Family violence in Canada...

This week, Statistics Canada published a report on Family Violence in Canada. You can download the entire report at this link.

The report is, as expected, completely flawed and skewed towards the feminist perspective, even though spousal abuse is equal between the sexes. Here are my comments:

- I am surprised that there is no statistical breakdown by racial/ethnic status, other than that there is more family violence amongst aboriginals. For an agency/government so hung up on ethnicity/race, it is a glaring omission.

- The report is based up on the 2004 General Social Survey. So, what they have done is asked a bunch of men and women about spousal abuse. Thus they have to use terms like "women were also much more likely to report" or "likely to state". The plain fact of the matter is that is all based on a subjective view - with no attempt to determine the legitimacy of the data. For instance, we all know that there is a fair amount of false accusation of rape - wouldn't that make this data somewhat suspect?

- Most of the injuries reported were minor. "While women were more likely to say that they had been bruised than men (96% vs. 82%), men were more likely to have been cut (56% vs. 35%). Bruises and cuts account for the huge majority of injuries.

- Amongst aboriginals, there was a huge jump in males reporting spousal abuse, compared to a small reduction in females. Of course, this was not really commented on in the report.

- The report notes that gay couples experience a higher incidence rate of abuse (15% vs. 7% for heterosexuals). Yet, they do not break down the statistics by sex. Strange, no????

- The report also surmises a relationship between spousal abuse and so-called emotional abuse and 'financial abuse'. But, how bad is this emotional abuse? "Women were proportionately more likely than men to state that their partner put them down and called them names to make them feel bad (13% vs. 7%). Come on, give me a break.....called them names???? Put them down????

- The report also looks at where spousal abuse victims go for support. One of the categories is 'Men's centre". Excuse me, but how many shelters do we have for men? The report does note that 90% of women's shelters will not allow men into them.

- If we look at physical injuries, the majority of female victims say they have no physical injury (57%). Another 25% said they did not need medical attention.

The real problem of this whole report is that there is really no attempt to correlate what people say to what they report to police, etc.