[Note: This started out as a note at the bottom of this post about sex work and domestic violence but realized it could probably stand on its own. —fl]

While looking up exact numbers of domestic/intimate homicides (assault rates are often barkingly ambiguous but a body’s pretty unambiguously, and un-ignorably, a body) I noticed two fairly persistent mismatches of statistics.

One set, comparing the number of women victims to men victims compares overall rates. This leaves the misleading impression that women overwhelmingly victims compared to men. Another set implies that women are overwhelmingly domestically homicidal compared to men. This leaves the impression that women are more sangunary when it comes to domestic violence.

Care to guess which camp (DV activists vs MRAs) prefer to emphasize which statistics?

Bottom line, though, is that men are overwhelmingly likely to be murder victims, period, meaning the relative percent of DV victims out of all types of homicide is pretty low. Meanwhile women commit a very small number of murders overall, so their DV homicide rates are statistically high but numerically low.

It took a little digging but it looks as though in the U.S. approximately two women are murdered by their women partners for every one man murdered by their woman partner. Still disproportionate but it also suggests domesticity isn’t a completely safe bet for men either. One wonders if relying on less partisan hyperbole might result in a) more common ground, b) less unproductively ginned-up gendered outrage, and especially c) fewer domestic homicides.

Update: I didn’t say it before but in case it’s not completely obvious, realistic ratios of domestic violence or domestic homicides justify nothing, mitigate nothing, explain nothing. And confuses nothing. It’s meaningless to say “only” two women die for every man instead of three or ten or fifty, just as it’s meaningless to try and spin something like “almost half the victims are men.” If the ratio is “only” two to one it’s as much a gendered problem as if it was a million to one. And if more men are victims says only that the problem is bigger than our gender narratives would have it, not that anything is somehow more “fair.” I’m pretty sure nobody would have misunderstood but it never hurts to be clear.