Radio NZ informed of error concerning DV statistics
Dear Morning Report
At 8:28am today 03/08/2015 you broadcast an article entitled ‘Judge says change needed to make protection orders effective’. Your announcer commenced by stating “14 women, 6 men and 10 children are killed by a member of their family every year on average; pretty extraordinary statistics…”. Your web site also states “Fourteen women, six men and ten children are killed by a member of their family every year on average…”.
These statistics are wrong. In fact, every year on average 17 women, 13 men and 11 children were said by the Family Violence Deaths Review Committee (FVDRC) to have been killed by a member of their family from 2009 to 2012, the latest years that the FVDRC has reported on. One further child per year was said to have died due to neglect. The erroneous figures you have published badly underestimate male victimization.
Your statistic was almost correct regarding children but for adults you may have misunderstood the FVDRC figures pertaining only to homicides caused by intimate partners (as shown in Table 3 in the latest FVDRC report) rather than adding in the deaths caused by other family members (as shown in Table 25). Or perhaps you were simply given the wrong figures by your highly unbalanced selection of interviewees.
The Ministry for Men would like to see an end to false and misleading statistics in the important area of family violence, in order both to reach understandings that might finally be effective for reducing this problem and to reduce the misandry that for too long has been actively fostered through propaganda and unbalanced reporting. Unfortunately, the direction promoted by Morning Report’s unbalanced selection of interviewees this morning will be unlikely to achieve its purported aims.
The FVDRC figures are likely to under report true male victimization rates in fatal family violence. Due to decades of misleading propaganda concerning this important topic most people have come to believe that domestic violence is almost totally perpetrated by males against females. This belief is likely to affect all parties involved in investigating, determining, recording and reporting the nature of domestic violence deaths. For example, some deaths may have been wrongly attributed to accidents or to non-family violence in order to shield a female perpetrator from consequences.
The FVDRC report itself was very femicentric and their figures frankly cannot be trusted to be accurate. For example, your error in deriving the true victimization numbers was due to the fact that the FVDRC did not provide overall adult death statistics so it is necessary to combine two of their tables printed in widely separated parts of the report in order to gain a realistic picture. We believe this obfuscation was deliberate because the true picture was inconvenient to the FVDRC’s ideological agenda.
Nevertheless, the FVDRC statistics are the only ones readily available and the Ministry for Men expects that at least those statistics are accurately reported.
The Ministry for Men acknowledges that men cause most of NZ’s serious physical violence but will be grateful when the smaller yet significant rate of serious violence committed by women is no longer ignored or trivialized. That goes also for the much more gender equal rates of less serious violence and non-physical violence perpetrated by women. Such honest acknowledgement of the facts will be essential for an accurate understanding of causes and solutions.
The Ministry for Men however commends National Radio for bothering to mention male victims at all. This is a welcome change from your previous pattern of only mentioning the female victimization rates. We trust that you will maintain this commitment towards more accurate and balanced reporting by publishing an acknowledgement that the figures you published were erroneous and providing a correction.
Yours faithfully
Ministry for Men (Formerly the Ministry of Men’s Affairs), a community group because successive governments have neglected the voice and welfare of NZ men.
The numbers from tables 3 and 25 are:
17 men 46 women table 3 Intimate Partner Violence
21 men 5 women table 25 Intra Familial Violence
In total this is:
38 men 51 women for 2009-2012. The forward says this means four years so that is actually an average of:
9.5 men and 12.75 women per year.
By comparison in 2012 there were:
404 men and 145 women suicides.
If those figures were included, and why should they not be, a person is a member of their own family so there is certainly a sense in which suicide is family violence, then the majority of deaths are of men. Even women are more than ten times more at risk from themselves than they are from a male partner.
Comment by WayneBurrows — Tue 4th August 2015 @ 12:01 am
Thanks Wayne. We will send your more accurate figures and good analysis.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Tue 4th August 2015 @ 12:07 am
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Thu 6th August 2015 @ 8:18 am
It’s now the 6th August and Radio NZ still has not corrected its erroneous figures. See the evidence here, under the heading at 8:28 ‘Judge says change needed to make protection orders effective’.
It’s only when dishonouring men that a publicly funded radio service would dare to keep publishing seriously wrong statistics. What is it about men that encourages so many in society to abuse, exploit and misrepresent them?
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Thu 6th August 2015 @ 8:25 am
Newstalk ZB Kerry Woodham, has done the same thing MOMA, with the same statistics. Citing the women’s refuge website.
She also went on to talk about there being no females in NZ who have been prosecuted for rape, and not knowing why? The answer is that the law only allows men to be prosecuted for rape.
Comment by DJ Ward — Thu 6th August 2015 @ 9:38 am
Thanks DJ Ward. We will investigate Newstalk ZB. It would be great if those who hear misrepresentation and ignorance from media were to communicate with those media directly.
We have made a formal complaint now to Radio NZ. Still not the slightest courtesy of any reply from this publicly funded feminist radio station. No gratitude to the listeners who took the trouble to provide a correction to their wrong figures. But they will have to reply now to the formal complaint and we look forward to taking it to the Broadcasting Tribunal if necessary.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Thu 13th August 2015 @ 8:48 am
Good luck with your efforts MOMA
It is clear that our media is engaged in campaigns of propaganda. It is interesting for example with the interview with the Father and Child Trust how ignorant the interviewer was of the issues facing men, and how quickly the interview got shut down as statistics were used to explain the issues facing young men. Also with the DV review how the issue was captured by discussions about privacy and allowing anybody to review a person’s DV history, when it’s not part of the report seeking public opinion. The media is now silent on the DV review but is repeatedly shoving down our throats subjects such as monitoring bracelets, and desires to keep people in prison forever.
I also find it interesting on what they don’t report on, which is another method of propaganda.
Also interesting is an article by Duncan Garner who went off feminist script on DV with this article.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/70930827/duncan-garner-gutsy-stuff-from-adams-to-hit-the-bullies-where-it-hurts
The comments
“Groups working with victims of domestic violence support it and call it “exciting change”. But fathers who send “I love you” text messages to their children would be arrested. Is that fair? It’s still a technical breach.
This week I heard from a father who had breached his protection order six times. He told me he had no intention of hurting his family – he just wanted to talk to his kids. He was hurting.
What do we do with him? Send him to jail? Technically, yes. Is that fair? It seems a bit rough. But six breaches indicates he doesn’t respect the protection order.
Then there’s the women who take out protection orders but breach them themselves by continuing to contact the ex-partner – should there be a new law around that?”
Could there be a little, behind the scenes war going on, after all they have been attacked as being part of a white male patriarchy.
Comment by DJ Ward — Thu 13th August 2015 @ 10:40 am
My impression about the interview with the Father and Child Trust was that Mike Hosking was fairly sympathetic.
I agree that the media pushes a lot of propaganda. I’m not sure how much this reflects a deliberate agenda, – I think part of the problem is that they don’t employ enough skilled journalists, so they fill the space with material they are sent by well-funded activist organisations.
I heard recently that another father is currently being prosecuted for breaching a protection order by sending a birthday card. It will be interesting to see whether this gets reported.
Comment by JohnPotter — Thu 13th August 2015 @ 4:59 pm
I was interviewed by Duncan Garner on Radio live last Thursday 6th of August. I found him reasonably balanced on the issue. He was misinformed about the Ed Livingstone case but he appreciated that Protection Orders are used as weapons as well as for protection.
The link above is not current and provides this weeks news item rather than last weeks.
Allan
Comment by Allan Harvey — Thu 13th August 2015 @ 7:21 pm
John and Allan
Propaganda works in many ways. An example was last night in TV One news. Obviously time constraints limit the extent that a subject can be examined. This can aid in presenting an issue with bias, giving the audience a skewed understanding of what’s taking place. In this example pertaining to the Child Sex Offenders register, they did say that the legal point of view was that it breached the Bill of Rights, but did not say why. Then Min Tolley gave a response, ‘I don’t see how knowing where they live is a Bill of Rights issue’. End of discussion. The reality it’s not only the persons address that is part of the proposed law, it is many more things. Those other things open these offenders up to persecution type behaviours. Was this deliberate? Probably not due to the time constraint issue. But like a death from a thousand cuts, when this happens over and over, it will have an effect on the public’s perception of reality.
I agree with John ‘well-funded activist organisations’. Pity that this means the Crown itself.
Also one cannot ignore the reality that our nation’s reporters become under duress from feminist groups who vehemently attack any male public figure if they have a negative opinion about women, and how they behave in the community. Look what happened to John Tamihere, who was publicly attacked, lost his job, but a year later was given compensation, and an admission by the news agency that he said nothing wrong. He was also one of the only talk back hosts that would let me express my opinion. I experienced the complete opposite with his replacement.
Comment by DJ Ward — Fri 14th August 2015 @ 1:39 pm
I saw another version of how society uses the media to manipulate and develop culture that enables DV against males in the weekend. I understand that someone else has mentioned this example in the past. The movie Frozen, a kid’s movie.
So ignoring the fact that all the male characters have roles that subject them to denigration by the script which is pretty normal for movies with a female hero, but the portrayal of the female characters gets even more bigoted.
The bad character, ‘in the past called witches’ is actually a nice person, who just behaves badly in misguided attempts to protect herself, she needs love and compassion even though she is killing everybody. Very similar to female DV justification, she was only DV because she had to protect herself.
Then at the end of the movie when it is discovered that prince charming is a bit of a nasty fraud, that the male hero is not needed, as he can’t provide true love, the movie does something so offensive that if the sex of the characters was reversed it would be banned as a movie.
The female main character, punches the prince in the face, un-expectantly, and then laughs and giggles about it. Then everybody lives happily ever after.
Can you imagine a kid’s movie that promotes males punching females in the face, then having a good laugh and giggle?
Frozen is an offensive, sexually bigoted movie, design to normalise female DV abuse of males. The publishers should be held to account. The movie should be reclassified so children cannot see it.
Comment by DJ Ward — Mon 17th August 2015 @ 12:27 pm
The incorrect figures were published in the Dept of Justice discussion document for
Amy Adams’ intended law changes regarding family violence. Since then all manner of groups and media have been spreading those same incorrect figures. The latest is our old friends the White Ribbon Campaign. We informed them that the figures were wrong and explained how they could find the correct figures, but they don’t seem to care that they are spreading wrong figures. They simply asserted that the figures came from the Dept of Justice. They are still living up to their nickname the White Fibbers.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Thu 27th August 2015 @ 5:12 pm
This is the data on the Its Not Ok Campaign statistics page
“On average 14 women, 7 men and 8 children are killed as a result of family violence every year.”
It is old data. Their page now says the data is being updated. I am pretty sure that the report quotes Its Not Ok for their data. The reporting is very sloppy as they quote these figures and do not link them to a particular time frame and then they generalise and extrapolate to “every year”. It is a fundamentally dishonest way to present statistics.
When I use normal rounding conventions I get for the 2009-2012 statistics in the Family Violence Clearinghouse Annual Death Review data:
13 women 10 men and 9 children on average for those four years. It paints quite a different picture. No wonder they are tardy in updating their statistics page.
They will no doubt put some spin on the numbers to try and diminish the reality that men are killed in similar numbers to women over this period.
Comment by WayneBurrows — Thu 27th August 2015 @ 7:20 pm
Thanks WayneBurrows. We have been using exactly the statistics you correctly calculated in all of our challenges to those groups who are spreading the false numbers including the Ministry of Justice. None of them so far seem to care about the validity of what they publish.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Thu 27th August 2015 @ 9:56 pm
Those figures can be updated now.
Obviously a coroner got things wrong.
Who would have thought a women could purposefully push a male down some stairs.
Really there’s no way a mountianclimber could negotiate those treacherous steps.
I’m waiting patiently for the slap on the hand sentence.
The judge is clearly indicating compliance with new female sentencing guidelines.
Is the distribution of his estate going to be reviewed?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/96456635/taranaki-woman-goes-on-trial-for-husbands-death
Comment by DJ Ward — Mon 4th September 2017 @ 7:56 pm
Yes, well spotted DJ Ward #15. The case is another example of one form of police favouritism towards women. Man fell down stairs, died, police investigated “on the basis that it may have been a homicide”, which may have involved them asking the man’s wife Susan Mouat if she did it then believing her immediately when she denied it. After all, it’s men who are violent. However, (for some reason we are not seen fit to be told) the police charged her six years later with manslaugther and she eventually pleaded guilty.
It was a similar story with the ‘Black Widow’, Helen Milner whose case was recently portrayed in a tv screenplay. Police readily accepted her claim that the husband committed suicide when if it had been a woman found dead they would almost certainly have suspected the husband and thoroughly sought any evidence. It took a coroner telling police to go back and investigate properly for police to do their work properly.
And you are correct also DJ Ward about Susan Mouat’s pending pussy pass with the judge asking for a report regarding home detention. So for a crime with a maximum tariff of life imprisonment this woman is considered for a sentence at home that can only be a maximum of one year. Manslaughter is this woman’s laughter.
Comment by Ministry of Men's Affairs — Mon 4th September 2017 @ 8:10 pm