Control Freaks Redux

For some reason, I seem unable to comment on my own blog. Some sort of technical glitch.

Just as well, really, since it's worth highlighting the stuff I have been trying to post in response to faulty and misleading comments made by regular PaulR, who contends that

(1) Femicide is not such a big deal in Canada.

(2) Men are killed by their intimate partners just as often as women are killed by their intimate partners.

(3) A study I posted some time ago backs up (1) and (2).

(4) Men's Rights champion, author and professor Don Dutton should be considered as seriously on the subject of femicide as other academics with experience on the street and no anti-feminist agenda.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

So, let's begin:

Please read this post first.

And down in the comments (where you will have to go to make the links in the screen grabs work):

 

So PaulR obliges like this:

Well Paul here are the facts:

You are cherry-picking here. Furthermore, you are citing decades-old numbers. So, let's go with the latest that I can find, shall we? (And the good news is, domestic violence is decreasing -- probably because, IMO, women have the means to get out more than they used to and because, researchers like Peter Jaffe, are helping police to identify possible wife-murderers before they commit their crimes.)

Statistics Canada numbers for 2007, the latest available.

Women continue to be about 4 times more likely to be victims of spousal homicide than men. In 2007, there were 51 women and 13 men killed by a current or former spouse. For both men and women, more victims were killed by a common-law spouse than by a legally-married spouse in 2007.

Stats Can figures for 2006:

Women are generally more likely than men to be victims of spousal homicide and 2006 was no exception. There were 56 women killed by their husband (including common-law,
separated, and divorced) and 21 men killed by their wife. The female victim spousal homicide rate was 2.6 times higher than the rate for male victims. However, in 2006, the rate for male spousal victims increased to its highest level in a decade, while the rate for females fell for the fifth consecutive year.

And for good measure, here's 2005:

There were 74 spousal homicides in 2005, 1 fewer than in 2004, resulting in the fourth consecutive annual decline in the spousal homicide rate. Consistent with previous years, the 2005 spousal homicide rate against women was five times higher than the rate against men.

None of these numbers accounts for the rate of much graver physical injury of women by their partners, sexual assault, or other forms of femicide such as the continued killings of sex workers.

More research here. Tons of it in fact. More. You get the point.

As for Dutton's book, his research/methodology has been savaged, and it seems to be all about denouncing feminism -- which is why Men's Rights guys love him:

Although feminists have strengthened a social scientific understanding of woman abuse and havehelped curb this problem, current U.S. and Canadian federal governments are rejecting feminist recommendations and are creating policies that are explicitly anti-feminist. For example, in 2006, Status of Women Canada removed the word “equality” from its list of goals. Still, Dutton claims that “mainstream governments came to support domestic violence policy based on radical feminism” (p.153). To the best of my knowledge, there is no conclusive evidence to support this assertion, while there is ample evidence showing that the governments led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President George W. Bush are intent on buttressing the efforts of fathers’ rights groups and other conservative movements that fundamentally oppose feminist scholarship and practice.

That's by Walter S. DeKeseredy, Professor of Criminology, Justice and Policy Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.plus Chair of the American Society of Criminology's Division on Critical Criminology.

Lots more critiques where that came from.

So PaulR?

Please spare us the MRA agenda rhetoric, which you serve up with wordy helpings of Stats 101 for which I would give you a FAIL.

Comments

[PaulR]

Furthermore, you are citing decades-old numbers. -Antonia
-------
Actually, you cited the data going back to '77 in the original post, averaging it together with the now much lower 2007 IPV data as a route to bringing the average back up higher than the 2007 data which I also linked to - the same data you linked to.

I also cited Fekete's book, which studies the 100 gender violence studies done up until the 1990's, including the 14 or so, which bothered to ask the same questions to both genders. I cited that data as a route to establishing consistency with the Statscan data you've just cited back at me.

Again though, you are falling back on the percentages game to obfuscate real data. Using the stats you correctly represented above (I made an error on mine), let's crunch the math and see how your veritable slaughter of women compares against a population of 30 milion. 51 women of 30 mill vs 13 of 30 mill.

Let's see how what this means though, as it pertains to the general point I was making. 30 million people, around 15 million each men and women. Comparing your numbers against the general population, that gives each woman a a 0.00017% chance of getting killed by her partner in 2007, and a man 0.000043% chance.

So, fixing my mistake, using your data that gives women a 1.7 chance in a million. and men a .4 chance in a million. Again, we are talking about a rate of death that is not significant as a societal scourge. If we are going to treat it as significant from a societal standpoint anyway (as opposed to an individual standpoint), then we are talking about a real difference of only 38 murders (again, against a population of 30 million) between men and women, and that paltry difference is being amounted to a WAR on Women, while men in the same boat are ignored.

I don't say that as a route to getting towards "poor men". I make the point that your continued insistance in demonizing men in this manner through such a distorted statistical lens (and you should know better) isn't going to help those women you stand for. It won't help men either, but you've shown nothing but contempt or indifference to their plight - though it is the same as the women's.

[Antonia]

Okay Paul. Let's put it another way, which brings us back to Sooey's comment which launched all this ...

Given how many women are murdered, and how many of them are murdered by men, whether they are intimates, street rapists, serial killers, mass murderers or those who prey on sex workers, how do your numbers look?

In other words, how many women are targeted by men -- in proportion to how many women are murdered overall -- simply because they are women and/or sexual intimates?

And why do you continue to dismiss the fact that men target women because they hate women, fear them, are jealous or want them not to leave?

How many women, in comparison, are killed in the situations men are usually murdered? Robberies, fights, gang rivalries, etc.

Women are mostly killed because they are women.

Consider that a statistical challenge.

[Francesc]

isn't one death one too many?

[deBeauxOs]

And the other part of that observation would be to ask why is there a minority of men who abuse, sexually assault, violate, beat, choke, hit, and murder a great number of women?

I say they do it because they can. They have grown up watching men who engage in the behaviours named above and who get away with it. They do this violence to women in their lives: mothers, sisters, lovers, wives and daughters. They do it to colleagues, acquaintances and strangers. They keep doing it and the level of violence escalates if they are not stopped and if they find they get enjoyment from inflicting suffering.

Men who do NOT engage in these behaviours should be encouraged to participate in research so we can discover why they are different.

I once asked my father why his younger brother, the only one in a family of 5, had raped his wife when they were dating (she was shamed into marrying him because she became pregnant and couldn't get an abortion). He was known to torment, beat and abuse his wife and children. He was not a psychopath by the way. By all accounts, his cop buddies trusted him and thought he was a great guy. He was functional; he held down a job for 35 years. His wife divorced him as soon as the last child left home.

My father's response was self-referential. He said that he would never do that because he would be afraid to lose the love and the respect of the women he cherished and had vowed to protect.

Not much has changed since then except the criminal justice system; less and less are men who violate and kill women allowed to get away with it. As though their victims didn't matter because they're only women.

[PaulR]

"1) Given how many women are murdered"
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Antonia, you and I both know that the number of men murdered vastly outnumbers the amount of women murdered. Vastly. Implicit in your statement (unless I'm misreading it) is the notion that it is a greater crime to murder a woman than a man.

2) "and how many of them are murdered by men"
--------------------
This is to establish a comparative rate. Problem is that you have just gone to considerable trouble to establish that out of a population of 30 million, there are only 38 more women than men murdered in DV situations. While that number may mean a murder rate that is several times higher for women than men, it obviously doesn't warrant the panic language you are using.

Beyond that, some of those situations will likely include same sex partners- since the study you cited indicated they were included in the data. That difference of 38 women does not include contract hits or conspiracy to committ murder - which women do more frequently than men for planned murders. Normally, I'd be embarrassed to even throw in that factoid when talking about societal-scale problems, but because we are talking about so few actual people here, it becomes a relevant factor. We are talking about a freak element here - not some expression of the norm.

3. "And why do you continue to dismiss the fact that men target women because they hate women, fear them, are jealous or want them not to leave?"
--------------------
Men don't target women for those reasons, Antonia. Rapists and murderers do. There is a difference there that eludes you with men, but you are very sensetive about it when you are discussing Muslims - which is why some people continue to think you convey the appearance and behavior of a person who hates men. It would be super if you would show a flake of sensetivity to men and masculinity that you do when defending Muslim culture.

4. "Women are mostly killed because they are women."
---------
Well, aside from WW2, and the existing draft laws, in which tens of thousands of men were killed because they were men - you've got something there. But your point, on the face of it isn't true at all, aside from Lepine and that other gym shootem-up. And in both those cases, you are taking the rant of a lunatic as evidence of some latent masculine undercurrent.

As I said to sooey, that's the same as saying that someone who says they killed their kids because they are possessed by the devil (to save their souls), is evidence of latent infanticidal rage within the church.

[Antonia]

Not only have you failed to refute this post, not to mention the fact that femicide is a leading cause of the premature death of women, you have also demonstrated an utter callous indifference to the problem of wife abuse. (After all, if you can attribute a motive to me, why not point out what is ''implicit'' in your comments???)

So murderers target women because they hate them? So glad we agree on this.

Oh the Muslim ''honour killing'' card. Figures.

Typical men's rights nonsense.

You can throw all the stats you want at me. Fact remains, men target women for murder, rape and other violence because they hate women, fear women or are afraid of losing them -- and not because they want to win their countries, their oil, their treasure, their money, their cars, their gang turf ...

''Femicide, the homicide of women, is the leading cause of death in the United States among young African American women aged 15 to 45 years and the seventh leading cause of premature death among women overall. American women are killed by intimate partners (husbands, lovers, ex-husbands, or ex-lovers) more often than by any other type of perpetrator. Intimate partner homicide accounts for approximately 40% to 50% of US femicides but a relatively small proportion of male homicides (5.9%).1,5–10 The percentage of intimate partner homicides involving male victims decreased between 1976 and 1996, whereas the percentage of female victims increased, from 54% to 72%.''

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1447915

Like Sooey said: ''Violence is perpetrated by men against women -- and men.''

So far all you have done is prove her point, and this post.

[Antonia]

And, a bonus link!

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/tables/intproptab.htm

See?

In the US, 2.5% of men murdered are victims of intimate homicide, versus about 33% of women murdered.

Over a 30 year period, that's what? At least 40,000 women, many of who were mothers whose children witnessed their fathers kill them.

[MensRightsNow]

Antonia: In the whole scale of things 50 women killed by their spouse is tiny in a country of 33 million. Especially when the majority of deaths are men.

The murder of women is no more important than the muder of men.

Femicide is a word that denotes a greater importance on female murders than men.

Again, what about the root causes? Is it testosterone? Well, I guess a man can use the same post-partum excuses women use right? It's a hormonal thing, testosterone increases aggression, hence more men assault and kill.

Seems your numbers are dead on. What they don't explain is how and why docile uppity independent women murder their children and/or husbands when they don't have the same level of testosterone?

[Keith]

"Not only have you failed to refute this post, not to mention the fact that femicide is a leading cause of the premature death of women, you have also demonstrated an utter callous indifference to the problem of wife abuse. (After all, if you can attribute a motive to me, why not point out what is ''implicit'' in your comments???)"

LOL, this is rich. So you are claiming that "femocide" causes more deaths to women than, auto accidents, health issues, heck even child birth? I need to see your source on that one.

In addition since the difference in male vs female deaths by intimates is only 38, how many murders of males were by a male at the request of the female intimate partner of the murder victim. That number could easily push males into the "greater victim" status.

[PaulR]

"isn't one death one too many?" - Francesc
--------
Certainly is, but that's not what's being charged or disputed here. The question is whether the death rate and/or abuse rate is both disproportionately large and large enough to indicate a widespread societal problem, or if it is simply in the realm of random occurrence, or somewhere in between. What's being disputed is whether this is a product of masculinity, or whether it is the product of something else that occurs slightly more commonly among men than women, and may in fact be the product of mood disorders and mood altering substances.

A guy chops off the head of a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus. It's certainly one death too many, but regardless of how spectacular -- it doesn't make bus beheadings a societal problem

"you have also demonstrated an utter callous indifference to the problem of wife abuse." --Antonia
------
I'll stop you right there. The thing that will ultimately save those who DO suffer in those scenarios, is a respect to the truth. Pointing fingers and defining the enemy along some primitive tribal division is an easy political ploy that works wonders in organizing people - but in the long run, it's a divisive, distracting sham. If victims’ advocacy is going to be regarded as important, then do the research correctly and report it properly, without trying to crowbar it into some kind of ideology.

"men target women for murder, rape and other violence because they hate women, fear women or are afraid of losing them"-Antonia
-----------------
Antonia, rapists, lunatics, and killers -- not "men" -- target women for those reasons. You DO see the difference, don't you? Don't you write an annual father's day column taking great pains to point out that you know what that difference is? I'm just a saying- if you claim to value you the difference between a killer and a man, you aren't showing it when you write that way.

You make the distinction for Muslims – so I know you are at least capable of making that distinction.

"the Muslim ''honour killing'' card. Figures."
-------
How does it figure. I was referring to any wide range of comments you’ve made to differentiate the behavior of Muslim individuals, to prevent a wider criticism of their overall group practices. I did not characterize the quality of that argument, but I note with interest that you do not make the same distinction when assigning a group of pathologies to men.

“Typical men's rights nonsense….” ---Antonia
--------------
I’m not for men’s rights any more, or less, than women’s rights - which is to say that I'm a devout humanist and an old school libertarian liberal. Criticism of feminist dogma does not equal men's rights crap.

“In the US, 2.5% of men murdered are victims of intimate homicide, versus about 33% of women murdered. –Antonia”
----------------
Antonia, you do realize that this US stat you cited only measures the proportions of cause of death, right? So, if more men are murdered overall, for more reasons, – then it will have the effect of driving the *proportion* of men murdered by DV lower, even though the actual number of men murdered by DV remains the same.

Again, it’s the difference between a percentage and a real number. More simply, all that stat says, is that fewer women than men are murdered for reasons other than DV – which could actually be better news for women than for the men.

BTW, why are we suddenly jumping tracks to the US? Can’t we argue one thing at a time? Murder rates in Canada? I’m sure we can branch out to abuse or rape later.

As for your 40,000 over 30 years (I'm rusty - do we pro-rate across each year?(- I know you like those big numbers. We still have to do that whole math thing - compare them vs the US population size - for each of those 30 years. And the US population is 10 times the size of ours. And you'll also arrive at a figure that's going to have over 10 thousand men in it too, who died at the hands of their spouses. And if you argue that those 10,000 are unimportant, I'm going to circle back the original Canadian 2007 number of 51 women murdered, which you originally posed as a War on Women, and I'm going to point out a double standard.

[Antonia]

Cherry-picking. Nit-picking. Obsessing.

My points remain unrefuted.

[Keith]

Antonia, Seems that you have artfully neglected to pick up on this incident of "Femocide" as you put it. It's a case where a woman targetted the women's wedding tent at a Kuwaiti wedding reception. It appears that in this single event by a woman the toll of deaths and injured exceeds all of the cases you've recently quoted combined. http://news.aol.com/article/kuwait-wedding-tent-fire/623787

[Keith]

Here's the rub Antonia, from the figures that you most recently quoted (2005), nearly 4 men are murdered for every woman that is murdered. You clearly place a higher "value" on the 1181 women killed by intimates while neglecting value let alone acknowledge the clearly high number of men murdered, 13,122. On the one hand you claim PaulR cherry picks statistics, yet you, yourself, cherry pick percentages of women murdered by intimates in effort to avoid the clearly obvious disproportion of men murdered verse women. This begs the question why do you trivialize the value of so many men's lives?

[MensRightsNow]

Antonia:

Your flaw, and it is a flaw, is your obssesion with domestic violence perpetrated by men. You fail to look at domestic violence as a breakdown in a realtionship, but instead as some women hating occurrence. This is ridiculous.

Yes men murder/injure their spouse more than women, men are stronger, this is a no-brainer, the laws of probability ensure this. This doesn't change the fact that women partake in domestic violence equally.

It's amazing that you make excuses for "battered women's syndrome" and "hormonal women" or "over worked women", but a man, emotionally and pychologically abused by his wife lashes out and you weight it differently? Your are being disingenuous when you call yourself a humanist.

Is the man supposed to leave his abusive wife? Maybe go to a shelter, though there are none. Lose his kids, be robbed of his life?

Domestic violence laws simply punish the perpetrator (almost always the man) while emotional and pychological abuse by women is never addressed or remedied.

[Ashley]

Huh?

I'm trying very hard to figure out where some of these commenters are drawing their conclusions from. Am I to understand that if a blogger writes about how terrible it is that women continue to be abused and/or killed by their spouse and cites sources that prove that more women than men are killed by their spouses, she is also somehow saying that the deaths of those women are more important than those of men who are killed? Really? By saying "I find it terrible that this is happening" that also means "I think these deaths are more important than others." Again, really?

I'm just ever so confused here, would someone please point out to me exactly where Antonia said that any one death is of more value than another? (without reading between the lines I mean, I want a direct quote of hers that says "these women dying is worse than these men dying" or something to that effect please)

[MensRightsNow]

Ashley: Simple...using stupid words like femicide.

[Ashley]

Sorry, not was I was looking for. Femicide is defined as the killing of women for a systematic reason, such as cultural reasons, and no where in that definition is the any mention of the fact that Femicide is a crime that is worse than Viricide (and that would be the killing of men).

It's just a term that describes who is being killed, kind of like all the other terms (Suicide, Familicide, Avunculicide, Prolicide, Filicide, Infanticide, Neonaticide, Fratricide, Sororicide, Mariticide, Uxoricide, Matricide, Patricide, Genocide, Democide, Omnicide, Regicide, Tyrannicide)

Do you have any problems with using the rest of those terms?

Hope that clears things up for you.

[glenfitz]

Here’s another point to note.

Antonia’s discussion with PaulR here, “Control Freaks Redux,” demonstrates the hissy-fit style (to provoke an outraged hissy-fit from the public) of reporting and journalism we see in the media. That is to say, a style that fails to fairly bring into discussion the weight of statistical occurrence.

Antonia seems to have lost the debate with PaulR on the question of her assertion regarding spousal homicide. Recall that she quoted the 2007 stats that, “there were 51 women and 13 men killed by a current or former spouse.”

And to that assertion, PaulR replied:

“Let's see how what this means though, as it pertains to the general point I was making. 30 million people, around 15 million each men and women. Comparing your numbers against the general population, that gives each woman a a 0.00017% chance of getting killed by her partner in 2007, and a man 0.000043% chance.”

Paul’s rebuttal correctly implies that Antonia’s statistics are nearly meaningless when stacked against the entire male and female population. The real question, then, that Antonia’s stats should cause us to ask is why spousal homicide (including Femicide) is so low. I hate to say this, but the force of Paul’s logic in his discussion of Femicide is very compelling.

[MensRightsNow]

When a feminist uses a word like "femicide", especially a radical like Antonia, it denotes superiority and suggests an agenda to equate female murders being more newsworthy or important than the murders of men.

[Antonia]

You forgot gendercide, Ashley.

But to Men's Rights activists, HOMIcide is the only acceptable term.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=homicide

"killing," c.1230, from O.Fr. homicide, from L. homicidium, from homo "man" + -cidium "act of killing."

[fern hill]

Antonia, you are amazing. I don't know why you even engage with these 'men's rights' losers.

[Antonia]

It keeps them off the streets, Fern.

[MensRightsNow]

murder: from the english; to kill someone, man, woman or child (humans) intentionally

[Ashley]

"When a feminist uses a word like "femicide", especially a radical like Antonia, it denotes superiority and suggests an agenda to equate female murders being more newsworthy or important than the murders of men."

Ah I see. That clears up this whole discussion then doesn't it? You fellas were under the impression Antonia was speaking in some kind of "Feminist Code" wherein words take on new meanings because the speaker is a Feminist.

In that case... I think you guys are super smart and awesome! (I'm not going to tell you what's that code for)

[Antonia]

SHHHH!

They may find out about the (secret) International League of Feminazis.

[glenfitz]

I notice that it is PaulR who has pressed his point in a dignified stance absent of the cheap inuendos and sarcasm thrown around in some recent posts here.

And I'm speaking as a man who strongly opposes PaulR's points elsewhere throughout this blog.

Let's try to follow PaulR's example of civil dialog. \\

Antonia, I would have been more impressed if in the just last post you had found a way to press one of your points home. But the "feminazis" jibe just wasn't necessary.

PaulR, thanks for your well thought out responses. I might disagree with your views almost totally, but I appreciate the civil tone in which you've expressed your views.

Cheers, glenfitz

[Antonia]

Lighten up. This is a blog. Not a dissertation.

I am still awaiting my points to be refuted.

Go to any emergency room and see how many men end up there with broken jaws and arms caused by their wives.