Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, mgriff2k4 is angry that the picture to the right here showed up on his computer screen. Sorry, make that fucking angry. “Did this really just fucking pop up on my news feed?” he asks in the title of his post, adding in a comment: “sorry about the word “fucking” but im really pissed off about this.”
Why is he angry? Presumably, he assumes the statistic is untrue, and that it unfairly paints men as evil murderers.
Luckily, in this Age of the Internet it is trivially easy to find out whether statistics like this are true. It involves something called “Google.” mgriff2k4 did not bother to avail himself of this easy-to-use research tool.
But I did. In less than 5 minutes, I confirmed that this factoid is indeed true, at least according to the most recent figures on gender and homicide found on the Department of Justice’s web site, drawn from FBI data covering the years from 1976-2005. According to the FBI, 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by “intimates.” Roughly 20% are killed by husbands or ex-husbands; 10% by boyfriends or girlfriends. (In the overwhelming majority of cases the murderers are boyfriends, not girlfriends; men are ten times more likely to commit murder than women.)
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.” Men kill women more than twice as often as women kill men. Women suffer far more serious injuries from domestic violence than men do; so it is not altogether unexpected that they are also far more likely to be murdered by intimates.
If you want to see what this means on a human level, I suggest you take a look at the excellent if depressing web site Domestic Violence Crime Watch, which links to stories in which men are the perpetrators, and in which men are the victims. There are far more of those in the former category than in the latter.
I should note that (as of this writing) one commenter in the thread also found his way to the DOJ site, and noted that men were more likely to be killed by strangers or acquaintances. But he didn’t bother to tell mkgriff2k4 that the sign in the picture was in fact accurate.
“For whatever reason.”
<100 cases annually and resource issues seems to be the reason.
Roscoe: It did, directly. You said that third parties engaged to kill intimates don’t count in the FBI stats. You, of course, pretended it only exists when women engage said third parties.
I pointed out that men do it too.
Point.
Counter-point.
@Roscoe- Don’t waste your time. Fact is, love triangle homicides are almost universally initiated by the woman; therefore, it’s “statistically insignificant”.
In my experience, it’s more than that. I know a woman who once hired an amateur hitman to kill her old boyfriend- for no other reason than he lived in the same town and wouldn’t allow himself to be run out on a rail. The hitman failed, but she was never convicted. If the phenomenon was more understood outside of fucking movies, she might have been brought to trial.
Oh, so there’s a conspiracy theory? Yay. In any case, if you think there’s a problem with the way the FBI collects and distributes statistics, the solution is to do activist work aimed at getting the FBI to change its policies. Complaining that you don’t like the way David is using the statistics does nothing to further that cause – you need to address the people who actually collect and distribute the stats.
I’m working on digging up the raw number of muders with male victims in 2006 to compare to “Today, we typically work between 70 and 90 cases a year, including 78 in fiscal year 2006.” — give me a moment here, this is a lot of data. (And excel for mac = yuck)
“In any case, under these conditions a claim that only 5% of IPV homicide victims are male amounts to speculation.”
Of course it does. Oh, and misandry, too. 😀
No no. Just paying someone doesn’t count. Only if you set out to get your ex killed by the person you’re now fucking does Roscoe want it to be counted, and he thinks it’s so common for women to persuade their lovers to kill their ex-lovers that murder statistics are useless without that data.
Which, yeah. That doesn’t happen. But it is different from hiring someone you’re not fucking to kill your ex.
Men, in Roscoe’s eyes, are puppets to whoever they’ve been sleeping with lately. So pliable they’ll murder someone just because their lover asks them to. He does not have a high opinion of men.
viola: as I said, he’s trying to make his namesake look fucking brill.
I’m trying to apply the principle to non-monogamous relationships, and the result is hilarious. So, what, each of my boyfriend’s partners is alive merely at my whim, and I at theirs? Does it depend who he’s spent time with most recently? Does it take a majority vote to kill someone off? Are we all safe, but my ex is in terrible danger? Can I get him to kill my other partners, or would I have to split with them first?*
*Note: The whole idea of any one of us killing any other is so horrible and upsetting that the hypothetical ease of doing it becomes hilarious. I love my partners, all of them, and nobody is to murder them, okay?
So, combining the following data sets for some fun math times! All sources available here (spreadsheets)
htus8008t01.csv Table 1. Victims and Offenders by Demographic Group, 1980-2008
htus8008f02.csv Figure 2. Number of homicide victims, 1950-2010
Using 2006 as per above — 17,030 homicide victims, 76.80% of them male. That works out to 13,079 men killed by homicide in 2006. Versus 78 murder for hire cases. Let’s assume for a moment that 100% of murder for hire cases are men killed by their ex’s new lover, they’d still make up 0.6% of all men killed.
Ignoring that all deaths are not homicide (because I don’t feel like working with numbers so small my calculator is spitting out e) — know what has a greater than 0.6% chance? Among other things, anaphylaxis (you’d call that an allergic reaction) — 500–1,000 deaths per year in the US, that’s 5-10 times the total number of contract killings. Also slightly more dangerous — lightening, averages 82 deaths per year (CDC).
Please ignore my rant about e, it isn’t relevant since I went with the raw numbers. (I much prefer i to e though…)
Shit… That makes the woman I knew more incredible than it seemed at the time.
I know someone who was killed that way too! It was a big scandal in my hometown. Interestingly it ties in with the free will discussion – the husband was a model citizen until a traumatic brain injury, after which his personality changed drastically and for the worse. He eventually hired a guy to pose as a stranded motorist. The hitman lured the wife into helping him and shot her.
Now maybe the husband had been a secret asshole all along and just got worse at hiding it. Or maybe the brain injury really did change him. No way of knowing, I guess, but still.food for thought.
Oh, and I feel oddly heartened that we have a female troll again. It sort of proves our point, don’t you think? ^_^
Oh joy, more white people are saving brown women from brown men. That’s just what we need.
Ruby, you’re a bigot as well as a torture-enthusiast, which surprises nobody. If I were David, I’d ban you.
“Now maybe the husband had been a secret asshole all along and just got worse at hiding it. Or maybe the brain injury really did change him. No way of knowing, I guess, but still.food for thought.”
The latter is definitely possible, historically speaking, let me introduce you to Phineas Gage. Idfk in this case, but it’s definitely theoretically possible. (If you’re the screamish sort, be warned that there’s a reconstruction of a skull with a pipe through it, but the whole reason he’s famous is his survived.)
You know, Roscoe P. Coltrane has sockpuppeted before as Jesse James. Kind of interesting how the mysterious James Justice shows up out of the blue to agree with Roscoe’s weird soap opera plot conspiracy theory.
Ooh, I want to know more about James’s imaginary friend. Does he normally associate with people who hire contract killers? Did he report this woman to the police, like a normal person would if someone they knew said “btw, I hired someone to kill my ex”? Did she have horns?
“Kind of interesting how the mysterious James Justice shows up out of the blue to agree with Roscoe’s weird soap opera plot conspiracy theory.”
Right after I proposed that with <100 cases annually it isn’t much wonder why it isn’t looked into more? Yeah, just a bit odd.
James Justice — “Fact is, love triangle homicides are almost universally initiated by the woman; therefore, it’s “statistically insignificant”.” — no, they’re statistically insignificant because they’re statistically insignificant, tautological, I know, but statistics just don’t work like you claim. One of the wonders of math is the numbers don’t lie. Annually there are, in the US, <100 contract killings, 500-1,000 deaths from allergic reactions, and about as many deaths from lightening as from murder for hire. Really, it just isn’t a statistically significant cause of death.
And now I’m curious…”In recent decades, an average of seven human plague cases are reported each year (range: 1–17 cases per year).” (CDC) and “There were 547 deaths from TB in 2009, the most recent year for which these data are available.” (CDC)
Yes, you are >5 times as likely to die from TB than from a murder for hire. And you might actually want to give a shit about TB, well, more persicely, about drug resistant TB, MDR-TB, XDR-TB, and TDR-TB (yes, this is one of my pet topics).
precisely* I can spell check, I swear! (Yeah, my spelling really is that bad without spell check, it might be my favorite invention ever.)
Hi New-World-Order-Slave,
Thanks for your comment.
I’m happy to see you’re a reader of Jackson Katz and you follow some of the work of the Media Education Foundation. Since you read him so closely, I’m sure you’ve noticed Dr. Katz, in his writing, uses footnotes. You ought to check those out. When you do you’ll find the information is legitimate.
Also, Futrelle links to some sources in his blog post, including the US Department of Justice. You ought to look at those too. Information from the US Department of Justice is legitimate, isn’t it?
And if I may comment on your writing, New-World-Order-Slave, it seems to me unbiased, and it does not scream.
“…is going to tell another feminist she’s a bad feminist? Kinda like the pot calling the kettle black. Ain’t it?…Prisoners with perks I guess ya’d call it.”
*bangs head on wall* Ruby said that prison rape is sometimes fucking justified, so at least manage to end your shitty analogy with “Prisoners without torture” FFS
And what’s with the hate-on for Cassandra, she dared point out why creepy has turned into a flashpoint? You’re kind of only proving the point, especially since she didn’t call you creepy (or call anyone in particular creepy for that matter).
Well hello friend Mister Insightful
Thank you for your comment on my little Youtube clip!
That is all.
Oh, has Slavey decided that I’m this month’s chosen person for his 3-minute hates? I can’t be bothered to scroll back and find his last comment.
Cassandra — yeah don’t bother, he just quoted what you’d said about the word creep (again) and claimed he can’t tell the difference between you and Ruby, because we all dictate men’s actions.
He also managed to hit “SCUM MANIFESTO!” in reply to Guy Noir, and “men bad, women good” in reply to Shaenon. The usual 3 trick pony and usual intentional dishonesty in other words. (I did math, and he didn’t comment! Must’ve been gone when I did the math I guess, his hatred of statistics is his fourth trick after all)
See, this is why I don’t bother to read his comments. Too repetitive.