(Scroll down or go here for a warmer on this post).
I spent some time on the phone with a guy from Statistics Canada. I asked him to look up some numbers for me, vis a vis the rate of violence against women in Canada generally, and Ontario specifically. I told him that a politician (Cheri DiNovo, MPP) said in a speech that 51% of women in Ontario are abused or assaulted. When he got back on the phone he said, "I found numbers quite a bit different from yours."
I figured. Yet he ran into the same problem I did. That is, define abuse or assault, and define whether she meant spousal abuse, or assault by a stranger.
I have to believe she's talking about spousal abuse, because her speech concentrates on women escaping violence in the home. She also states that the houses of Ontario act as a staging ground for "guerrilla warfare." This statement in the speech is also very clear (bold mine): "...here it’s one man against one woman in the quiet of their own home where no one else can see it, away from prying eyes."
The problem with statistics is that they're easy to play with. The guy on the phone directed me to a few tables in a report, and told me to be careful: most stats come from surveys with a limited time frame, in this case five years. He said it's possible someone could have morphed a couple of different surveys, or projected the numbers from all of the surveys to make up a "lifetime" number.
Still, he told me that the report was the most detailed the government had and that it was the go-to paper on the subject. His warning to be careful was exactly what I was thinking: if you say someone's wrong, they could use a calculator for five minutes, bend the figures, and call you a liar.
With that in mind, I took a look at what a Statistics Canada official calls the most detailed report on violence against women. Note that they're careful to advise "caution" on virtually all of their graphs and tables.
National surveys for violence against women have only been conducted since 1993. Before that, the government relied on police reports. What the three five-year studies show is that since 1993, violence against women nationwide has been declining (as has violence against men, a subject I can't remember being mentioned by any politician in my lifetime). In the three studies, at no time do 50% of women declare that they have been assaulted in the past five years:
The report struggles to figure out why the numbers are dropping and gives a list, such as increased use of women's services, increased public awareness, increased treatment for violent men, so forth. Never mentioned is this: maybe less men are hitting women.
Now let's look at DiNovo's main theme: violence against women in Ontario. DiNovo: "51% of our population are abused or assaulted; one in every two women in Ontario experiences abuse or assault. What does that mean?"
That means someone like me is going to pick up the phone to see if that's correct. Note she's talking in the present tense: 51% of the population are abused and assaulted.
The facts don't back her up:
According to Statistics Canada in the 1999 and 2004 reports, 7% of women reported being assaulted by their spouse. [I misread this graph earlier as representing 1999 through 2004. Note that it's two different reports covering ten years, but neither goes anywhere near 50%]. More numbers from the same period (click to enlarge):
The estimated number of violent incidents against women in Ontario from 1999 to 2004 was 227,000. For men, it was 215,000. Of those, the most prevalent form of violence against women is that their spouse pushed, grabbed, or shoved them. Men were more likely to be slapped or have something thrown at them. Both sexes reported an equal amount of being hit with something (23%).
These aren't happy number. Even though spousal violence is in decline, it's not good that 400,000 people reported being assaulted by their spouse. But there is no way that a politician can take these numbers and declare that half of the households in Ontario are battlefields. Further to that, it's insulting to men to imply that violence in the home only occurs against women, and that men are responsible for making Ontario resemble Darfur.
It's impossible to go through the entire report and write a blog about every detail. No point. The numbers are there. I can also see how the numbers and graphs in this report could be shaped and massaged to say anything someone wants. But guerrilla warfare? Not in Ontario. DiNovo seems to be going with the old gossip-rag saw: "Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story."
You can find the Statistics Canada report here. PDF format.
3 comments:
It's dead simple, Sean. Didn't you know that 90% of all domestic violence isn't reported? So the 227,000 is only 10% of the total, and the total is more like 2.5 million, which might well be 50% of the adult women population of Ontario.
And there you were, questioning our Cherie!
An even more shocking statistic is the 100% lifetime male mortality rate! So who's to blame?
To the first poster from Feb. 19:
These aren't police reports...these were surveys being conducted anonymously, so they are in fact rather representative. I can see how she arrived at the 50% number if Cherie decided to extrapolate 7% over 5 years to a lifetime (80 years):
7% * 16 = 112%!
But of course its not that simple...that 7% over a lifetime is unlikely to grow any higher than perhaps double the 5 year number (i.e. if you keep the same sample set, its unlikely that suddenly more spouses are going to become abusive), so our largest outlier would be near 14% tops imo.
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