Feminists Are Bad At Statistics
Quantitative reasoning debunks a core feminist claim
Imagine that a law has been proposed to address Violence Against Whites. You wonder why the law is specifically about Whites, instead of about violence against people in general. It’s especially odd since Whites suffer violence at lower rates than Blacks. We can now step out of the hypothetical and into reality because America does in fact have a Violence Against Women Act, in violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law, and in spite of the fact that men suffer violence more often than women.
One could argue that a Violence Against Women act is warranted because while men are more likely to be the victims of crime, they are also more likely to be perpetrators. One could make exactly the same argument for a Violence Against Whites act.
The language of Violence Against Women is everywhere. Mainstream news media claim that there is a “crisis” of women being killed by their romantic partners. Politicians denounce it. Radical feminists love to promote the idea that women are always unsafe in the presence of men. Radical feminists seem almost to salivate over the idea of women in seemingly loving relationships being killed by their husbands or boyfriends.
The Numbers
What are the actual statistics about intimate-partner-murder?
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics about 1,700 women are murdered in domestic violence incidents each year. A few of those murders are probably committed by lesbians, but let’s be charitable to the feminist position and just assume that all 1,700 murders are perpetrated by men. There are about 165 million women and girls in America, so the average woman’s annual risk of being murdered by her intimate partner is 1.03 in 100,000. The average woman’s annual risk of being murdered by someone other than an intimate partner is 2 in 100,0001
For comparison, the annual risk that you will die by drowning is 1.13 in 100,0002 For dying in a car accident, it’s 12 in 100,0003 Risk of death from an unintentional fall is 14 in 100,0004. The annual risk of death from food poisoning is 0.9 in 100,000.5 If you’re not living in fear of food, you shouldn’t be living in fear of men.
I think that the most hardcore feminists know that they’re lying, or at least they’re aware at some level that they don’t really care about the truth. But a lot of young women and girls have a natural fear of men - especially strangers - and feminists eagerly stoke that anxiety with statistics-free fear-mongering.
According to BJS, intimate partner murders make up 34% of all murders of women, so the annual risk that a woman will be murdered by someone other than an intimate partner is (1.03 / 34) * 66 = 2
You can thank Mary P Koss and Joe Biden for VAWA.
Women are bad at math.
This is not a revelation.