DISTORTING THE TRUTH ABOUT SPOUSAL MURDER

HOW WOMEN'S ADVOCATES TRY TO FOOL YOU ABOUT SPOUSAL MURDER

Consider the following paragraph from page 118 of the World Health Organization's (WHO) huge pdf file, "World report on violence and health." It is an example of how ideological groups try to fool you about gender violence:

“Studies from Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States of America show that 40–70% of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, frequently in the context of an ongoing abusive relationship. This contrasts starkly with the situation of male murder victims. In the United States, for example, only 4% of men murdered between 1976 and 1996 were killed by their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends. In Australia between 1989 and 1996, the figure was 8.2%”

Sounds really horrific for women relative to men, right? There's just one problem. While percentages don't lie, they can distort the truth when used without the actual numbers that show how the percentages were derived. (Time magazine once tried this trick regarding the number of women murdered in the workplace vs. the number of men murdered.)

By leaving out actual homicide numbers and using only percentages, WHO is able to suggest that in the U.S., for example, nearly 14 times as many women are murdered by intimates as men. (To get the figure of nearly 14 times, I averaged the 40-70% of women murdered in the five countries, getting a result of 55%. I then divided the 55% by the 4% of men murdered in the U.S., which comes out to 13.75.)

What WHO is banking on, I suspect, is this: when reading the paragraph, we unconsciously assume – because the huge report at this point has already focused almost exclusively on the horrors of violence against women -- that women are murdered in an actual number equal to or greater than the number of men murdered, even though the homicide figures by sex are disclosed elsewhere in the report. To further nudge us into sympathizing with female victims of violence, WHO employs the emphatic term “only 4%” to address the men murdered by intimates in the U.S.

To get a true picture of men and women murdered by intimates, consider the following figures on homicides by sex in the U.S. in 2000 (see "Cable TV's Crime Shows Love White Female Homicide Victims," which provides the government source for the numbers):

Men------12,407
Women---3,799

Now let's do the simple math:

Four percent of 12,407 is 496 men murdered by intimates. Fifty-five percent -- the average of 40-70% in the five countries -- of 3,799 is 2,089 women murdered by intimates. If in the U.S. only 40% of female murder victims were killed by intimates, the number is 1,520. That's still over three times as many women murdered by intimates as men -- but it's a far cry from the nearly 14 times as many that WHO would like us to picture.

Into this we must add the observations of Dr. Warren Farrell, who writes in Chapter Six of his book Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say:

The basic trick of the Ad Council's ad is that a high percentage of murdered wives are murdered by their husband or ex-husband exactly because married women are so rarely murdered to begin with. 

But aren't husbands more likely to kill their wives than vice-versa? Again, we enter the arena of "who's the biggest victim?" It bothers me to have to document that the sexes kill their spouses about equally, but there are life-and-death consequences that result from feminists persuading the public that it is almost exclusively husbands who kill wives. It leads to financing of only women's shelters and hotlines without shelters and hotlines for men, thus leaving men with no place to go when they are in danger, so he becomes a powder keg that can endanger his wife rather than someone who can find a supportive retreat while he cools off.

The brief answer to this accusation is that no one knows for sure which sex kills the other more. In a second we'll see why it's likely that more wives kill husbands, but until the government is willing to collect data about the three female methods of killing, we can only do an educated guess. I'll explain...

On the surface, the Bureau of Justice reports women are the perpetrators in 41% of spousal murders. However, the male method of killing is with a knife or gun, done by himself. The three female methods of killing are different. The third female method is poisoning, but I'll deal first with the first two methods, both of which are "multiple offender killings" — that is, a wife either hires a professional killer or persuades a boyfriend. We only know that in multiple offender killings there are four times as many husbands as victims than wives, according to the FBI. These multiple offender killings are meant, of course, to not be discovered, but even a multiple offender killing that is discovered is not recorded by the government as a wife killing a husband, it is listed separately by the FBI as a "multiple offender killing." That is, the 41% figure does not include either of the first two female methods of killing.

How common are contract killings? We don't know. Perhaps the best hint we have of how many husbands could be killed by contract comes from the FBI, reporting that some 7800 men were killed without the killer being identified (vs. 1500 women). This number is almost 9 times larger than all of the wives killed by spouses and ex-spouses put together . However, this "9 times as many" figure is a very inadequate hint since many of these men were doubtless killed by other men, and many are unmarried — and our comparisons are among married people.

Most important, of the hundred or so contract killings about which I have read, only a small percentage were originally recognized as such. The very purpose in hiring a professional was to have the husband's death appear as an accident so she can collect insurance money. And that is also the purpose of the third female method: poisoning.

Joyce Cohen exemplifies a typical contract killing. Stanley Cohen was a Florida millionaire when Joyce became his secretary. Eventually they got married, but soon got bored enough with each other that, among other things, they had not had sex for two years. (I did not personally investigate this.) Joyce feared a divorce would return her to being a secretary. So she used $100,000 of Stanley's money to hire some young men to kill her husband. When he was asleep and naked, she had him shot four times in the head with his own gun. 80 Joyce's motivation is obvious (although statistically her existence as a spouse-killer is invisible).

A husband is much more likely to kill in an emotional fit of rage (so much for the rational sex!). Or he kills his wife and children, and then turns the gun to his own head. Next time you read about a husband killing a wife in the newspaper, read a little further in the article and you'll be surprised to see how often he also kills himself. And obviously the killing of himself indicates that money is not his primary motivation. When people commit suicide, it is because they feel there is no one who loves them or needs them.

In brief, a wife's style of killing reflects her motivation which requires the killing not be detected; a husband's style of killing reflects his motivation and, well, a husband who kills himself is pretty likely to be caught — a dead husband is a dead giveaway. Even if her killing does get detected, it is much more likely to never be recorded as a spouse killing — but as a "multiple offender" killing, or an accident or a heart attack. When a woman is murdered, we are more likely to track down the killer than when a man is murdered.

The next time you see an article that is obviously attempting to impose on you a certain view by using percentages but no numbers, ask the writer and his/her editor to provide the numbers so you can get the complete picture.