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.
Ugh. It makes my brain hurt.
Say, I’ve got a theory. I suggest that aliens are here on Earth. Aliens are well known for their ability to kill with great efficency and stealth. Therefore, its quite likely that all unsolved homocides and all accidental deaths and some death by disease are actually murders committed by aliens. As a result even if the Aliens are only responsible for a small percentage of these deaths, they are guilty of thousands of murders every year in the United States. Yet our government still does nothing to counter the Alien threat.
What are the numbers like if you don’t take out the self-defense numbers?
Not saying that you should, but I’m thinking they could arrive at this figure by claiming that women can claim that a murder was in self-defense.
‘Can claim’? ‘Claim’s’ an interesting word: it carries with it a hint of skepticism, especially in this case. Eight hundred murders redefined as self defense?
Thanks! I’d never realised that Farrell was the source of the ‘special poisoning skills’ line.
Here in the UK, MRA’s arguments that domestic violence is ‘equal’ have long been rebutted with ‘count the bodies’ (c. 100 women a year, c. 27 men a year of whom nearly half are killed by male partners).
A couple of years ago they strated responding with the ‘special poisoning skills’ line which is clearly barking mad – although their other defence does have some validity – namely that women sometimes get someone else to kill their husband / boyfriend for them. Even taking this into account, however, doesn’t make it equal.
(I think this is a typo: probably should be 1988):
The source Glenn chose uses data from 1998, and since it considers only 33 urban counties …
[Whoops! Thanks for pointing that out; I’ve corrected the typo. –Amp]
I don’t know whether glenn is right or wrong.
But your critique largely amounts to “the government’s numbers don’t agree, so he must be wrong.” I don’t know offhand why the goverment would be biased toward underreporting murders by women, or overreporting murders by men, but I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. Government is eeeevil, i tell you. It is the patriarchy, and historically and presently exists as a method of oppressing women (and also men.) Government lies, and even when it’s not trying to lie, it genuinely doesn’t know. I don’t know glenn, but I do know John Ashcroft.
Maybe I’m overgeneralizing from a few hundred fictional mystery stories, but women can kill men and make it look like natural causes, like an accident, like self-defense, like an unsolvable killing, or find a patsy to take the rap.
When a woman is killed, police, usually males, start with two prime suspects: whoever found the body, and the husband/boyfriend. I’m not sure the reverse is true.
Debunking glenn’s claim needs a better source of data.
p.s. math is hard!
Glenn needs to have data to back up his claim before anyone should be expected to provide data to debunk it. Quite a nice little fort he’s built for himself if all he needs to do is rattle off paranoid delusions and wait for people to conclusively prove him wrong. He’s making a unprovable suggestion, for goodness sake. Things that are unprovable are also, by nature, unrefutable. Doesn’t make them true.
This mystery novel garbage is just silly. What is the basis for this “women are good at hiding murders” theory? Anything? Just something you’ve heard? Just something that sounds like it could be true? That’s not proof. Its called talking out of your ass.
“This mystery novel garbage is just silly. What is the basis for this “women are good at hiding murders”? theory? Anything? Just something you’ve heard? Just something that sounds like it could be true? That’s not proof. Its called talking out of your ass. ”
I think perhaps Glenn and Farrell have deeper problems with women (with this whole idea of special poisoning skills, unsolved murders being attributed to women , we are more devious, etc., etc.,)…
I recently observed Farrell on Booknotes and it was interesting to see how controlling of people he is, as he made the entire audience get up and change their seats so he could conduct a raised hand survey…I never saw anyone do that before as most of the other authors just talk about their book and then conduct a question and answer session afterwards. It gave some real insight into the man seeing how he couldn’t resist trying to control a whole group of people who were just too polite to refuse to listen to him…
Anyway Farrell also claimed during that book review that women were primarily responsible for gang violence in California (even though most gang members are young men) because single mothers trying to raise boys w/o fathers forced them to look for male mentors and they gravitate into the streets hunting for them, thus the formation of gangs…
Yet in spite of everything bad he said about women, during the question and answer period many of the questioners were women who fluttered all over Farrell like hens over a barnyard rooster…
So I guess that saids something about deeper problems for women as well…
I think it’s obvious, really.
Women are Ninja.
after all, the female frame is naturally smaller and more stealthy, so of course they sneak much better.
so women ARE better at getting away with murder.
You see men, being big and stupid, only kill women in obvious ways, like shooting them in a rage, and then the neighbors call the cops and get there in 5 minutes.
but women set up a fake alibi by going to a movie, then using ninja skills to climb out the roof, then go home, and kill their intimates by dripping poison in their ears using strings
of course, it’s a magical poison that never shows up in toxin screens. and kills instantly, because if it didn’t, one or two of the guys might make it to the hospital or something, where it would obviously not be a heart attack.
Well, it is true that all professional hitmen are deadly but beautiful Asian women, so you might be on to something.
Of course, by “true”, I mean seems like it might as well be. If you disagree, prove to me by citing examples of professional hitmen who are not deadly but beautiful Asian women.
Of course, by “professional hitmen” I mean the really good ones who never get caught or talk about their profession. Can you show me one example of a completely secret and never revealed (even post death) assassian who is not a deadly but beautiful Asian women? If not, you really have no right to critique my position.
Of course, I’m not talking about deaths attirbuted to the previously mentioned Aliens from outer space. You’ll note that aa did not dispute my claim that beings from other worlds are responsible for most deaths, unexplained or otherwise, because they have technology we humans cannot detect. I’d like to see him try to disprove that hypothesis.
I wonder if the deadly but beautiful Asian women are actually from another planet? Why, its too perfect not to be true! Just try and refute me.
“Maybe”??!?
Also, what is it about men that means they *can’t* make murder look like natural causes? From what I’ve seen on the news, they have been known to try just those tactics you listed above.
And yes, I’m fairly sure that when a man is murdered, the most likely suspects are considered to be those closest to him, which often would include the wife and/or partner. Why would you assume this wouldn’t be so?
BStu, I already have you.
I have both an example of a hitman who is not deadly but IS a beautiful asian woman, and an example of a hitman that IS deadly, but is not an asian woman of any nature.
they are Bayushi Kachiko and Number 47. umm… run a google search.
In fact, about half of the extras cast of house of flying daggers are beautiful asian professional hitwomen who never actually kill anyone.
Well it’s funny to a certain extent…but not when you see how seriously some people take Sacks and Farrell…then you have to wonder how they can make such ridiculous statements (especially Farrell) and STILL have people who count take them seriously…
I mean people listen to Farrell and public policies are implemented based on what he saids…and then he’s going around claiming that ‘women have special poisoning skills’ that can kill men undetected, thus the numbers of men killed by women is really higher then we think…so I guess I’m saying are government officials going to be making changes in public programs based on this? Such as reallocating money for male victims of these ‘undetected poisoning’…although what money would do for them at this point I can’t say…anyway I think I made my point, that much silliness comes from supposedly the well-educated class…
Ah, but you see “Hitman” was clearly a video game created by the vast conspiracy of deadly but beautiful Asian extra-terristrials to fool people into thinking of women’s special murdering skills as a joke.
Its sad that this is taken seriously. Its sad that people are this incredibly stupid. To keep from crying, sometimes all one can do is laugh. After all, I have 4 female roommates (one of whom has a girlfriend who frequently visits). Clearly being in such grave risk, all I can do is resort to humor to try to settle down the extreme fear I am in from all these special poisining skills in my home.
“Its sad that this is taken seriously. Its sad that people are this incredibly stupid. To keep from crying, sometimes all one can do is laugh. After all, I have 4 female roommates (one of whom has a girlfriend who frequently visits). Clearly being in such grave risk, all I can do is resort to humor to try to settle down the extreme fear I am in from all these special poisining skills in my home. ”
Yes, it probably explains why MOST of the great chefs are male…