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Feminism: chat

7310 babies lost in domestic abuse

16 replies

SamphirethePogoingStickerist · 19/07/2022 07:37

I just saw this on Twitter and felt physically ill with anger.

How the hell can this be happening in any part of the UK?

It's 2022 FFS! We no longer live in the so called Dark Ages!

7310 babies lost in domestic abuse
OP posts:
Etinoxaurus · 19/07/2022 07:52

That’s horrendous, but I suspect inaccurate. One act of violence, one lost baby is too many, but I suspect there’s a mistake there.Flowers

SamphirethePogoingStickerist · 19/07/2022 08:04

I was trying to figure that out. But, with no reason to disbelieve her given the case she is trying to bring, those do seem to be the bald facts.

35 a week in Scotland! Presumably from very early pregnancies onwards.

I WANT it to be a mistake...

OP posts:
XDownwiththissortofthingX · 19/07/2022 08:11

I could well believe 7,310 recorded incidences of DA perpetrated against pregnant women over a 4 year period. That only works out to be 5 per day, but I think that's been misinterpreted as every single recorded instance equating to one instance against 7,310 distinct, separate individuals resulting in the loss of a baby.

No reason to disbelieve her, but that hardly seems credible.

SW1amp · 19/07/2022 08:56

I’m also doubting that stat…
I was assaulted while pregnant, but no one followed up to check the outcome of the pregnancy

I find it hard to believe the police are properly tracking cases to compile that stat?

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 19/07/2022 09:21

@XDownwiththissortofthingX yes I think I agree with you. The numbers don't tally with our current understanding of prevalence and risk.

There were 53,000 babies born in Scotland in 2000. but we're talking a four year period so say 212000 so far as I can see the best estimate we have for the proportion of mums (in the uk) who are subjected to IPV during pregnancy is 3.4% So over the 4 year period that would give 7208 (say a range 7000 - 7500) babies born to mothers who had been subjected to ipv during the pregnancy.

Which, in terms of the order of magnitude, is the same as the tweet suggests for the number of women beaten so badly they lost the baby. So this would suggest that either rates of IPV are underestimated by about half and women experiencing IPV were at a 50% risk of losing the baby or rates of IPV in pregnancy were underestimated by a whopping 10x and the risk of miscarriage in women experiencing IPV was around 10% in line with the Guatemalan women from the study below. OR the tweeter has misunderstood the statistics they got from the police.

I'd suspect the tweet is the most likely to be wrong and as XDown suggests the number of callouts the police went to involving pregnant women has been conflated with them all being to separate women who all lost the baby. I'll be honest I want the statistic to be wrong, but sometimes that's it goes, you find a piece of data that just really doesn't fit your understanding and have to change your understanding to fit the data. I won't be doing that on the basis of this one tweet though.

Number of births in Scotland data

https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files/statistics/rgar/2019/Pages/bir-sec.html#:~:text=Births%20up%20to%202019,1900%20to%2053%2C000%20in%202000.

3.4% figure (whole uk) from this paper - Bacchus, Loraine, Gill Mezey, Susan Bewley, and Alison Haworth. "Prevalence of domestic violence when midwives routinely enquire in pregnancy." BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology 111.5 (2004): 441-45. Web. 22 Mar 2011

This study may be relevant "IPV affected 18% of the 1897 pregnant Guatemalan women aged 15-47 in this sample. Verbal IPV was most common (16%), followed by physical (10%) and sexual (3%) victimisation. Different forms of IPV were often co-prevalent. Miscarriage was experienced by 10% of the sample (n = 190). After adjustment for potentially confounding factors, physical or sexual victimisation by a male intimate partner in the last 12 months was significantly associated with miscarriage (ORadj 1.1 to 2.8). Results were robust under a range of analytic assumptions."

https://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2393-11-49

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 19/07/2022 09:23

that's *how it goes

SamphirethePogoingStickerist · 19/07/2022 09:44

I hope she gets it all clarified before she uses the numbers in court then!

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howdoesatoastermaketoast · 19/07/2022 15:47

She certainly seems clear what she asked for (looking at her twitter) I'm just not so sure that's what they sent back...

Could be, I'm just trying to process it's a lot

EmbarrassingHadrosaurus · 20/07/2022 14:03

Like PPs, I strongly want this to be a misunderstanding on someone's part.

Thank you for the analysis @howdoesatoastermaketoast I was interested to see the variation in the paper with stages of pregnancy:

The prevalence of domestic violence in pregnancy was 1.8% at booking, 5.8% at 34 weeks of gestation and 5.0% at 10 days postpartum.

It would be helpful to have some up to date data collection on this matter.

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 20/07/2022 14:23

The data gap is enormous as caroline criado perez pointed out. The stuff we don't know about women's lives is astonishing.

DockOTheBay · 20/07/2022 14:27

I wonder if the US will start prosecuting men for this more often, in light of the change to abortion laws. I somehow think not...

EmbarrassingHadrosaurus · 20/07/2022 15:06

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 20/07/2022 14:23

The data gap is enormous as caroline criado perez pointed out. The stuff we don't know about women's lives is astonishing.

The Chief Nursing Officer has launched a substantial initiative to encourage more nurses to conduct research as part of their jobs and as a way of expanding their career options.

One of the criteria they promote is to select a research topic that is meaningful to patients/public and the nursing profession. It would be very timely for a collective of nurse researchers to address this.

www.england.nhs.uk/publication/making-research-matter-chief-nursing-officer-for-englands-strategic-plan-for-research/

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 20/07/2022 16:31

EmbarrassingHadrosaurus · 20/07/2022 15:06

The Chief Nursing Officer has launched a substantial initiative to encourage more nurses to conduct research as part of their jobs and as a way of expanding their career options.

One of the criteria they promote is to select a research topic that is meaningful to patients/public and the nursing profession. It would be very timely for a collective of nurse researchers to address this.

www.england.nhs.uk/publication/making-research-matter-chief-nursing-officer-for-englands-strategic-plan-for-research/

Oh that's great news thanks for telling me.

nocoolnamesleft · 20/07/2022 20:43

DockOTheBay · 20/07/2022 14:27

I wonder if the US will start prosecuting men for this more often, in light of the change to abortion laws. I somehow think not...

They'll probably charge the victim with procuring an illegal abortion.

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 26/07/2022 15:44

@nocoolnamesleft I've seen one case where the pregnant woman was charged with reckless endangerment for upsetting the woman who stabbed her (in the stomach) we should all just stay meek and mild barefoot at home I guess.

nocoolnamesleft · 26/07/2022 18:43

howdoesatoastermaketoast · 26/07/2022 15:44

@nocoolnamesleft I've seen one case where the pregnant woman was charged with reckless endangerment for upsetting the woman who stabbed her (in the stomach) we should all just stay meek and mild barefoot at home I guess.

Bloody hell.

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