Twenty-two to thirty-five percent of women who visit emergency rooms are there for injuries related to ongoing abuse. This statistic, printed on a table slip by Brown University 's Women 's Center last year, was shocking. This table slip turns out to be more disappointing than shocking because the statistic is completely misleading. The statistic comes from the 1984 article "Domestic Violence Victims in the Emergency Department" published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was conducted in a downtown Detroit hospital. The authors admitted that this sample group was not representative of the American population at large. Ninety percent of the 492 patients questioned were from inner-city Detroit and 60 percent of …show more content…
The statistic comes from a study by the FBI. The FBI study relied on the book "Behind Closed Doors: Violence in The American Family", by Murray Straus and Richard Gelles. Gelles and Straus did find high levels of violence in American families; but they also found that women were as likely to engage in it as men. They did find that women are more likely to be seriously injured as a result of violence. However, they found the percentage of women who are seriously injured to be smaller than inflated claims of irresponsible feminists - fewer than one percent. Surveys about violence often distinguish between minor violence, such as pushing, shoving, grabbing, and slapping (no injuries) and severe violence, such as kicking, trying to hit with an object, and beating up (injuries). Often feminists create misleading statistics by deliberately ignoring the distinction between minor and sever violence and counting all acts of violence as abuse. No effort is made to distinguish between non-threatening aggression and physically harmful aggression. According to the 1998 National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAW) "approximately 5.9 million assaults [were] perpetrated against women" in the previous 12 months. Seems like a high …show more content…
Why? According to this survey a physical assault was defined as "behaviors that threaten, attempt, or actually inflict physical harm." Furthermore, the NVAW survey counts a "push, grab, or shove" as an assault. If a man gets in an argument with his girlfriend and he pushes her out of the way as he stomps out of the room, the NVAW counts the women as a victim