August 7, 2009
A Case Study
I recently wrote about the implications for democracy if the media routinely disseminates deliberately misleading or false information, as well as a post about the marginalisation of feminism in modern society.
Yesterday my friend John sent me a neat little case study of the two issues welded together. No surprise that it comes courtesy of the Daily Mail’s latest attempt to play-down the presence or significance of domestic violence against women in the UK.
There’s so much evil in this piece – which is outrageous even by the Mail’s standards – I can’t tackle it all. But for present purposes, I’ll focus on three particularly pernicious aspects.
First, the Mail’s contention that children should not be taught that domestic violence both happens and that it is wrong. Apparently, children should learn this from “families and communities”.
The idiocy of this position only takes a moment’s reflection to reveal. Those children who don’t already know that violence against women is wrong will be those who hail from families and communities where this hasn’t already been taught to them. They are precisely the kids who need to have it taught in school, because they are not being taught it at home. And they need to have it taught to them early to counteract the effects of imbibing the socio-cultural norms of families and communities in which domestic abuse of women is tolerated. Hence teaching this to children at the age of 5 is a very sensible idea.
Second, the Mail’s devious use of true statistics to strongly imply untrue conclusions, which in turn produce value judgements about the importance (or otherwise) of violence against women.
The two statistics that this piece employs most gleefully are that “25% of violent crime is committed by women” and that “men are most likely to be the victims of violence.”
Both these statistics are true. But it’s worth recalling that whilst men are more likely to be violently assaulted than women, most of that violence is perpetrated by men against men.
Yet what the Mail does is marry these statistics together to create a completely untrue implication: that most violent crime is committed by women against men.
When spelt out like that the proposition of course looks ridiculous. If 25% of violent crime is perpetrated by women, then 75% of it must be perpetrated by men. So obviously men must account for most violent crime overall. But by not spelling things out so clearly, the Mail cleverly implies that the real issue is that men are the ones who are suffering, not women. Accordingly, the Government is portrayed as being focused on the wrong problem. This, it is heavily implied, is because Harriet Harman is pushing an unjustified feminist agenda…thus playing into the Mail’s favourite fantasy narrative: that white middle class men are the most persecuted group in society.
And this matters, because the obvious value judgement to draw from this is simple: domestic violence against women doesn’t matter and isn’t a real issue, and the Government is wrong to focus on it.
Now I personally find this very difficult to stomach. You see, my girlfriend works for the domestic abuse charity Refuge as a helpline volunteer. Sometimes she tells me about the calls she has to deal with. Of the horrors that many women are coping with on a daily basis, most of whom are trapped in years or decades-long cycles of abuse.
But that would be merely anecdotal. So let’s use the Women’s Aid statistics:
• Domestic violence accounts for between 16% and one quarter of all recorded violent crime. (Home Office, 2004; Dodd et al., 2004; BCS, 1998; Dobash and Dobash, 1980)
• One incident is reported to the police every minute. (Stanko, 2000)
• 45% women and 26% men had experienced at least one incident of inter-personal violence in their lifetimes. (Walby and Allen, 2004) ) however when there were more than 4 incidents (i.e. ongoing domestic or sexual abuse) 89% of victims were women.
• In any one year, there are 13 million separate incidents of physical violence or threats of violence against women from partners or former partners. (Walby and Allen, 2004)
• Women are much more likely than men to be the victim of multiple incidents of abuse, and of sexual violence: 32% of women who had ever experienced domestic violence did so four or five (or more) times, compared with 11% of the (smaller number) of men who had ever experienced domestic violence; and women constituted 89% of all those who had experienced 4 or more incidents of domestic violence. (Walby and Allen, 2004)
• Women are more likely than men to have experienced all types of intimate violence (partner abuse, family abuse, sexual assault and stalking) since the ages of 16. And nearly half the woman who had experienced intimate violence of any kind, were likely to have been victims of more than one kind of intimate abuse. (Coleman et al., 2007)
• 54% of UK rapes are committed by a woman’s current or former partner. (Walby and Allen, 2004)
• On average 2 women a week are killed by a male partner or former partner: this constitutes around one-third of all female homicide victims. (Povey, (ed.), 2004, 2005; Home Office, 1999; Department of Health, 2005.)
A pretty stark picture. Which leads me to another point. No doubt somebody will object that the Daily Mail isn’t manipulating figures to produce false implications, as described above. I really don’t believe any honest reader could conclude otherwise. Yet supposing such an honest reader* did claim the Mail was doing no such thing, I would like to know why the Mail did not see fit to include any of these shocking statistics about domestic violence.
The explanation to me seems clear: the Mail is selectively using information to create an inaccurate impression in its readers’ minds that domestic violence against women is both uncommon and unimportant. The full facts just do not bear this out.
This, from a newspaper with a circulation of just under 2.5 million. As I asked in my previous post, what state our democracy when millions of people are systematically misled about important issues? How can they develop an informed opinion about (say) Harriet Harman’s proposals when they are fed a selective slice of statistics, spun to imply that an issue of tremendous important to individuals and society is irrelevant?
Thirdly, an observation about the Mail’s basic moral thinking on this matter which is, somewhat ironically, at the level of a five year old: That domestic violence against women doesn’t matter, because men suffer from violence too. That two wrongs, apparently, make a right.
Writing about the Mail’s vicious, distortionary right-wing nastiness is like shooting fish in a barrel. But sometimes fish need to be shot. Articles like this undermine not just the plight of women trapped in cycles of abuse, but the very fabric of a democracy which requires political will dependent upon popular support to take significant steps to end this abuse.
–
* Yes Dan, I’m thinking of you.
EDIT: for some light relief – which also makes a point – The Daily Quail has given the Mail article the full Quail treatment. Brilliant.
Peter said,
August 7, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I laughed at this bit:
“The lessons are part of a controversial drive, unveiled today, to reduce violence against women and young girls.”
Sounds about as uncontroversial as you can get!
Paul said,
August 7, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I’m not sure you should laugh.
Am I right in thinking that you find it funny because it seems patently ridiculous to claim that a drive to reduce violence against women and girls is “controversial”?
Because there’s another way of looking at it. That the Daily Mail is putting the idea into people’s heads that it *is* and *should be* controversial to take measures to reduce violence against women and girls.
I don’t find that funny. I think it’s scary.
Peter said,
August 7, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Aye, the first one. I have to laugh or else otherwise I’ll cry. That’s why speakyourebranes is so good.
Ste For Sure said,
August 7, 2009 at 2:12 pm
that article made me feel sick. i didnt read it all the way through. the person who wrote it is an evil little maggot.
Paul said,
August 7, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Ste,
I have long pondered about the people who write the vile crap. I mean, they *know* what they are doing.
Some of them, I’m sure, are actually evil little bastards who get off on being such.
But I suspect that’s not an accurate description of most of them. I think to most of them “it’s just a job”. They just write the words then sign off, not really thinking about what effects they are having.
Which is probably worse. It doesn’t take evil bastards to produce stuff like this, just people who are “only doing their job”.
Dan said,
August 8, 2009 at 12:27 am
The shout-out is most kind, although (as you might expect) the implication in the article that most violent crime is committed by women against men is not clear to me; I’m entirely prepared, however, to chalk that up to blindness (possibly induced by spending too long studying Gricean implicature – oh how analytic philosophy has ruined me) on my part.
But I do agree with you – reducing violence against women (or violence against anyone, for that matter) is stupendously obviously a good thing. I sympathize to some extent with the view that what kids learn should not be subject to political whims, but this is a really really bad place to pick a fight on that issue.
Paul said,
August 8, 2009 at 9:12 am
Dan,
Presumably, however, in Libertopia only the children of the well-to-do will have the privilege of learning these things in school, right?
After all, it is more evil for the state to tax people in order to provide education for the poor, than for the poor’s children to go uneducated, thus trapping them in poverty as without education how can they ever rise past the menial jobs at the bottom of the freemarket pile?
Are you sure you’re happy with all the delightful implications of libertopia? You seem a tad inconsistent here, wanting children to be taught things and not making that dependent upon the arbitrary fact of their parents’ wealth…
Dan said,
August 8, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Paul,
You seem to be committed to an extremely questionable empirical premise here, namely, that only the children of the well-to-do will be taught that raping and beating people is wrong. I don’t know if you’re saying that only the children of rich parents will be sent to school in the first place, or that only the children of rich parents will go to schools where they are taught that raping and beating people is wrong, but either way, I don’t think that’s right. I’m convinced by both the empirical and theoretical arguments that in a free market, the poor would have no problem getting educated. The work of James Tooley, who shows that in some of the poorest slums in some of poorest countries in the world there is a flourishing network of private schools which cater to their customers far better than the state ever could, ought to answer the first of your possible complaints. The fact that even otherwise selfish parents should see the utility in having their kids learn not to engage in activities which will land them in jail (like beating and raping people) ought to speak to the second.
Anyway, I’m not sure why you think there is some inconsistency between my wanting X and my not being prepared to endorse the use of the coercive apparatus of the state to expropriate the fruits of people’s labour in order to ensure the realization of X, but that is, for most values of X, the heart of the libertarian position. It’s based on the moral principle, seemingly obvious to me (but perhaps your mileage may vary), that no matter how badly you want something, it is prima facie wrong to initiate violence or the threat of violence against other people in order to get it.
As for the relevance of ‘arbitrary facts,’ I’m reasonably convinced that people who use this argument are either begging the question in the form of a (morally arbitrary) egalitarian baseline, or that, if they do indeed take the principle that morally arbitrary properties are irrelevant, that is, properties which are not themselves deserved, then the results would be quite substantially more stringent than they realize.
graylad said,
August 8, 2009 at 4:44 pm
This article stirs anger in me, but in a good way. Their seemingly egregious hatemongering has not gotten the better of me.
Also, tenuous statistical links. They’re all over the bastard shop. I could link statistics of rising obesity with statistics on rising sea levels and come up with a conclusion of equal validity to the one blerted out in that article.
Peter said,
August 8, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Dan
“As for the relevance of ‘arbitrary facts,’ I’m reasonably convinced that people who use this argument are either begging the question in the form of a (morally arbitrary) egalitarian baseline, or that, if they do indeed take the principle that morally arbitrary properties are irrelevant, that is, properties which are not themselves deserved, then the results would be quite substantially more stringent than they realize.”
- I’m interested in the second horn of this dilemma (I think I agree with you re: the first). Can you go into more detail?
Paul said,
August 10, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Dan,
“You seem to be committed to an extremely questionable empirical premise here, namely, that only the children of the well-to-do will be taught that raping and beating people is wrong.”
No I don’t. I never said anything of the sort. My point to you was a simple straightfoward one about educating the poor generally. I did not imply – and did not mean to imply – that only the children of the poor will need to be eduated about domestic abuse. (Though, FYI, I do think it’s likely that as an empirical fact this is possibly the case, given socio-economic factors and correlations regarding domestic abuse. But nothing in my preceding arguments pointed to this. You just expected me to point to this. My point, in fact, was about the state provision of education generally. Of maths, say. In Libertopia)
“I’m convinced by both the empirical and theoretical arguments that in a free market, the poor would have no problem getting educated. The work of James Tooley, who shows that in some of the poorest slums in some of poorest countries in the world there is a flourishing network of private schools which cater to their customers far better than the state ever could, ought to answer the first of your possible complaints.”
Links, please. I find this extremely unlikely. I mean, come *on*. Did the poor get quality educations under the Victorians in Britain? Of course not. Do you seriously think that private enterprise can and will provide quality education for the children of the poor?
“The fact that even otherwise selfish parents should see the utility in having their kids learn not to engage in activities which will land them in jail (like beating and raping people) ought to speak to the second.”
Again, was a point about education generally, not about domestic violence specifically. But you might want to consider: if otherwise selfish parents can see this, might they not also see that a very effective way of ahcieving generally socially desirable goals to be…paying tax!
“Anyway, I’m not sure why you think there is some inconsistency between my wanting X and my not being prepared to endorse the use of the coercive apparatus of the state to expropriate the fruits of people’s labour in order to ensure the realization of X, but that is, for most values of X, the heart of the libertarian position.”
I don’t think it’s inconsistent so much as I think it’s plain mad. I don’t understand how you can look at the developed world with established tax regimes, where most people are getting on OK (some considerably better than others to be sure, but mostly OK) and think “oh my lord, this coercive tax is so appalling…it would be better if there was no tax at all, even if it meant old grannies died in the street and the children of the poor went uneducated and became trapped in poverty”. It just seems to me fundamentally potty to ascribe that sort of reaction/judgement to taxation. Especially as to me taxation seems one of the manifest virtues of modern society. I, for example, don’t mind paying tax at all. I’m quite happy about it. It’s my contribution to the society which has furnished me with a life of such fantastic luxury compared to 99.99% of human beings that have ever existed. Does tax have a coercive aspect? Well yes, in terms that if I try not to pay it society/the government will inflict its violence upon me. Am I bothered? No, because this violence is a necessary part of a) making people pay their share to enable this fantastic society of luxury because there will always be cheapskates and dodgers and people who want to take and not give and ultimately you need to be able to do more than just tell them off, and b) the human political condition. (More on this below…)
In sum, I don’t reallly understand why you are so disproportionately hung-up about tax, when the evidence is all around you that tax really ain’t that bad…
“It’s based on the moral principle, seemingly obvious to me (but perhaps your mileage may vary), that no matter how badly you want something, it is prima facie wrong to initiate violence or the threat of violence against other people in order to get it.”
But why focus so exclusively and so inistently upon only taxation if you want to worry about the existence of violence in organised human society? Why not focus on the vicious violent or threat-of-violence behaviour of many corporations, for example? Or the violence and threat of violence that powerful individuals can wield over less powerful individuals? And the ways in which having money in a market-based society will frequently lead to having disparate levels of power?
And anyway, why are you such an absolutist about violence? From my Weberian perspective, politics is *always* going to be about violence and who controls the means of its perpetuation. It just depends how many steps removed from the violence we all are, and who ultimately controls it. I’d much rather live in a world where the violence is controlled by accountable (within obvious limitations we know about) governments that use the threat of violence inherent in all human political society to secure mutual co-operation via taxation, which allows all sorts of wonderful things for those who could not afford them in a pure market society…like hospitals, schools etc for the poor.
You seem to be under the impression that if governments taxing populations disappeared, that would bring an end to violence or the threat of violence in politics, or substantially reduce it. Which seems to me so unbelievable niaive and obviously wrong i don’t really know what to say. And I suppose that’s where we part company. Except to repeat that i’d rather the violence was used for collective endeavours, promoting fairness and equality (I know you don’t care about these, but still…) via a tax regime, than sporadically concentrated in the hands of the unaccountable wealthy, as it would be in libertopia.
Your strange deontology about violence being an absolute bad in all cases rather than ceteris paribus and as a necessary feature of human political society, married with your bizarre belief that violence in political society would disappear/be drastically reduced if those pesky governments just stopped taxing people, is what leads me to think you’re not so much “inconsistent” as a bit freeking mad. Though to be honest, I find it increasingly intruiging how somebody evidently so intelligent can keep it up. At least Peter Hawkins grew out of it!
“As for the relevance of ‘arbitrary facts,’ I’m reasonably convinced that people who use this argument are either begging the question in the form of a (morally arbitrary) egalitarian baseline, or that, if they do indeed take the principle that morally arbitrary properties are irrelevant, that is, properties which are not themselves deserved, then the results would be quite substantially more stringent than they realize.”
Like Peter said, develop this please.
Climate Change Deniers, Freedom, and the End of the World « Bad Conscience said,
August 12, 2009 at 9:17 am
[...] previously written two posts about how a free press may actually undermine democratic society. Today I want to turn my attention [...]
Dan said,
August 13, 2009 at 12:41 am
Paul,
“No I don’t. I never said anything of the sort. My point to you was a simple straightfoward one about educating the poor generally. I did not imply – and did not mean to imply – that only the children of the poor will need to be eduated about domestic abuse. (Though, FYI, I do think it’s likely that as an empirical fact this is possibly the case, given socio-economic factors and correlations regarding domestic abuse. But nothing in my preceding arguments pointed to this. You just expected me to point to this. My point, in fact, was about the state provision of education generally. Of maths, say. In Libertopia)”
If I misread you I apologize, but (of course there’s a but) I think my interpretation of “Presumably, however, in Libertopia only the children of the well-to-do will have the privilege of learning these things in school, right?” wasn’t too far off the mark.
“Links, please. I find this extremely unlikely. I mean, come *on*. Did the poor get quality educations under the Victorians in Britain? Of course not. Do you seriously think that private enterprise can and will provide quality education for the children of the poor?”
Yes, actually, I do. Like I said, check out James Tooley – much of his work is online:
Recent research has found a large majority of schoolchildren in selected poor urban and periurban areas of India and Sub-Saharan Africa using private schools, while in rural India, half of all schoolchildren are privately enrolled. Even in impoverished rural China large numbers of private schools exist off the official radar. The research showed that private schools for the poor are superior to government schoolteachers are more committed, the provision of important inputs better, and education outcomes better even after controlling for background variables. All this is accomplished for a fraction of the per-pupil teacher cost of government schools
From the summary (here: http://www.ifc.org/ifcext/economics.nsf/attachmentsbytitle/educating_amaretch_booklet.pdf/$file/educating_amaretch_booklet.pdf ) – read it for yourself, there are plenty of hard facts and it’s all peer reviewed.
As for the Victorians, I don’t think it’s as clear cut as you seem to believe. The economic historian EG West (there’s a collection of his essays here: http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-book223pdf?.pdf ) made his name attacking the myths here. For instance, he reckons that over 90% of 15 year olds were literate before compulsory state schooling was enacted; compared to the current statistics of 20% people leaving school functionally illiterate, this doesn’t seem too bad to me.
“I don’t think it’s inconsistent so much as I think it’s plain mad. I don’t understand how you can look at the developed world with established tax regimes, where most people are getting on OK (some considerably better than others to be sure, but mostly OK) and think “oh my lord, this coercive tax is so appalling…it would be better if there was no tax at all, even if it meant old grannies died in the street and the children of the poor went uneducated and became trapped in poverty”. It just seems to me fundamentally potty to ascribe that sort of reaction/judgement to taxation. Especially as to me taxation seems one of the manifest virtues of modern society. I, for example, don’t mind paying tax at all. I’m quite happy about it. It’s my contribution to the society which has furnished me with a life of such fantastic luxury compared to 99.99% of human beings that have ever existed. Does tax have a coercive aspect? Well yes, in terms that if I try not to pay it society/the government will inflict its violence upon me. Am I bothered? No, because this violence is a necessary part of a) making people pay their share to enable this fantastic society of luxury because there will always be cheapskates and dodgers and people who want to take and not give and ultimately you need to be able to do more than just tell them off, and b) the human political condition. (More on this below…)
In sum, I don’t reallly understand why you are so disproportionately hung-up about tax, when the evidence is all around you that tax really ain’t that bad…”
As it happens, developing countries are an interesting example, because there is ample evidence that their high-tax policies actively retard growth (and it’s very easy to think of economic growth as an abstraction or a luxury when in reality it is the only way for a people to get away from poverty.) But all empirical arguments aside, there really is a very strong moral case against taxation. Taxation, of earnings at least, is on a par with forced labour. I guess that should answer your puzzlement: it’s like if someone said to you “well, if it’s for a good cause, what’s wrong with a little bit of slavery?” (which is not too far off one of Jerry Cohen’s responses, as it happens). Now of course I’m not saying that taxation is as bad as forced labour, or that I’d rather be a slave than be taxed, etc etc, just that they are moral wrongs of the same kind, which should make it obvious why I am philosophically opposed to both. And even if a slave was better off than 99.99% of people in history, that does not justify his being a slave. Not to mention that even if I should be grateful to ‘society,’ it absolutely does not follow that the same is true with respect to the state. If society is an organism, then the state is a parasite living off it. As far as I’m concerned, “the state is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large” is about right.
“But why focus so exclusively and so inistently upon only taxation if you want to worry about the existence of violence in organised human society? Why not focus on the vicious violent or threat-of-violence behaviour of many corporations, for example? Or the violence and threat of violence that powerful individuals can wield over less powerful individuals? And the ways in which having money in a market-based society will frequently lead to having disparate levels of power?”
Having said all that above, I wouldn’t even say that taxation is the greatest of my concerns. It is one of them, to be sure, but if I could keep the level of taxation constant, have it simply redistributed (as progressively as you like) like a negative income tax, and abolish all the not-strictly-necessary-for-law-and-order functions of the state, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Taxation doesn’t really exercise me so much as the millions of tiny regulations and restrictions and harassments and permissions and licenses and assessments and authorizations and controls, which are part of everyday life under an overbearing state. What frustrates me is that I think a lot of people on the left feel roughly the same way when it comes to ID cards or CCTV cameras but do not follow the thought through consistently.
“Your strange deontology about violence being an absolute bad in all cases rather than ceteris paribus and as a necessary feature of human political society, married with your bizarre belief that violence in political society would disappear/be drastically reduced if those pesky governments just stopped taxing people, is what leads me to think you’re not so much “inconsistent” as a bit freeking mad. Though to be honest, I find it increasingly intruiging how somebody evidently so intelligent can keep it up. At least Peter Hawkins grew out of it!”
I certainly don’t believe violence is an absolute bad in all cases; just that it is, I think, a paradigm of immorality to initiate it against someone. I have no problem with reasonable self-defence, I am not a pacifist. And much as I enjoyed the last quip there, I think it can go both ways – I see egalitarianism and all the talk of fairness as something to be doled out by a benevolent state as, really, a continuation of the childhood complaint about a sibling: “but mum, why does he get more?”
Paul said,
August 15, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Ah, you call it a childhood complaint, and liken it to whining.
I think it’s more evidence of a basic human propensity to desire equality in the absence of compelling reasons for why there should be inequality.
Most of the inequality in the world at persent cannot be justified by anything more than arbitrary privilege (here I take my cue from Rawls and include undeserved natural talents as well as material inheritances).
The only institution that can rectify this is the state.
So I think most people have a basic propensity – expressed so early on by children who are so exorcised by the manifest *unfairness* of others have more for no good reason – for equality. I think the state can satisfy that.
You, obviously, see it differently.
And ultimately, I don’t think we can argue beyond it that much. Different, incompatible Weltanschauung, ultimately.
Though I’ll fight – physically if necessary – to stop yours winning out over mine.
Causes and Effects « Bad Conscience said,
October 24, 2009 at 6:38 pm
[...] as thanks to Peter I can supply another example, here. The article by James Slack (which I’ve discussed before), is, as Peter says, probably as bad as Moir’s one about Stephen Gately. So my over-all [...]