Debunking Domestic Violence Statistics The following is a copy of a letter written by Eeva Sodhi in response to a Globe and Mail article, 2002 02 23: The Globe and Mail: Child-welfare time lost on paperwork, report says

By SIMON COOPER INVESTIGATIONS UNIT

[A summary of the article is appended WHS] Sir, The problem is not that there are insufficient numbers of social workers. Rather, it is the allocation of those resources. What is needed is to re-educate social workers and reassign their priorities. It is of grave concern that the entire, and I mean entire, emphasis now is on the so-called family/domestic, etc. violence, which in the social worker lingo means "violence against women". Children are linked as appendices to women and only receive attention when they can be used as propaganda tools. Though the scientific community now has to admit that females are at least as violent as males, even if they may express it in a slightly different manner, often perpetrating their acts of aggression by proxy, all counselling is based on William Glasser's Reality Therapy. Men's therapy groups - to stop the violence that exists in relationships between men and women. Therapists use a discussion format to explore men's violence in relationships and to propose non-violent alternatives for solving problems. Responsibility for one's actions and consequence of choice are emphasized. Women's therapy groups - to increase women's understanding of violence between partners and to provide them with strategies for protecting themselves against that violence. Therapists encourage open and frank discussion about past violence and explore methods of avoiding violence in the future. The Ontario government spends $145 million in direct contributions to combat violence against women, yet there is no evidence to support the hypothesis that we are in the grips of an all out epidemic of wife beatings and homicides. Rather, all the available data point to the other direction: women are the aggressors, not the aggrieved, especially when it comes to child abuse, often fatal. Health Canada is currently compiling ER data on injury admissions. The South Fraser (B.C.) Regional Injury Report is the first pilot project of its kind available in Canada. South Fraser Regional Report Period 1 http://www.injuryresearch.bc.ca/SFHR_RegionalReport1.pdf When questioned, Kate Turcotte, representing the project, replied: For the Inflicted Injuries, the numbers are 359 for males and 117 for females.



Unfortunately, due to issues around small numbers, we are not able to provide more data regarding the cross tabulations. Certainly, in future, we will be able to produce these tables in greater detail, and separately for males and females.



Our system is coded using the International Classification of Disease system (ICD-10 CA).



Any injuries resulting from domestic violence, and identified as such in the Emergency Department, will be identifiable in our database. Of the Inflicted Injuries reported, a subsample of these will be family violence.



As the numbers for domestic violence will be fairly small for our first 3-month time period, I believe that it would be beneficial to you if we put together a report on Intentional Injury once we have received our full year of data. We are expecting to have received all of the Fiscal year 2001/2002 data by the end of June. At that time we will be able to provide a more detailed breakdown of Intentional Injuries, included domestic violence by sex, and we will also be able to do a comparison of our three regions.



I hope that this helps for now,



Kate Turcotte and in another message: Included at the bottom of this message are the ICD-10 CA codes that relate to violence, including domestic violence. However, in ICD-10 there are also many other codes that could be selected concerning Inflicted Injury, which do not identify who inflicted the injury.



Assault (X85-Y09)

Includes: homicide

injuries inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill,

by any means

Use additional code from category U98.-, to identify place of

occurrence (not applicable for Y06-Y07)

Excludes: injuries due to:

* legal intervention (Y35.-)

* operations of war (Y36.-)



Y06 Neglect and abandonment

Y06.0 By spouse or partner

Y06.1 By parent

Y06.2 By acquaintance or friend

Y06.8 By other specified persons

Y06.9 By unspecified person



Y07 Other maltreatment syndromes

Includes: mental cruelty

physical abuse

sexual abuse

torture

Excludes: neglect and abandonment (Y06.-)

sexual assault by bodily force (Y05.-)

Y07.0 By spouse or partner

Y07.1 By parent

Y07.2 By acquaintance or friend

Y07.3 By official authorities

Y07.8 By other specified persons

Y07.9 By unspecified person



end -----Original Message-----

From: Turcotte, Kate [mailto:kturcotte@cw.bc.ca] For more, see: https://fathersforlife.org/health/EDISDR_SFHR_2001_causes.htm The FBI in the U.S.A. has been collecting data on family violence. Their intake data are sex specific for both alleged perpetrators and victims. Yet, these data are selectively disseminated either as sex specific or sex neutral so as to make it appear that female family members are the victims and males the perpetrators.



See: NIBRS paper "The Structure of Family Violence: an Analysis of Selected Incidents" URL http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/nibrs/famvio21.pdf



The paper "The Structure of Family Violence: an Analysis of Selected Incidents" gives the sex of the victims, the offender statistics are gender neutral. On page 11, for example, you find the following information: "...However, in family situations, these children represent 62 percent of all victims. Juveniles aged 12-17 comprise 29 percent overall offenses and 26 percent in family in family occurences. Females are frequent victims of these offenses, comprising 75 percent of the victims of both family and overall offenses" [end quote]



Table 29. Percent Distribution of Victims by Age, Sex, and Race, Other Offenses, 1995 (The other tables are formulated by the same principle)



The definitions in the data include spouse, parent, sibling, step-parent, stepchild, in-law, grandchild, grandparent, common-law spouse, other family member, etc. Based on that, the offender is not always a male.



The reader is left to wonder what are the numbers in the following categories: Female offender/female victim; female offender/male victim; male offender/male victim; male offender/female victim, as well as victim/offender and offender/victim relationship, by sex and age (i.e. child, juvenile, young adult, elderly, biological parent, stepparent, etc.). Without that information, there are no means to establish the sex ratio as it applies to the offenders.



Kwong, Bartholomew, & Dutton. (1999). "Gender Differences in Patterns of Relationship Violence in Alberta". Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, Vol. 31, No. 3, July 1999. pp. 150-160) http://www.mensrights.com.au/page13ae.htm report: Gender differences in patterns of relationship violence were investigated in a representative sample of adult men (N=356) and women (N=351). Results: Gender patterns in violence reports: A smaller proportion of women reported male only violence (13%) compared to female only violence (35%), and fewer women reported male initiation of violence (26%) than female initiation of violence (67%). Patterns of relationship violence: Only 3 of the 52 women who reported receiving any violence in the year prior to the survey fit the batterer/victim pattern of clearly asymmetrical violence. The majority of violence reported by respondents was equally perpetrated by men and by women, relatively minor and infrequent, and did not result in serious injury. (p. 157) Conclusions: Consistent with research outside Canada, men and women reported similar rates of violence perpetration and victimization. And, while more comprehensive study is needed, it appears that a substantial proportion of womens violence cannot be explained as acts of self-defense. (p.158) Nevertheless, those women who did report using violence in intimate relationships, 73.4% said they struck the first blow, women physically abuse children more than men do and that only minor differences exist between male and female aggression .



Stets and Straus found the female-severe/male-minor pattern to be significantly more prevalent violence pattern than male-severe/female-minor. For dating couples, 12.5% reported the female-severe pattern and 4.8% reported the male-severe pattern; 1.2% of cohabiting couples reported the male-severe pattern compared to 6.1% reporting female-severe; 2.4% of married couples reported male-severe and 7.1% reported female-severe.



With these data, the use of severe violence by females was not in reaction to male violence or as a preemptive strike, since the female partner in each couple reported only minor violence from her male partner despite using severe violence herself. Similarly, couples where only the female was violent were significantly more common (39.4% of dating couples, 26.9% of cohabiting couples, 28.6% of married couples) than couples where only the male was violent (10.5% of dating couples, 20.7% of cohabiting couples, 23.2% of married couples).What is experienced, especially in intimate relationships, is the power advantage women appear to have in their ability to introspect, analyze and describe feelings and process. Hence, assaultive males report feeling powerless in respect to their intimate partners.



"Partner Violence Among Young Adults" Series: NIJ Research Preview, April 1997, Published by U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, with support from the National Institute of Justice (U.S.) http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/fs000167.txt



Interspousal violence in a representative sample of 562 couples in Calgary, Canada. [Brinkerhoff, M., & Lupri, E. (1988) In: Canadian Journal of Sociology,13, 407-434] The overall violence rate by husbands was 10.3% (severe violence 4.8%) while the overall violence rate by wives was 13.2% (severe violence 10.7%). (Only the incidence of husband-on-wife violence was published.)



Carrado, M. et al. (1996) Aggression in British heterosexual relationships: a descriptive analysis. [In: Aggressive Behavior, 22, 401-415] In a representative sample of 894 British men and 971 women 18% of the men and 13% of the women reported being victims of physical violence at some point in their heterosexual relationships. With regard to current relationships, 11% of men and 5% of women reported being victims of partner aggression. Rape. Advocacy information: 1-in-4 of college women are raped annually Actual statistics:



A review of Oklahoma University enrolment data and information supplied by campus police yielded the estimate that the annualized rape risk for 1996 freshmen women at OU was 1 chance in 476. [Source: Deflating the Date Rape Scare: A Look At Campus Police Records by Michael P. Wright, Scientific Social Research, Norman, Oklahoma]



BJS report NCJ-151658 notes that there are 2 rapes or attempted rapes reported per 1,000 US citizens, which is 530,000 reports of rape per year. There are 15,000 rape convictions annually. Based on new DNA tests, a third of those convictions are now found to be false. Therefore, there are potentially 520,000 false rape allegations a year. Sentencing: Advocacy information: Nearly 90% of spouse murderers receive a prison sentence, with an average sentence of thirteen years. Convicted spouse murderers were less likely to receive a severe sentence (12.7% received a life sentence and 9.3% received probation) compared to non-family murder convicts (16% received a life sentence and 2.7% received probation). (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1994) Actual statistics: Nearly 13 percent of wives accused of killing husbands were acquitted, compared with 1.4 percent of husbands accused of killing their wives.



Of those convicted, 16 percent of the women had received probation instead of prison, ten times the rate for men.



The average prison sentence for women convicted of intimate homicide was six years, compared to 17 for men.



Of the 25 women pardoned by Governor Richard Celeste (Ohio) in 1990, 15 said they had not been physically abused. Six had discussed killing their husbands beforehand, and two had tracked down their estranged spouses to kill them. One Maryland woman who had been freed had hired a hit man and collected on her husband's insurance policy. The data are limitless, yet we still rely on the innovative feminist documentation of non existing "facts", based on such phrases as "some researchers believe", or "it is believed that ..." In the meantime, tens of thousands of Canadian children suffer incredible torture in the hands of their parents, mainly mothers, and we only hear of some of them who die such horrible death as Randal Dooley in Toronto.



It is up to the media to become informed and to begin to disseminate facts rather than promote the goals of a destructive ideology. First step in the right direction would be to demand that all women's studies departments in their present form be dismantled.



Sincerely,



Eeva Sodhi RR 1 McDonald's Corners,

Ontario, Canada K0G 1M0

e-mail:rajeeva@ripnet.com The Globe and Mail article: Child-welfare time lost on paperwork, report says

By SIMON COOPER

INVESTIGATIONS UNIT



Saturday, February 23, 2002  Print Edition, Page A1



Summary: An internal report of the Ontario Children's Aid Society, obtained by the Globe and Mail claims that Social workers in charge of children's welfare spend most of their time (85%) "with paperwork and bureaucracy rather than providing frontline care." The report comes in the wake of the deaths of several children in care, including that of Jordan Heikamp, an infant who starved to death in 1997 while in the care of a children's aid society in Toronto. Ontario experienced a 100% increase, with some agencies, during the past three years in the number of children coming into care of Ontario's 55 children's aids societies (CAS). [In the opinion of many people familiar with the failings of the system, the increase is more likely due to CASs becoming far more intrusive and far more powerful than they used to be. That follwing paragraph, quoted from the article, supports that.] In Ontario, new procedures for assessing risk to children, brought in through recent changes to the child-welfare system, have been pinpointed as one of the root causes for the diversion of social workers away from frontline work. The article quotes a number of social workers that indicate that the problem of increasing entanglement of social service aganecies in bureaucratic work is all-pervasive throughout Canada, and that in Ontario alone, the amount of unpaid overtime work equates to 650 full-time social worker positions, and quotes from the report that although, "'significant accomplishments have been realized,' ...the cumbersome nature of some of the new procedures has resulted in 'unintended negative consequences' for the quality of social work."



Aside from identifying the plight of the poor over-worked social workers that have to spend between 70 and 85 percent of their working hours wading through a morass of bureaucratic procedures rather than actually helping children in need of their help, the article states that, "Other issues of concern outlined in the report include: Too little time for staff to thoroughly investigate and assess new cases;

Senior social workers prevented from supervising and training younger workers because of growing administrative burdens;

Increased risk to children because social workers do not have the time to properly get to know them or their family's problems. The article concludes with the following: The Children's Aid Society of Metro Toronto, which has experienced a 27-per-cent increase in cases since 1997, has been introducing its own reforms to help free up social workers.



These include hiring special support staff to do paperwork, recruiting legal clerks to handle more of the court-related bureaucracy and improving computer software used for case management. More than 2,000 new social workers have also been trained in the past two years. Investigations@globeandmail.ca Although the article makes it quite clear how enormous an industry CASs have become and that they'll without any doubt grow to astounding and cancerous proportions, it is odd that the article didn't express the slightest bit of curiosity about the fact that fewer and fewer children are being born in Canada every year, and yet, that problems affecting children and requiring intervention by social workers increase to massively.



What seems to be at work is a classical case of Parkinson's Law: in any bureaucracy, "Work expands to use up available time." To which should be added that work will also expand to consume all other resources that will be made available.



After all, CASs are organizations in search of problems. That doesn't mean that they don't attempt to solve the problems they find, but it does mean that they will not solve them necessarily to everyone's satisfaction, nor does it mean that they don't create problems where none exist,[*] or that they find all of the problems they should find.



WHS

_____________________

* A prime example is the forceful abduction by an Ontario CAS of all seven of the children from a religious family in Aylmer, Ontario, even though there was absolutely no justification for doing so, other than that the family was, well, religious. More politically correct, the preferred expression is not the "abduction" of children, rather, it is called apprehending children, such as in "the criminal was apprehended." See also Big Sister Is Watching! An epidemic of state-sponsored kidnapping feeds a tyrannical system hungry for revenues. Child Protective Services and Children's Aid Societies systematically and increasingly often rob children from their parents. Kafkaesque chicaneries that the targeted families find impossible to comply with are the tools used to keep the revenues rolling in. Many families don't survive the ordeals that they are being subjected to by any given CPS or CAS. Rape: Are the Vaginas in the House?



Girlwriteswhat debunks Eve Ensler (of The Vagina Monologues) and turns common perception about rape on its head. (28 minutes -- some of the best 28 minutes you will ever have spent) Back to the Table of Contents for Eeva Sodhi's Web Pages __________________

Posted 2002 02 23

Updates:

2012 08 02 (added link to Are the Vaginas in the House?)