Dusty old bones, full of green dust.
Well, the way they initially presented has people coming in saying “Well, men get hurt too” like they’re trying to say they don’t. The way this first explained the numbers is saying, “Hey, they’re 27% more likely to be harmed.” All the person did was turn the data into a percentage.
How is it dishonest? It’s looking at one specific kind of harm. It just happens men aren’t the highest statistic for this kind of violence. That’s literally all it’s saying. “When it comes to relationship violence, women tend to be victims more often than men.” If this was a report about suicide and they were ignoring men, I would get the issue.
It’s like an article talking about smokers being more likely to get lung cancer. It’s not the only way to get it, but they’re focusing on smokers. We wouldn’t go, “Well they’re ignoring all the miners.” They just happen to not be the focus of that study.
This is specifically about intimate partner violence, not a study of every cause of death. They’re focusing on women because the numbers are not higher for men. If they were the same, there would be little need to distinguish the two, but they noticed a tend. That’s the whole point of this is to highlight that women face a higher risk of harm at home, at the hands of someone they know, than men. That’s it. They’re not saying men don’t also get abused and murdered, nor is it saying the other ways men die aren’t valid.
Posting this from another thread.
It’s a shame that this data is being presented this poorly, because this is a really important issue that deserves attention. None of the figures presented in the linked article have the proper context to understand them. Even the UN report itself does not present their findings well.
So, for instance, 140 women per day is of course more than the ideal number of zero, but there are billions of people on this planet. To actually quantify the gender imbalance of this number, we need to compare it to the number of men who are victims in the same way. From the report:
Globally, approximately 51,100 women and girls were killed by their intimate partners or other family members […out of…] 85,000 women and girls killed intentionally during the year […] In other words, an average of 140 women and girls worldwide lost their lives every day at the hands of their partner or a close relative.
The report does not offer corresponding numbers for male (or non-binary) victims. It does, however, say that 11.8% of male victims and 60.2% of female victims are killed by partners or other family members. It also acknowledges that 80% of all homicide victims are men and 20% women, which is beside the point as this is about domestic violence, but it will allow us to do some math to arrive at numbers to compare against.
…which should have been the headline. 27% more is massive! Domestic violence is a huge issue, and women are more likely to suffer from it!
There is no need to obfuscate the numbers to be less honest. The honest numbers themselves are shocking enough, and scientifically literate readers won’t dismiss your credibility along with your cause. I look forward to future UN reports communicating these horrifying statistics a bit more clearly.
Edit: Wtf is wrong with ya’ll? This article is only about one kind of violence that women are more suseptible too. That’s it. No one is trying to say men aren’t getting hurt, or even that women being harmed is the #1 cause of women’s death. Someone has a post like, “Well, women are more likely to slip, so that’s more dangerous, so there!” Like, okay??? Men are usually the victims of violent crimes and homicides, but when they looked at home based partner abuse, women come out on top. Like, damn.
Here’s some articles on men since apparently we can’t have an article talking about something specific. I guess I should leave a comment on all of these saying “What about the girls!” :
Men and boys are also victims of sex trafficking
Like most things in the US, being treated like a human being is behind a paywall.
Good for her, but only $8k? For a lifetime of health issues?
The only way they could get this information is to compare it, that’s why they’re focusing on women, they happened to come out in top. If they said “smokers have an 80% higher chance of cancer”, I’m taking it that they compared it to people who don’t smoke, they don’t need to tell me that because I can infer it. If I get a report that says “men are 50% more likely to die in combat” I wouldn’t sit and go, “compared to what? Women? CHILDREN!? Why are they just focusing on men, like women don’t die in combat! They’re just showing scary numbers!” they’re focusing on the group that came out in top and delving into that. I don’t know how you would read the title of the article and be surprised that that is what they are focusing on.