Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife?

The local press in this unnamed oil-rich Middle Eastern principality recently ran a story on domestic violence. A professor at one of the local universities interviewed 2,778 female students, and came up with the shocking information that 23% of those surveyed were “victims of beating.”

But there is something odd here. The professor is quoted by the newspaper as saying “most females are not even aware that they are victims of domestic violence.”

It seems to me that, if I were beaten, I would be instantly aware of the fact.

Can it be that, like Western feminists, this researcher has falsified her research by playing fast and loose with the meaning of terms? Can she be using “beating” in some specialized sense? Does it, for example, include pushing and shoving? Does it include fighting back when attacked? Any unwanted touching? A verbal insult?

Yup. Turns out “beating” in the survey was really “harassment and beating”; and included such items as “divorce threats, suppression of freedom of expression, and name-calling.”

Apparently a concurrent survey found that 42% of the women interviewed felt they “deserved” what the survey described as “aggression” against them. Obviously, the question of whether this was really violence, or legitimately oppression of women, is debatable. You do the math: subtract 42 from 23. What is left as the incidence of real, indisputable domestic violence against women?

More suspect still, the paper explains that the result of the survey “will be used to advocate and explore the necessity of enacting legislation on violence against women in the country.”

What could be more obvious, from that comment, than that this survey was not, as claimed, “scientific,” but rather politically motivated?

It is a trivial matter to skew a social science survey to produce any apparent results you desire.

For example, did this survey ask men as well as women whether they had been subject to violence? It did not: the story says only female students were sampled. Doesn’t this prejudge the problem considerably? For comparison, how helpful or scientific would a survey have been that, in Nazi Germany, only measured violence by Jews against Aryans? Or one in the pre-1960s US South that interviewed only whites about violence by blacks? Wouldn’t we, rightly, see it as completely unscientific, and no more than a tool of prejudice?

In this survey, what happens if a woman calls a man a name, and he objects? Wouldn't that fall under the survey’s category of “suppression of freedom of expression”? How about if a man calls a woman a name? That, surely, as “name-calling,” becomes a form of “beating”?

Catch-22.

Was the study double blind, as any meaningful survey must be? It seems impossible: note the comment that most females were not even aware that they were victims of violence. How would the researcher be able to claim this, if the theme of domestic violence had not been made clear while conducting the survey itself? Both interviewer and interviewee must have been fully aware not only of the subject of the survey, but indeed of the desired result.

Domestic violence? Frankly, I blame global warming.