Hulls pushes false DV claims

Rob Hulls, our new Deputy Premier here in Victoria, seems prone to exaggeration. Consider the two vastly inflated statistics he fired off in rapid succession when introducing a proposed new Family Violence Act:

Mr Hulls said family violence affected one in five Victorian women.

"It is the leading contributor to death, disability and illness in women under 45."

At least there's been some improvement. Less than a year ago the figure being bandied about was that more than 50% of women were victims of male violence. It's now dropped to 20%. Even this claim, though, is grossly overstated.

I dealt with this issue last year:

For evidence, let's take a quick look at a major, official research project carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Women's Safety Survey (1996).

This survey was commissioned by the Office for the Status of Women. Some of the staff at the ABS complained at the time that it was advocacy research designed to inflate the level of domestic violence.

Even so, the survey found that in a twelve month period about 2.6% of women experienced an incident of violence from a married or de facto partner. Of these 2.6% of women, about half experienced milder forms of violence such as threats or pushing or grabbing (and of the approximately 1.3% of more severe cases about 50% involved alcohol abuse).

What this means is that in a twelve month period 97.4% of men desisted from any conceivable form of violence against their partners, including threats.

When you consider the amount of alcoholism, drug use, mental illness and family breakdown in society, the figure of 97.4% of men not even committing a single instance of a threat is a creditable one to men.

Another interesting statistic from the survey is that women are physically safer when they are partnered - by a large factor of 250%. It is single women who are more vulnerable to violence. Women therefore should not go into a relationship assuming that they are at higher risk of assault - the very opposite is true.

Finally, the survey revealed that 25% of the physical assaults committed against women are perpetrated by women.

And is it really credible that domestic violence is the leading cause of death, disability and illness in Australian women under 45?

Again, when I checked out the statistics last year I found such claims to be not only untrue, but untrue by a very large margin.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics site didn't give an exact figure for deaths and injuries to young women caused by domestic violence. It did, though, give causes of mortality.

As you might expect, by far the highest cause of death for young women was cancer (673 deaths). The next highest was suicide (238), then car accidents (215).

If you look at causes of death for women in all age groups, there is data which shows how ludicrous the claim is that domestic violence is the main source of injury to women.

Of the 3531 injuries leading to death in women in 2004, the majority (2725) were accidental. Of the 806 intentional injuries leading to death, the large majority were self-inflicted (531). There were 77 injuries leading to death resulting from assault, but many of these would have been committed by strangers, rather than by husbands.

So of the 3551 injuries leading to death, considerably fewer than 77 were a result of domestic violence.

Women are about 10 times more likely to die from self-inflicted wounds than they are from domestic violence. They are more likely to die from accidental drowning than from domestic violence.

So why would Rob Hulls make the incredible claim that women are most at risk from their own partners? The answer has to do, of course, with political ideology, in particular with patriarchy theory. I've explained the connection in some detail here.