Some time ago I was asked if I don't have any data on hand regarding domestic violence and the gender symmetry in it in the US, after I linked some data showing so in the UK. Apparently, some feminists online are talking about "half of women in the US" supposedly being abused
, so I thought, since CDC's new report on partner violence in the US, as part of the 2023/2024 version of its NISVS (a counterpart to which I wish existed in the EU), is being prepared right now, I might as well finally take a deep look at the 2016/2017 report, which various manospherians have happily been using for years due to how good it is. That one, by the way, was apparently posted, or reposted with updated data in 2022, I'm still not sure which it was, so just keep in mind that those data might actually be fresher than 2016/2017.
https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/NISVSReportonIPV_2022.pdf
Regardless of what kind of stats feminists are currently bringing up, they have to be selectively conflating police-reported DV rates and self-reports from government surveys and so on. Regardless of what country it is, not just the US or the UK, but really any country, the general pattern is that police-recorded incidents are highly skewed towards male perpetrator-female victim paradigm, but they also aren't common (men obviously massively underreport it but it's also something that gets highly underreported in general) and basically at the level of other crimes, where it affects like 1% of the population.
If you want to say that DV affects a double-digit percentage of the population, you must use the self-report numbers, but unfortunately for feminists and other soy misandrists, those tend to be very gender symmetrical. Immediately after seeing the “muh 50% of American women are abused” claims, I guessed that they come from people who selectively bring up the self-reports for the female victimization percentages, but then pretend that the intensity and gender ratio are those of the police-recorded cases, all while completely sidestepping the male victimization numbers at all.
Looking at the NISVS report, that seems to be just about right.
I guess this is where the "half of American women are abused" stuff comes from. What they don't mention, of course, is that the difference between the percentages of men and women who experience any physical violence, sexual violence, or stalking from an intimate partner, is just three percentage points, women's 47.3% being rounded up in the report to "Almost 1 in 2" and men's 44.2% being rounded down to "more than 2 in 5", and then of course ignored by the public.
Experiencing any physical violence was actually a tiny bit more common among male victims. Stalking and sexual violence did the heavy lifting for female victimization percentages there. Severe physical violence was more common for female victims, but, once again, the difference was just eight percentage points, one in three female victims experiencing it and one in four male victims experiencing so, while the 0.1 percentage point gender difference in being slapped, pushed or shoved was definitely within the margin of error.
Negative impacts of intimate violence tend to be more common among female victims, but the ratio tend to be about 3:1 at most, which absolutely does not show an overwhelming female advantage in terms of suffering.
Taking general population stats into account, it's:
Not even twice as many women were injured, something over twice as many had PTSD symptoms as men, about three times as many needed medical care or help from law enforcement, and so on. Notable, but nowhere near an "overwhelming" difference.
Focusing solely on the victims, 87% of women and 60% of men reported some negative impact on their life as a result of intimate partner violence:
That could've been calculated from the other figures I get, but it's nice to have it made clear like this that most victims of both genders report negative impacts. Makes it harder to dismiss male DV victims.
The same types of impacts, just somewhat higher percentages among women as a rule. Also, this made me realize just how much female-on-male DV isn't thought of in terms of causing a lot of this. The injuries sustained by men often just get waved off as being caused by women defending themselves and everything that can be made light of is, and everything else is ignored. Who even knew that the amounts of men and women who miss out on a day of work because of this were so similar?
And that's about effects on the individual, but a lot of people live with children.
Once again, it just hits me how this is a side of DV we just never see in fiction, or nonfiction either. Whenever there's a DV situation in a TV series where someone's getting slapped around and their sad kid is powerlessly watching it, it's always that kid's mother, literally always. Even when female-on-male DV somehow manages to be shown, it never reaches levels like this, it never shows the man having serious health problems because of it, and it never affects the rest of his family.
TL;DR, the main difference is between what people report and what gets reported to the police. There is a clear gender symmetry in quantity, and although there are differences in terms of impact, the fact that this is regularly and only pulled out by feminists whenever the male victimization numbers are pointed out, without actually saying what the exact numbers of those differences are, tells you everything you need to know about how much those differences at the margins really matter.
, so I thought, since CDC's new report on partner violence in the US, as part of the 2023/2024 version of its NISVS (a counterpart to which I wish existed in the EU), is being prepared right now, I might as well finally take a deep look at the 2016/2017 report, which various manospherians have happily been using for years due to how good it is. That one, by the way, was apparently posted, or reposted with updated data in 2022, I'm still not sure which it was, so just keep in mind that those data might actually be fresher than 2016/2017.https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/NISVSReportonIPV_2022.pdf
Regardless of what kind of stats feminists are currently bringing up, they have to be selectively conflating police-reported DV rates and self-reports from government surveys and so on. Regardless of what country it is, not just the US or the UK, but really any country, the general pattern is that police-recorded incidents are highly skewed towards male perpetrator-female victim paradigm, but they also aren't common (men obviously massively underreport it but it's also something that gets highly underreported in general) and basically at the level of other crimes, where it affects like 1% of the population.
If you want to say that DV affects a double-digit percentage of the population, you must use the self-report numbers, but unfortunately for feminists and other soy misandrists, those tend to be very gender symmetrical. Immediately after seeing the “muh 50% of American women are abused” claims, I guessed that they come from people who selectively bring up the self-reports for the female victimization percentages, but then pretend that the intensity and gender ratio are those of the police-recorded cases, all while completely sidestepping the male victimization numbers at all.
Looking at the NISVS report, that seems to be just about right
.I guess this is where the "half of American women are abused" stuff comes from. What they don't mention, of course, is that the difference between the percentages of men and women who experience any physical violence, sexual violence, or stalking from an intimate partner, is just three percentage points, women's 47.3% being rounded up in the report to "Almost 1 in 2" and men's 44.2% being rounded down to "more than 2 in 5", and then of course ignored by the public.
Experiencing any physical violence was actually a tiny bit more common among male victims. Stalking and sexual violence did the heavy lifting for female victimization percentages there
. Severe physical violence was more common for female victims, but, once again, the difference was just eight percentage points, one in three female victims experiencing it and one in four male victims experiencing so, while the 0.1 percentage point gender difference in being slapped, pushed or shoved was definitely within the margin of error.Negative impacts of intimate violence tend to be more common among female victims, but the ratio tend to be about 3:1 at most, which absolutely does not show an overwhelming female advantage in terms of suffering.
Taking general population stats into account, it's:
Not even twice as many women were injured, something over twice as many had PTSD symptoms as men, about three times as many needed medical care or help from law enforcement, and so on. Notable, but nowhere near an "overwhelming" difference.
Focusing solely on the victims, 87% of women and 60% of men reported some negative impact on their life as a result of intimate partner violence:
That could've been calculated from the other figures I get, but it's nice to have it made clear like this that most victims of both genders report negative impacts. Makes it harder to dismiss male DV victims.
The same types of impacts, just somewhat higher percentages among women as a rule. Also, this made me realize just how much female-on-male DV isn't thought of in terms of causing a lot of this. The injuries sustained by men often just get waved off as being caused by women defending themselves and everything that can be made light of is, and everything else is ignored. Who even knew that the amounts of men and women who miss out on a day of work because of this were so similar?
And that's about effects on the individual, but a lot of people live with children.
Once again, it just hits me how this is a side of DV we just never see in fiction, or nonfiction either. Whenever there's a DV situation in a TV series where someone's getting slapped around and their sad kid is powerlessly watching it, it's always that kid's mother, literally always. Even when female-on-male DV somehow manages to be shown, it never reaches levels like this, it never shows the man having serious health problems because of it, and it never affects the rest of his family
.TL;DR, the main difference is between what people report and what gets reported to the police. There is a clear gender symmetry in quantity, and although there are differences in terms of impact, the fact that this is regularly and only pulled out by feminists whenever the male victimization numbers are pointed out, without actually saying what the exact numbers of those differences are, tells you everything you need to know about how much those differences at the margins really matter.
