Killings

Counting dead women — time for men to "step up", or be tied down?

Data from the Australian Institute for Criminology (AIC) indicates that of all the homicides in Australia, 80-90% of offenders are male (see Table 38 of the Homicide Offenders.xls here).  However, this statistic is dominated by the two thirds of homicides that are not DV-related – of which about 80% are male victims of male offenders (see Table 34 of Homicide Victims.xls ) – and this starkly gendered pattern is not so clear cut for other killings.

Globally, the UN report on killings of women & girls in 2022 notes Africa and Asia have the greatest number of victims (Africa highest in per capita terms).  However, despite recognising that "the overwhelming majority (80%) of homicides worldwide are committed against men and boys", and that even in the "private sphere (perpetrated by intimate partners or other family members)", females are only estimated to comprise 53% of victims (i.e. males are about the same at 47% +/- about 6%), the report overwhelmingly focuses on female victims as it claims they are, "committed on the grounds of gender-related factors. These can include the ideology of men’s entitlement and privilege over women, social norms regarding masculinity, and the need to assert male control or power, enforce gender roles, or prevent, discourage or punish what is considered to be unacceptable female behaviour".

Of course if you considered killings through war then the data would overwhelmingly point to men as the culprits.  But women can be just as enthusiastic about war, even though they don't actively participate much (except in Israel), and anyway the motivations of the psychopathic leaders who order wars are quite different from the issues that lead to domestic violence.  We cannot have a rational, objective analysis of what causes people to kill – and thus tackle the issues – when feminists insist on conflating all instances together, along with far milder DV and sexism, and then dishonestly attributing it all to "toxic masculinity" & patriarchy.

Despite the media attention they get, "random" killings by (psychopathic) strangers are quite rare — typically around 20-40 Australians p.a. (varying significantly by year), including about 20+/-10 women (see "DV & deaths & suicides.xls") or less & declining, which means for a population of 25 million the chances of any individual being so murdered over a period of 80 years is about 0.01% (slightly higher for women, at about 0.013%).

Note even these low numbers of killings by strangers will include victims who increase their risks by engaging in activities that may expose them to bad characters and dangerous situations, yet still they represent around 40 times less deaths p.a. than the 1,200 people killed on Australia's roads in a typical year or 100 times less than the annual number of Australian suicides (7 males out of 9 suicides a day in 2019).

A further 30-40 p.a. women are also killed by male partners (see analysis of this in comparison to suicides here), but it seems to be difficult to obtain definitive, official raw data at the most detailed level, split by perpetrator sex and homicide classification (intimate partner, DV, stranger etc.).  AIHW research on Australian homicides by partners indicates that one woman was killed every 9 days and one man every 29 days between 2014–15 and 2015–16 (totalling around 50 p.a., of which about 75% are women), indicating about one man is killed by a woman for every three women killed by men (assuming the vast majority of "partners" are straight).  AIC data for intimate partner homicide shows the same ratio continuing to 2019-20 (see Table 10 of the Homicide Incidents.xls here).

This gender difference may be exaggerated by some male deaths not being categorised as "DV" (especially as men are much less likely to report DV to police, or be treated seriously if they do) and because lesbian relationships are known to involve more violence than those of gay men (see DV research).  The gender difference in DV homicide perpetrators also reduces if child victims are included, as children are more often killed by mothers than fathers (see next page).  In addition, with more men killed by other men than women killed by women (even in a "domestic" context), AIC data for 2010-12 indicates a much smaller gender difference for victims, with one male victim of domestic homicide every 10 days and one female victim every 6 days (3-in-8 or 38% of victims being male).  "Domestic Violence Awareness Australia" – who claim to provide "Australia's most accurate DV death count" – report broadly similar patterns for 2018, with one man killed by a woman for every three women killed by men, and about 1.7 male DV killers for every female DV killer.

AIC data shows 25/35 = 71% of intimate partner homicides were committed by men against women in 2021-22, and 34/38 = 89% in 2022-23 (illustrating the volatility in such data).  In 2022, the trend level of non-indigenous female homicide victims was about 60 p.a. out of the population of around 96.2% x 13.15m, with about 44% of these being intimate partner homicides.  This implies a lifetime victim rate of about 0.017%, or less than 1 in 5,000.  Accordingly, less than 1 in 5,000 non-indigenous Australian men kill their female partner.

In the US, men make up about 30% of intimate homicide victims – "not counting cases in which women kill in self-defense" (a filter that is obviously exposed to error) – plus women are at least as likely as men to kill their children (more so if one counts killings of newborns), and account for more than half of child maltreatment perpetrators.

Statistical extremes don't represent the masses

Whilst it is true that cases of extreme violence such as murders, terrorism and mass shootings are overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) committed by males, these extremes do not provide a good representation of those responsible for the more moderate and highly prevalent conflict that occurs in many relationships.  

The statistical reasons for this are demonstrated in the graph below (from "gender trait distributions.xls"), showing typical overlapping frequency or probability distributions for a male & female characteristic — using height as an example (because the data for mean & standard deviation is readily available).  The difference in the mean height is 5.4 inches, but because of the significant overlap in distributions, there is a roughly 30% chance that a randomly chosen man & woman will be a similar height, give or take a few inches, and a 50/50 chance that they'll differ in height by no more than 5 inches.  Moreover, if there is correlation between the two people – which there is, because tall women prefer tall men – then the chances of a small height difference are even greater.  

However, the difference is vastly increased at the extremes or "tails" of the distributions, so if a person is more than 5 inches higher than the average male (i.e. over 6' 2"), then they will almost certainly be male (as about 4% of men are, vs less than 0.01% of women).  

Similarly, Dr Jordan Peterson points out that in personality tests, men, on average, score a lower measure of "agreeableness", but although the differences are not great at the midpoint of the distributions (so there's a sizeable 40% chance that a randomly selected woman will be less agreeable than a randomly drawn man), the effect of such differences are magnified at the tails, so the most disagreeable 1 or 2% of individuals (those at high risk for extreme violence and incarceration) are overwhelmingly male.  

Conversely, the dominance of males in the distribution tails has little relevance to the likely difference in agreeableness of two men & women amongst the bulk of the population, especially as they will also show correlation in their traits (which is what often drives partner matching).

Likewise, whilst there is considerable overlap in both men & women having neurotic traits (e.g. anxiety/fear & depression), the most neurotic people in society are overwhelmingly women.

Female homicide rates are reducing in Australia & most other nations

Contrary to the "escalating crisis" proclaimed so often by DV groups, politicians and the media, ABS data shows total homicides in Australia halved over the two decades following the 1990s, despite the population increasing by over a third.  About 0.03% of Australians are killed through DV, averaging around 100 homicides p.a. over the decade to 2014 (including children & other DV categories), but DV intimate partner homicide rates halved for both men and women over the two decades to 2020, reaching an average of 37 female (1 every 10 days) and 12 male (1 every 30 days) victims p.a. over the 5 years to 2020 (see AIC data here in slides 5 & 7 and Tables 8-10 of the Homicide Incidents.xls).    In NSW, homicide rates rapidly halved after 2014-15, to a total of 50 in the year to March 2018, including only 15 (30%) linked to DV (representing just 0.05% of DV incidents reported to Police).

The rate of female homicides is already low in Australia compared to the rest of the world, and continues to decline (see following charts).  But despite these low rates and the positive downward trend, in April 2024 an apparently one-off increase in female homicide victims enabled a campaign of outrage by the feminist DV industry to successfully get the issue declared as "a national crisis", with yet more money secured for itself  — supported by a mass media campaign that (with rare exception) ignored the bigger picture of the long-term decline and the fact that the increase in 2022-23 was really just a return to a volatile trend after the number of female victims had reduced significantly in the prior two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, contrary to alarmist feminist claims at the time, which also successfully brought in more DV industry funding (and similarly in the UK, where despite claims of a surge in DV during lockdowns, there was no increase in the trend for DV Police reports, and homicides actually stayed stable).

AIC research on female-perpetrated intimate partner homicides occurring in Australia between 2004 and 2014 indicates that approximately half of these homicides were premeditated.  Many offenders were unemployed and had a history of mental illness & substance misuse, and 40% had a criminal history recorded by police, primarily for assault.

However, dishonest & deranged feminists like Jenna Price only count dead women (and in a distorted way, thanks to the belief that "all violent deaths targeted against women are the result of societal misogyny") and claim "women don't murder" (on The Project 20 Feb. 2020, I think) – supported by feminists and a media that downplays or excuses women murderers – and then advocate, repeatedly, that all men should be subjected to an evening curfew and that "any man transitioning out of a relationship... should be monitored" — so lies are used to justify controlling behaviour by women based on irrational, misinformed fear.

Even if homicide perpetrators are more commonly men, being male is not their statistically distinguishing characteristic (which is also shared by half the population!); it is their extreme mental dysfunction.   However, while the media & DV organisations relentlessly exploit the horrific burning alive of the "beautiful" Hannah Clarke and her children by her ex-husband (following battles over children that lit the fuse on a "powderkeg man" who had been showing signs of losing control), they quickly forget similar murders committed by women of men like Daniel Surtees (just weeks earlier) or Stanley Obi (both men burnt alive while at home with their children), and there's no public outcry about the many children killed at the hands of violent mothers (who are more readily given the excuse of mental pressure/illness), nor concern shown for men killed by other men — which feminists blame on "toxic masculinity" (so implicitly, male victims are partly to blame for their own murder, because they're judged on their identity group rather than their individual characteristics).  In fact, contrary to the claims made following the high-profile case of Hannah Clarke – in order to justify new "coercive control" laws – NSW BOSCAR research shows reports of coercive control do not help to predict domestic homicide, nor even other violence.

Moreover, there seems to be no evidence that rare, random rape & murders of women have anything to do with society-wide casual sexism in modern, wealthy democracies.  Research "overwhelmingly identifies factors like humiliation, shame and guilt as motivating drivers" for violence, not the "lack of respect for women" that's claimed by feminists and echoed by politicians.  Most men love and care for women (or at least those women that don't attack them) and will even risk or sacrifice their lives for them & their children, so it is just as insulting to suggest that all or most men (& their supposed disrespectful attitudes towards women) should feel responsible for such dreadful crimes – as is repeatedly claimed with partial selected anecdotes & statistics by many misandric, or at least statistically ignorant (see above discussion of extremes) media commentators and weak-minded politicians (on all sides of politics) – as it is to (ineffectually) blame all Muslims for terrorist attacks by "Islamic extremists".  Likewise, the number of Australian children killed by their parents is a similar magnitude (about 20 p.a.), but just because a majority are killed by the mother (see here), doesn't mean we should blame this on women in general lacking respect for children!

Extreme violence is not caused by societal sexism, gender norms and inequality!

As laudable as it may be to advocate respect for women, the evidence indicates such general campaigns do little to reduce extreme violence & murder (and not surprisingly, focusing on actual perpetrators rather than their identity group is far more effective).  Violence & abuse in society is varied in its characteristics, so efforts to reduce it are not helped by overly-simplistic feminist theories that just blame it all on men, the "oppressive patriarchy" & "toxic masculinity".  On the contrary, the current dishonest demonisation of men in Australia especially (but also in other Anglo countries) with relentless attacks including TV adverts denigrating men & boys and divisive demands to "take sides" coming from feminists, mainstream media, governments, charities & virtue-signalling businesses (like Gillette), is creating a "festering fury about the vilification of men and boys".  This gender war is not the way forward; it is only making things worse.

Where violence most commonly occurs there is typically some background relationship/history that contributes to various types of conflict, ranging from some cases of one-way aggression (which may be sustained &/or unprovoked in the moment) by men or women suffering mental illness/trauma &/or inflamed by alcohol, through to violent responses that are highly provoked by (not necessarily justified by) verbal/emotional or physical aggression arising from mutual verbal conflict.  The sad reality (which has taken me about 40 years to really accept) is that there are large numbers of selfish, dishonest, insecure & aggressive men & women in society, and still more ordinarily-decent people who will snap & behave inappropriately if placed under enough pressure.  This diversity and complexity of violence in society needs to be confronted and better understood if we are to develop more effective policy measures to combat domestic violence.  If we want to make genuine progress in this enormously important area of humanity, we need balance, self-reflection, compassion and non-adversarial objectivity all round.

Let's be clear: violence is unacceptable, and all individuals have to take responsibility for their actions, no matter what the provocation.  But as a society, we do have to look at the emotional dynamics between two (or more) people that often leads to domestic violence.  It's not about excusing or "victim blaming" (which the media seems happy to engage in when the aggressor is female); it's about understanding.  If we don't understand the causes, we won't solve the problem.  We have to stop judging people based on their sex/gender identity (or any other tribal characteristic like race or religion), and instead consider the specific context of the individuals concerned.

The "solutions" that have been advocated in recent years, besides being dishonest & immoral, are frankly just stupid – on which, here's another entertaining video break, with Sydney Watson critiquing "feminist logic" in response to high-profile murders of women:

(& no, liking this doesn't make me a right-wing, gun-supporting Trump fan by association!)

OK, back to it:

NEXT: Child abuse