffer at least one incident of "severe violence" by a partner--a punch, a kick, an assault with an object. But only 7 per cent of the victims required medical care. A study published in Archives of Internal Medicine in 1992 found that, based on reports by wives in marital therapy, 48 per cent of "severe marital aggression" by husbands caused no injury, and 31 per cent caused only a "superficial bruise." While these are still reprehensible acts, most people visualize something very different when they think of "severe violence."

And the reports of domestic assault rising from 2 to 4 million a year over a decade? The figure, said Rita Smith, came from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Were these assaults reported to police? "Either that, or to medical personnel," said Miss Smith. "I'm not exactly sure how they gathered it, but it was one of the statistics they put out in some publication." What publication? She didn't recall.

An information specialist at the BJS knew nothing of such figures. Most of the Bureau's publications are based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, which puts the number of female victims of assaults by partners at about 470,000 a year.

Another shocking claim was made in a MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour segment by Connie McCall of Rainbow Services, a battered-women's assistance group in Los Angeles: "Over 50 per cent of women admitted to emergency rooms are admitted for an injury caused by a partner." In a pre--O. J. Simpson speech last March, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala gave a more modest estimate: "In our hospital emergency rooms, some 20 to 30 per cent of women arrive because of physical abuse by their partner."

These numbers (whose implausibility ought to be evident to anyone who has ever been to a hospital) come in part from studies in which medical charts were reviewed and most unexplained or inadequately explained injuries to women were reclassified as related to abuse, and in part from a 1984 study based on questionnaires distributed to emergency-room patients in a Detroit hospital. About 25 per cent of the female patients answered "yes" to the statement, "At some time my boyfriend/husband or girlfriend/wife has pushed me around, hit me, locked me, or hurt me"; so did about 20 per cent of the men. Most of the abuse did not seem to be directly related to the emergency-room visit. Moreover, a high percentage of the subjects were poor, unemployed, and cohabiting without marriage-factors strongly associated with the risk of domestic violence.

The same fallacy of projecting data obtained by studying the urban poor to the population at large is responsible for another widely reported figure--cited, for instance, in Newsweek's July 4 cover story on battered women: "[I]n 1992 the U.S. Surgeon General ranked abuse by husbands and partners as the leading cause of injuries to women aged 15 to 44." In fact, in a 1992 column in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the medical response to domestic abuse, then-Surgeon General Antonia Novello mentioned that "One study found violence to be ... the leading cause of injuries to women ages 15 through 44." This refers to all violence, not just violence by male partners. The article in which the finding was reported, titled "A Population-based Study of Injuries in Inner City Women," examines emergency-room visits by women "in a poor, urban, black community in western Philadelphia."