Using statistics to further your own agenda?

[FlamingoBingo]

My friend has just left, having explained how she doesn't feel comfortable with the MWR statistics, suggesting that it's using sensationalised statistics to get people involved. Also that what she objects to is violence against anyone and doesn't see why it has to be about women only.

We had a lovely, open discussion about it, but, in an effort to further my understanding and deepen my knowledge, what would your answers be to something like that?

what about them? Well they can get their own flyers, can't they?

Its a ridiculous argument that you can't focus on one thing because other things happen as well. Its like saying lets not bother with banning smoking in workplaces because people smoke at home. So what if they do, if my remit is to look at smoking in the workplace.

And come back to this argument when 2 men are murdered by their female partners every single week in the UK.

Thankyou Wilf, you have just helped me with an essay on research methods, by clarifying dome of the problems with stats.

Mumsnet is astonishing sometimes!

It's a really interesting debate - I worked as a crime reporter and would blithely trot out stats from 'the British Crime Survey as 'the facts,' and yet it is not as clear cut as you might think.

This is fantastic stuff, thank you. Now I just need to have a similar discussion about fifty times and I'll actually be able to trot all this stuff out myself!

Friend!!! Are you reading this!? What do you think?

The stats in the flyer are shocking. But then that is because the level of violence against women is that shocking.

Is your friend maybe a bit in denial about how bad things are for women? Many people adopt a bit of a hand in the sand approach to this subject because the reality is very hard to face. Is she confusing 'shocking' for 'sensationalist' in an effort to protect herself a little from the horrible reality of the violence women suffer.

Also the thing with stats is that if you don't produce them people will demand that you do in order to prove that you aren't making things up.

A: "Gosh it's terrible this violence against women isn't it?"

B: "What are you talking about?"

A: "Well you know all this rape and trafficking and so on?"

B: "Got any figures on that - I'm sure it is not as bad as you say."

A: produces shocking stats with a litany of men's violence on women.

B: "Oh stop being sensationalist!"

Stats on violence against women do make for uncomfortable reading - and they damn well should. The situation is that bad.

As the saying goes "lies, damned lies and statistics". Statistics can be manipulated to suit a certain line of argument so its important to look at how they were collected/calculated but they can be valuable in supporting an argument.

If anything, I would argue that the stats on violence against women probably understate the problem. I was in an abusive relationship but it won't be recorded anywhere. There are many women who put up with violence and abuse and who never seek help.

When I was coming out of the relationship I was in, I talked to other friends of mine and was shocked to find that most had been in a relationship where there had been some sort of abuse at some point in their lives. It was never reported - they moved on and that was that.

Jessin - "I was in an abusive relationship but it won't be recorded anywhere. There are many women who put up with violence and abuse and who never seek help."

I don't mean in anyway to minimize your experience, but I do want to point out that this is actually one reason why statistical methods are a very good tool for the voiceless.

Good statistical methods overcome the problem of general under reporting. They go out to random members of a population and push to find out what happened to them. If you do that enough times and extrapolate to a whole population you have a much better picture of what is happening than if you just rely on reporting by individuals. Methodology is important. Understanding the limits of any particular study is important. But one of the great things about good statistics is that it can expose the extent of an otherwise taboo subject, without requiring every incident to be meticulously recorded.

Yes, I agree. I work for the NHS and our spend on treating DV victims (about £7.5m a year in our small PCT alone) is based on Home Office stats, extrapolated from a sample population and then applied to our weighted population.

The point I was making though was that if you'd have asked me if I was in an abusive relationship, I'd have said no because I didn't recognise it as such (which shocks me now). I do wonder how many women out there are actually in a similar situation and yet wouldn't class their relationship as abusive either. Hence why I think that the problem may be not with sensationalising the issue but with actually under reporting it.

Perhaps the under reporting is taken into account when the stats (that 1 in 4 women will experience DV in her lifetime) are formulated, I don't know.

ElephantsAndMiasmas wrote "if we are talking about partner/spouse killing. I can't remember the exact stats but a recent discussion on here was talking about the number of women killed by their current or former partner... Someone produced a stat that claimed that men were killed by their partners at a rate of (let's say) 4 a month... BUT the key fact here is that women are being killed by their partners roughly twice as often as men are. "

I've posted those statistics on partner killings a few times on various threads. I always make a point of stating that the sex of the killer is not recorded in those statistics. I think that would be interesting data and hope that it is available somewhere. Does anybody know if it is? If it's not recorded in other sets of data, I think it should be. Until those details are known, one can only speculate.

I agree that the fact that women are being killed at twice the rate of men is a gender issue that needs to be highlighted and addressed. Likewise with gender imbalance of domestic violence in general. These statistics show that the numbers are unequal by gender in a population that is roughly half male and half female. Pointing this out is not the same as claiming a) men are not subjected to violence or b) that women matter more than men, which is what some men's rights advocates often accuse feminists of saying.

Well as soon as you start saying that women matter as much as men, that is taken as so much against the natural order of things, that many people read it as "women matter more than men". The idea that we matter as much, is far too shocking to grasp.