printNEW COLUMN IS “Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry.” It’s now on WND.Com and The Unz Review.
Excerpt:
Speaking recently to Fox News’ Arthel Neville, Andrew Napolitano, also of Fox News, repeated old feminist canards about sexual assault against women being an under-reported, ever-present crime in American society.
The violence-against-women industry in North America—you know, the one-in-four-women-are-assaulted rot—is propped up by the sub-science or pseudoscience of violence-against-women statistics.
In particular, violence-against-women surveys are based on inflated numbers nobody questions; numbers the advocates bandy about and the politicians rely on when drafting policy and plumping for resources.
I’m thinking of the original 1993 StatsCan Violence Against Women survey, and its preposterous statistical offshoots, which, in turn, were spinoffs of the American violence-against-women statistical sisterhood. Canada follows America’s lead.
Anyone who’s studied research methodology at a good school (check) knows that research is shaped by the researcher’s hypothesis. Duly, the corpus of violence-against-women statistics reflects an exclusive ideological focus on female victimization. It thus consists of single sex surveys—never two sex surveys—with no input from men, to the exclusion of violence females incur from other females, or acts of violence women commit against the man in the relationship.
Developed at the height of the “war against women” moral panic, these foundational questionnaires are the product of a collaboration with advocacy groups and feminist stakeholders, and are thus fraught with problems of unrepresentative samples, lack of corroboration, a reliance on anecdotes, a use of over-inclusive survey questions and, to charitably understate the problem, the broadest definition of assault.
There’s a lot that goes into skewing data.
The “statistical myths” that pervade the rape-is-rampant claims, states libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy, start with “deeply biased researchers,” who proceed invariably from a “false premise or assumption,” who then use biased and small samples whose selection, in turn, is further slanted by paying participants.
Surveys are, of course, inherently dodgy. The general pitfalls of survey methodology, such as asking leading questions, are legion. …
… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN IS “Bogus Stats Of The Violence-Against-Women Industry.” It’s now on WND.Com and The Unz Review.