Alas, a Blog

Men’s Rights radio host Glenn Sacks has an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle which argues that “there are actually as many wives and girlfriends who murder their male partners as vice versa.” Offhand, this seems like an odd claim; federal government numbers show that in 2002 (the most recent year available), 388 men and 1,202 women were killed by spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends – a ratio of about 3 women killed by an intimate for every man.

My impression is that Glenn (who is, for the record, a heck of a nice guy), and other MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) are motivated to make arguments like this by their denial that sexism ever harms women more than men. In their view, men are always greater victims and women have nothing to complain about – even thought that ideology causes them to make factually ridiculous arguments, such as Glenn’s argument here. (It would be as if feminists tried arguing that as many women as men are murdered each year overall, despite the clear evidence that overall most murder victims are male.)

Anyhow, back to the fisking…

DOJ statistics show that roughly 1,300 women are murdered by intimates each year. Yet domestic homicide is hardly a one-way street. The DOJ reports that 500 men are murdered each year by female intimates (excluding those killings deemed to be in self-defense). Moreover, evidence suggests that there are actually as many wives and girlfriends who murder their male partners as vice versa.

So Glenn, to his credit, acknowledges the DOJ statistics (his statistics and mine don’t quite match because Glenn’s data is from 1998). But although he says “evidence suggests” the numbers are equal, he doesn’t go on to present any evidence – just speculation and wistful thinking.

Warren Farrell, a high-profile expert witness in domestic violence cases and author of “The Myth of Male Power,” has delineated a number of “blinders” which have served to disguise the murder of male intimates. For one, women generally use less detectable methods to murder intimates than men do, including poisonings, which are often mistakenly recorded as “heart attacks” or “accidents.”

So according to this theory, women are committing hundreds of undetected murders of their intimates each year, which if accounted for would bring the murder rates close to even. What I’m confused by is, how on earth could there be “evidence” of how many undetected murders there are, who the undetected murderers are, and what undetected method they used? If there was such evidence, then the murders wouldn’t be undetected anymore.

I looked for the solution to this mystery in the Warren Farrell book Glenn cites. No dice – Farrell has no evidence to back up his claim that “a woman is more likely to poison a man than shoot him, and poisoning is often recorded as a heart attack or accident” (Myth of Male Power, page 281). Farrell does mention two anecdotes – a female serial killer who used poison to kill several relations, and a woman who poisoned Tylenol bottles to kill her husband and a stranger. But for the male/female intimate homicide ration to be even, as Glenn claims it is, there would have to be around eight hundred undetected husband-murders a year. To leap from two unusual cases, which took place many years apart, to the speculation that 800 such cases occur annually without detection, is silly and unwarranted.

Also, women are much more likely than men to convince their extramarital intimates to do the killing, or to use contract killers, who often disguise murders as accidents or suicides, according to Farrell. If the surrogate killer is caught, the murder is categorized as a “multiple offender” killing instead of as an intimate partner murder.

There is some statistical evidence about multiple offender killings – although that evidence is absent from Glenn’s article. Mercy and Saltzman (American Journal of Public Health, May 1989, v79, p595-599) examined every known spouse homicide in the US over a decade – including multiple-offender killings. According to their study, there are an average of 15 multiple-offender spouse killings of husbands each year, and 5 multiple-offender spouse killings of wives each year.

Of course, that was back in the 1980s – spouse murder rates have dropped since then, especially for male victims. So maybe the real numbers now are lower than 15 and 5 per year. On the other hand, Mercy and Saltzman didn’t include boyfriend and girlfriend murders, so maybe the numbers are a bit higher. It doesn’t matter, because no matter how you slice it, multiple-offender intimate killings aren’t even close to common enough to make a significant difference. Remember, currently there are about 400 men and 1,200 women killed by intimates each year; adding another 20 or 40 murders to that doesn’t change the overall picture significantly, and cannot justify Glenn’s claim that the numbers are even.

In addition, there are five times as many unsolved murders of men as of women. If only a small percentage of these murders are really intimate-partner homicides, men would comprise over 40 percent of all intimate murder victims.

Really? Let’s do the math.

In 2002, there were 12,410 male murder victims, of which 36.3% – that is, about 4,505 – were unsolved. In comparison, in 2002 there were 3,764 female murder victims, of which 27.7% – about 1,043 – were unsolved. (That’s a total of over 5,500 unsolved murders in 2002 alone – kind of depressing, if you think about it).

Currently, men are about 24 percent of all known intimate murder victims. To be 40% of all intimate murder victims, we’d have to assume that beyond the 388 known male intimate murder victims, there are an additional 513 unsolved male intimate murders – and there isn’t even a single case of an unknown female intimate murder. In other words, to believe Glenn, we have to believe that a solid majority of women who murder intimates are never caught, whereas every single man who murders an intimate is caught.

That’s ridiculous.

Of course, we could instead assume that not every man gets away with murder, and make up for it by increasing our assumed number of uncaught women. For instance, what if we assume that there are a thousand woman a year who get away with murdering intimates, but only 880 men who get away with it. That gives us Glenn’s claimed “40%” figure, and we don’t have to assume that women and only women ever get away with murdering an intimate.

However, we do have to assume that 22% of all unsolved murders of men were really intimate murders (for comparison’s sake, consider that among solved murders of men, fewer than 5% are intimate murders) – which destroys Glenn’s claim that “only a small percentage of these murders [would need to be] intimate-partner homicides” to make his 40% figure come true. We also have to assume that out of 1043 unsolved murders of women, 880 – that’s 83% – were really intimate murders.

No matter how you do the math, there’s no way to reach Glenn’s claimed 40% figure – let alone the 50% figure he implied earlier in the article – without making genuinely ridiculous assumptions.

Glenn’s continues:

This is consistent with the DOJ’s 1994 survey Murder in Families, which analyzed 10,000 cases and found that women make up over 40 percent of those charged in familial murders.

I recently discussed the problem with Glenn’s data source in detail. But in a nutshell: Before 1988 black men were more likely to be killed by an intimate than black women. Since then, the number of male victims per year has dropped hugely. The source Glenn chose uses data from 1988, and since it considers only 33 urban counties it has more blacks in its sample than a nationally representative sample would.

So by using out-of-date urban data, Glenn is taking a historic anomaly – the high rate of husband-murder among blacks before 1988 – and treating it as if it represents the norm.

So what’s left after we brush aside all the unlikely suppositions, the unfounded speculations, and the cherry-picked data sources? We have the data that opened this post: In the US, currently, around 400 men and 1,200 women are known to be killed by spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends each year. That’s a pretty simple and hard to deny fact; but it doesn’t fit in with the MRA ideology, which says that men must always be equal or greater victims.