fling93 loves fishies

Super Bowl Violence and V-Day

Super Bowl Sunday’s coming up, and my wife mentioned that it’s the worst day of the year for domestic violence against women. It occurred to me I could use that as a tie-in announcing V-Day and my wife’s upcoming appearance in her school’s production of The Vagina Monologues. Well, it sounded like a good idea, but after poking around a little bit, I ran into one little problem…

It isn’t true (the part about the Super Bowl Sunday being the worst day for domestic violence, not the part about her appearance).

I found a variety of sources debunking the myth, but I think Cecil Adams explains it best on The Straight Dope:

The whole thing began when Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watchdog group with a vocal feminist wing, decided to draw attention to the problem of domestic violence by persuading NBC to run an anti-wife-beating spot during the 1993 Super Bowl. To bolster its case, FAIR sent out a press release saying the day of the Super Bowl was “one of the worst days of the year for violence against women in the home.” A separate statement sent to FAIR activists said “women’s shelters report a 40 percent increase in calls for help during Super Bowl Sunday.”

FAIR and other women’s advocacy groups held a press conference a few days before the Super Bowl in Pasadena, California, the site of the game. One speaker, Sheila Kuehl of the California Women’s Law Center, cited a study by researchers at Old Dominion University in Virginia showing an increase in police reports of beatings and hospital admissions in northern Virginia following games won by the Washington Redskins during 1988 and 1989. The Associated Press subsequently reported that there was a 40 percent increase in calls for help following the Super Bowl and a similar increase after Redskins victories. The AP reporter later said he got these figures from Kuehl and from a FAIR spokesperson.

FAIR’s attempt to draw attention to domestic violence was a huge success. NBC agreed to run the anti-wife-battering spot, and a flurry of reports appeared in major media citing the 40 percent figure, giving the impression that the football/violence link was a proven fact…

It was all baloney. Ken Ringle, a skeptical reporter for the Washington Post, called around and found that there was no evidence of increased violence against women during the Super Bowl and that claims about violence following Redskins victories had been exaggerated. Janet Katz, one of the authors of the Old Dominion study, said that emergency room admissions of women for gunshot wounds, stabbings, lacerations, and so on were slightly higher on days when the Redskins won, but not 40 percent. (Having read the study, I’d say even that claim is dubious. See below.) Ringle called several women’s shelters and found no evidence of increased violence against women on Super Bowl Sunday. Domestic violence experts said they knew of no research supporting such a claim.
….
The reality of violence against women is shocking enough—why make stuff up?

Indeed, from the Skeptic’s Dictionary, where I found the Cecil Adams column:

…the claim that there is a significant increase in violence against women on SBS is not supported by any scientific evidence whatsoever. Nevertheless, the claim that on SBS violence against women increases dramatically is still being claimed by many journalists and teachers who should know better.

Even so, the data regarding violent crime against children, women and men in our society are sobering:

1. 1995 Federal Bureau of Investigation data show that among all female murder victims, 26 percent were killed by husbands or boyfriends, compared to 3 percent of all male victims who were killed by wives or girlfriends.
2. Of the 10.9 million violent victimizations during 1994, 4.7 million were against female victims and 6.2 million against male victims. Among women victims there was one rape for every 270 females 12 years old and older, one robbery for every 240 women, one assault for every 29 women and one homicide for every 23,000 women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
3. According to a Nov. 1998 Department of Justice report on the National Violence Against Women Survey, 1,510,455 women and 834,732 men are victims of physical violence by an intimate.
4. Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts looked at 107 cases of rape, attempted rape and fondling at 30 NCAA schools between 1990 and 1993. Male athletes at 10 of those schools made up only 3.3 percent of the male student body, but were involved in 19 percent of the assaults.
5. “In 1995 and 1996, there were 200 cases of college and professional athletes, almost exclusively football and basketball players, arrested for abusing women sexually or physically.”

So why make stuff up? Well, probably because not one of those facts is as memorable as the Super Bowl non-fact. And because making up stuff works. With the attention span of most Americans, hardly anybody bothers to fact-check anything anymore (including many journalists, apparently) — I’m sure you’ve received tons of e-mail warnings of various urban legends. And well, it’s not the first or last time somebody was guilty of cherry picking statistics and not thoroughly fact-checking them because they conveniently furthered an agenda.

Anyway, this is not going to be as smooth a segue as it would have been, but oh well. I just couldn’t pass up the chance to debunk a myth. Anyway, my wife, Erika Jackson, will be appearing on stage in “The Vagina Monologues” as part of V-Day SJSU 2004. The performances are on February 12 and 13 (Thursday and Friday) at the Morris Dailey Auditorium on campus. Doors open at 6 PM; show starts at 7PM. Tickets are $10 pre-sale, $12 at the door, and are available now through Ticketmaster. Proceeds will go towards V-Day, SJSU Women’s Resource Center, Next Door: Solutions to Domestic Violence, YWCA Rape Crisis Center, and Casa Amiga Crisis Center in Juarez, Mexico.

And no, not a penny of it will be going towards FAIR.