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You should really go read this comments thread on Pharyngula. It’s the Eighth “Skeptic’ Circle” - an ongoing collection of high-quality blog posts which “praise science and reason, and smirk and mock the gullible and credulous.”

Dean of Dean’s World decided to submit this post (written by Trudy Schuett, a men’s rights activist) from his blog. Trudy’s post is a response to a post of mine, which criticized men’s rights activists for using outdated statistics to discuss intimate homicide. (Not coincidently, my post was included in the seventh Skeptic’s Circle).

Here’s where it begins to amuse. Trudy’s rebuttal of my post was not only rejected, the editor, P.Z. Meyers, found it so ridiculous that he openly mocked it when he posted the Skeptic’s Circus:

This article from Dean’s World on Men’s Issues and Stats has but one virtue: irony. Look at these opening lines in disbelief.

It seems the ignorance of feminists is not only alive and well, but growing at an astonishing rate. Or maybe it’s deliberate, this dissemination of obvious untruth. I vote for the deliberate, as I’ve never met a feminist or women’s shelter advocate yet who could hold an entire conversation without resorting to at least one fabrication.

If you must read further, watch the phony strawman go up in the second paragraph, too. Ouch.

Ouch, indeed.

This rejection infuriated Dean so much that he posted a sour grapes attack on the entire Skeptics Circle tradition.

The angry link from Dean’s world caused a few anti-feminists to swarm on the thread. And here’s where it’s very entertaining: a long debate ensues between the anti-feminists and the Skeptics, and the anti-feminists make total idiots of themselves. If you enjoy the “Alas” posts debunking anti-feminists, you’re pretty much guaranteed to enjoy this thread, too.

Also, note that in the comments on Dean’s World, Richard Bennett calls me “the Josef Goebbels of the women’s movement.” Lovely fellow, that Richard.

Unfortunately, P.Z. Meyer’s spam-prevention program has gone haywire, so people who haven’t already “joined” the site might not be able to post. So you can read the thread, but you might not be able to post to it. What follows “below the fold” are two responses I wrote intending to post on in P.Z.’s comments, but which I’m instead posting here. (UPDATE: I’ve just discovered that I can join P.Z.’s site, as long as I used IE rather than Firefox to do so.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise and I have been debating about the new JAMA study of fat and mortality. Here is Lindsay’s response to my critique of her earlier post. I hope to find time to respond to Lindsay sometime in the next week.

* * *

Glenn Sacks sent me an email about my response to his San Francisco Chronicle article claiming that men and women are equal victims of intimate homicide. First of all, he pointed me to this longer version of his argument, in which he describes his reasoning in more detail than the Chronicle’s space limitations permitted.

Secondly, Glenn took issue with my opinion that he and other men’s rights activists are “motivated to make arguments like this by their denial that sexism ever harms women more than men. In their view, men are always greater victims and women have nothing to complain about…” Here’s how Glenn describes his own view:

I don’t believe that men are oppressed and women are privileged or the other way around. I think both genders have advantages and disadvantages. But, what I have come to believe is that the disadvantages women face are in the public domain. Everyone knows about them. But few understand men’s. That is what I want to shine light upon.

Fair enough. However, I still think my original statement was a good description of how many MRAs think, even accepting that Glenn is an exception. Over on this thread on the MRA discussion board “Stand Your Ground,” when I asked a poster for an example of sexism or discrimination that harmed women, he responded “Bathrooms. There aren’t enough women’s bathrooms to meet the demand. That’s about all I can see…” And then another MRA poster responded that he didn’t even agree that bathrooms were a legitimate problem.

That’s anecdotal, of course, but I’ve debated with hundreds of MRAs over the years (mostly online), and the “women have no serious problems, not compared to what men suffer” attitude appears to be pervasive.

Amanda at Pandagon has posted the first of a promised series of posts providing “an overview of the men’s rights movement.” It looks to be a terrific series - I’m all a-quiver with anticipation.

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Men’s Rights radio host Glenn Sacks has an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle which argues that “there are actually as many wives and girlfriends who murder their male partners as vice versa.” Offhand, this seems like an odd claim; federal government numbers show that in 2002 (the most recent year available), 388 men and 1,202 women were killed by spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends - a ratio of about 3 women killed by an intimate for every man.

My impression is that Glenn (who is, for the record, a heck of a nice guy), and other MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) are motivated to make arguments like this by their denial that sexism ever harms women more than men. In their view, men are always greater victims and women have nothing to complain about - even thought that ideology causes them to make factually ridiculous arguments, such as Glenn’s argument here. (It would be as if feminists tried arguing that as many women as men are murdered each year overall, despite the clear evidence that overall most murder victims are male.)

Anyhow, back to the fisking…

DOJ statistics show that roughly 1,300 women are murdered by intimates each year. Yet domestic homicide is hardly a one-way street. The DOJ reports that 500 men are murdered each year by female intimates (excluding those killings deemed to be in self-defense). Moreover, evidence suggests that there are actually as many wives and girlfriends who murder their male partners as vice versa.

So Glenn, to his credit, acknowledges the DOJ statistics (his statistics and mine don’t quite match because Glenn’s data is from 1998). But although he says “evidence suggests” the numbers are equal, he doesn’t go on to present any evidence - just speculation and wistful thinking.

Warren Farrell, a high-profile expert witness in domestic violence cases and author of “The Myth of Male Power,” has delineated a number of “blinders” which have served to disguise the murder of male intimates. For one, women generally use less detectable methods to murder intimates than men do, including poisonings, which are often mistakenly recorded as “heart attacks” or “accidents.”

So according to this theory, women are committing hundreds of undetected murders of their intimates each year, which if accounted for would bring the murder rates close to even. What I’m confused by is, how on earth could there be “evidence” of how many undetected murders there are, who the undetected murderers are, and what undetected method they used? If there was such evidence, then the murders wouldn’t be undetected anymore.

I looked for the solution to this mystery in the Warren Farrell book Glenn cites. No dice - Farrell has no evidence to back up his claim that “a woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident” (Myth of Male Power, page 281). Farrell does mention two anecdotes - a female serial killer who used poison to kill several relations, and a woman who poisoned Tylenol bottles to kill her husband and a stranger. But for the male/female intimate homicide ration to be even, as Glenn claims it is, there would have to be around eight hundred undetected husband-murders a year. To leap from two unusual cases, which took place many years apart, to the speculation that 800 such cases occur annually without detection, is silly and unwarranted.

Also, women are much more likely than men to convince their extramarital intimates to do the killing, or to use contract killers, who often disguise murders as accidents or suicides, according to Farrell. If the surrogate killer is caught, the murder is categorized as a “multiple offender” killing instead of as an intimate partner murder.

There is some statistical evidence about multiple offender killings - although that evidence is absent from Glenn’s article. Mercy and Saltzman (American Journal of Public Health, May 1989, v79, p595-599) examined every known spouse homicide in the US over a decade - including multiple-offender killings. According to their study, there are an average of 15 multiple-offender spouse killings of husbands each year, and 5 multiple-offender spouse killings of wives each year.

Of course, that was back in the 1980s - spouse murder rates have dropped since then, especially for male victims. So maybe the real numbers now are lower than 15 and 5 per year. On the other hand, Mercy and Saltzman didn’t include boyfriend and girlfriend murders, so maybe the numbers are a bit higher. It doesn’t matter, because no matter how you slice it, multiple-offender intimate killings aren’t even close to common enough to make a significant difference. Remember, currently there are about 400 men and 1,200 killed by intimates each year; adding another 20 or 40 murders to that doesn’t change the overall picture significantly, and cannot justify Glenn’s claim that the numbers are even.

In addition, there are five times as many unsolved murders of men as of women. If only a small percentage of these murders are really intimate-partner homicides, men would comprise over 40 percent of all intimate murder victims.

Really? Let’s do the math.

In 2002, there were 12,410 male murder victims, of which 36.3% - that is, about 4,505 - were unsolved. In comparison, in 2002 there were 3,764 female murder victims, of which 27.7% - about 1,043 - were unsolved. (That’s a total of over 5,500 unsolved murders in 2002 alone - kind of depressing, if you think about it).

Currently, men are about 24 percent of all known intimate murder victims. To be 40% of all intimate murder victims, we’d have to assume that beyond the 388 known male intimate murder victims, there are an additional 513 unsolved male intimate murders - and there isn’t even a single case of an unknown female intimate murder. In other words, to believe Glenn, we have to believe that a solid majority of women who murder intimates are never caught, whereas every single man who murders an intimate is caught.

That’s ridiculous.

Of course, we could instead assume that not every man gets away with murder, and make up for it by increasing our assumed number of uncaught women. For instance, what if we assume that there are a thousand woman a year who get away with murdering intimates, but only 880 men who get away with it. That gives us Glenn’s claimed “40%” figure, and we don’t have to assume that women and only women ever get away with murdering an intimate.

However, we do have to assume that 22% of all unsolved murders of men were really intimate murders (for comparison’s sake, consider that among solved murders of men, fewer than 5% are intimate murders) - which destroys Glenn’s claim that “only a small percentage of these murders [would need to be] intimate-partner homicides” to make his 40% figure come true. We also have to assume that out of 1043 unsolved murders of women, 880 - that’s 83% - were really intimate murders.

No matter how you do the math, there’s no way to reach Glenn’s claimed 40% figure - let alone the 50% figure he implied earlier in the article - without making genuinely ridiculous assumptions.

Glenn’s continues:

This is consistent with the DOJ’s 1994 survey Murder in Families, which analyzed 10,000 cases and found that women make up over 40 percent of those charged in familial murders.

I recently discussed the problem with Glenn’s data source in detail. But in a nutshell: Before 1988 black men were more likely to be killed by an intimate than black women. Since then, the number of male victims per year has dropped hugely. The source Glenn chose uses data from 1988, and since it considers only 33 urban counties it has more blacks in its sample than a nationally representative sample would.

So by using out-of-date urban data, Glenn is taking a historic anomaly - the high rate of husband-murder among blacks before 1988 - and treating it as if it represents the norm.

So what’s left after we brush aside all the unlikely suppositions, the unfounded speculations, and the cherry-picked data sources? We have the data that opened this post: In the US, currently, around 400 men and 1,200 women are known to be killed by spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends each year. That’s a pretty simple and hard to deny fact; but it doesn’t fit in with the MRA ideology, which says that men must always be equal or greater victims.

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In the comments to an earlier post, Brad Benjaminson (who doesn’t identify as a men’s rights activist, but tends to cite writings by MRAs) cited several articles he thought of interest. I read the title of one - “Wives Also Kill Husbands-Quite Often” - and before I even saw the date the article was written (1994), I knew the article would use data from before 1990.

How did I know? Because I’ve read a lot of men’s rights articles about “intimate partner homicide” (that’s murdering a spouse, a girlfriend or a boyfriend), and nearly all of them use pre-1990 data. For instance, a quick search of two MRA (men’s rights activist) websites - Men’s Network.org and MenWeb - found seven articles arguing that women are about as likely as men to commit intimate murder. All of them used data from before 1990 to make their case. In fact, almost all of them used the same data set - a Bureau of Justice Statistics study of intimate homicide in 33 of the 75 largest-population (i.e., urban) counties, which was published in 1994 but used data gathered in 1988. The BJS has published more recent work - so why do the MRAs return to this one source over and over? (Or, if not this source, sources that also used urban data from before 1990?)

Because they want to prove - despite clear data, like these recent FBI figures, showing men are far more likely to murder wives and girlfriends than vice-versa - that men are “equal victims.” (This relates, I believe, to a larger project of trying to show that patriarchy doesn’t exist, women have nothing to complain about, etc.)

So what’s special about Urban data from before 1988? Check out these charts (source), both featuring more recent homicide data than the data the MRAs highlight:

This graph shows the reality: although there have always been more women murdered by intimates than vice-versa, the numbers used to be closer. In particular, there’s been a huge decline in male victims - which, unsurprisingly, isn’t something that MRAs with an ideology of male victimhood want to admit.

So that’s why MRAs avoid recent homicide data. Why do they prefer urban data, rather than countrywide data?

As you can see, before 1988 or so black husbands were more likely to be murdered by wives than vice-versa. The BJS data set the MRAs like to use, contains data from spousal-murder cases in 33 urban counties in 1988. In that data set, “Blacks comprised 55% of the 540 defendants, and whites comprised 43%. Among husband defendants 51% were black and 45% were white. Among wife defendants 61% were black and 39% were white.”

So using out-of-date urban data enables MRAs to use a historic anomaly - the high rate of husband-murder among blacks before 1988 - and pretend it represents the norm.

* * *

So why have husband-murder rates been dropping faster? Obviously, there is no one simple answer: but part of the answer is that abused women now have more resources. “Studies of homicides between intimates show that they are often preceded by a history of physical abuse directed at the women, and several studies have documented that a high proportion of women imprisoned for killing a husband had been physically abused by their spouses… the weight of the available evidence shows that often wives kill their husbands in the context of a history of wife abuse.” (Mercy, J.A. & Saltzman, L.E. “Fatal violence among spouses in the United States, 1976-85″ American Journal of Public Health 79(5): 595-9 May 1989)

Many of these studies have found that wives who kill their husbands often felt “hopelessly trapped” in an abusive relationship. Therefore, it seems possible that the growth of resources for abused women since 1970 has made a significant number of such wives feel less “trapped,” hence reducing the murder rate of men. To test this possibility, Browne & Williams looked at state-by-state spousal murder rates compared to a “Resources for Abused Women Index,” (availability of shelters, hot lines, support networks, etc, in each state), after controlling for demographic variables (such as the higher general murder rate in many southern states). (Browne, A. & Williams, K. R. “Exploring the effect of resource availability and the likelihood of female-perpetrated homicides.” Law and Society Review, 23, 75-94, 1989.)

The study found that “the Resources for Abused Women Index, although negatively correlated with rates of both types of partner homicide, is more strongly correlated with female-perpetrated than with male-perpetrated homicide…. Moreover, such resources were associated with a decline in the rate of female-perpetrated partner homicide in 1980-1984 compared to 1976-1979.”

So it seems that, thanks to feminism, abusive men may now be less likely to be murdered by their wives.

It’s also possible, that if battered black women (on average) had less access to resources to get themselves out of abusive relationships, that could explain the unusually high rate of black husbands murdered before battered women’s shelters became (relatively) common.

Another question: Why has homicide of white wives declined while homicide of white girlfriends hasn’t? I’m not sure what explains the racial difference, but one factor contributing to the girlfriend/wife difference is the emergence of no-fault divorce. According to a paper (.pdf link) by Betsey Stevensen of Harvard and Justin Wolfers of Stanford, no-fault divorce signficantly helps women in bad marraiges. From an article written by Wolfers:

The findings reveal that under no-fault laws a wife can threaten to leave an abusive husband, and this becomes a credible threat. Under the old regime, this was not so. Our theory is that the fear of divorce creates a strong incentive for abusive partners to behave.

More generally, easy access to divorce redistributes marital power from the party interested in preserving the marriage to the partner who wants out. In most instances, this resulted in an increase in marital power for women, and a decrease in power for men.

Our analysis of US data revealed the legislative change had caused female suicide to decline by about a fifth, domestic violence to decline by about a third, and intimate femicide - the husband’s murder of his wife - to decline by about a tenth.

Unfortunately, as “marriage movement” and men’s right activists have become more influential in recent years, there has been a movement to defund battered women’s shelters and to repeal no-fault divorce laws. Either of these changes would be incredibly harmful to the interests of battered women.

* * *

(Below the fold are links to the seven MRA articles I looked at, with the relevant bits quoted).