Omitting Male Victims Through Statistic Disinfo

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 18 of my book, Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons (pp. 441-442):

The public is continually fed both incomplete statistics as well as deliberately misleading information—disinformation—about sexual and domestic violence based primarily on:
• Statistics from law enforcement, hospitals, child protection agencies, and crisis centers
• Surveys and studies that excluded male victims and female perpetrators
• Studies that changed the definitions of rape when men were the victims and females were the offenders

…[D]isinformation is advanced in federally-funded studies by manipulating data to obscure results. This is done by:
• Engineering definitions
• Engineering superfluous (excess), confusing data
• Highlighting selected pieces of data to bias final reports
• Highlighting selected pieces of data to the media to bias the media
• Making it difficult for the public to access the raw data results

At least since the 1990s, the majority of the “statistics” on sexual and domestic violence (DV) that are pushed to the public, to professionals, and to lawmakers have been gathered in a biased, deceptive manner by feminist organizations and “researchers” who do not use representative samples. Kelly (2003) warns that DV stats gathered from police reports, interviews with women in domestic violence
shelters, and FBI crime data are dubious and inaccurate, as male victims are less likely than female victims to report or seek help, especially if the perpetrators are female. However, even when surveys of victimization are conducted to include both men and women, unethical tactics are used to falsely influence outcomes.

…[T]he CDC’s 2010 and 2011 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Surveys (NISVS) data showed that men were raped by women in numbers almost equal to women being raped by men in the year leading up to each study (Black et al., 2011; Breiding et al., 2014). The 2015 NISVS indicated that
more men than woman reported experiences that meet the legal definition of being raped in the year leading up to the study (Smith et al., 2018).

However, in order to learn these facts, a sharp, detail-oriented researcher must detect that there were double standards in definitions of rape based upon gender. They also must realize that what people remembered happening to them in the year leading up to the study yielded more gender symmetry in rape victimization than when people recalled an entire lifetime. To break it down, for a researcher to
accurately interpret the NISVS studies by gender, he or she must discover that the CDC uses tactics such as the following:

• The NISVS studies siphoned male rape victims out of the “rape” category.
• The NISVS studies funneled male rape victims into the “made to penetrate” category.
• The NISVS “reports” designed for the media and public highlight data that favors feminist ideology and stereotypes [Male = Perpetrator/Female = Victim], such as people’s “lifetime” recall of sexual assaults rather than people’s recent recall of sexual assaults.

The CDC uses the practice of highlighting only the data that it wants the media and the public to see. This has the effect of putting blinders on the media and on the public by diverting attention away from the data that the CDC (and feminist researchers) do not want the media and public to see. For example, by highlighting the sexual assault data under the “lifetime” categories, but not the data from the year leading up to the survey, the CDC has been able to skew perceptions drastically. The CDC claims, “Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives” (Black et al., 2011, p. 1). Again, they only reached this misleading conclusion…

• by removing most male victims of rape from the “rape” category,
• by only highlighting the rapes that people could immediately recall on the spot, spanning an entire lifetime; and
• by failing to highlight the data in “the year leading up to the study”—the rapes that people recalled most recently—which were at statistically equal rates by gender.

References:
Couture, L. A. (2023). Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons: Healing the Wounds of an Anti-Boy Culture by Parenting and Educating the Way Nature Intended. Seacoast Press/MindStir Media. https://laurieacouture.com/products/

Kelly, L. (2003). Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Abuse: How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State. Florida State University Law Review, 30, 791-855.

Black, M.C., Basile, K.C., Breiding, M.J., Smith, S.G., Walters, M.L., Merrick, M.T., Chen, J., & Stevens, M.R. (2011). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Summary Report. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pdf/NISVS_Report2010-a.pdf

Breiding, M. J., Smith, S. G., Basile, K. C., Walters, M. L., Chen, J., and Merrick, M. T. (2014). Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization — National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011. MMWR Surveillance Summaries, 63(8): 1–18. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/ss/ss6308.pdf

Smith, S. G., Zhang, X., Basile, K. C., Merrick, M. T., Wang, J., Kresnow, M. J., & Chen, J. (2018). The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2015 Data Brief–Updated Release. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2015data-brief508.pdf