Abusing the Story of Abuse

In the 1990s, a feminist group produced a research study that declared that domestic violence and abuse of women occurred more often, and was heightened, on Super Bowl Sunday. The study cited that, provoked by excessive drinking, and possibly the defeat of their favored team, callous and cruel men take out their football frustrations on their wives or girlfriends.

Legacy news articles disseminated the study without question, investigation, or reservation. In the interim, the late Rush Limbaugh said he took the article to task in his, “formerly nicotine-stained fingers” and made calls looking for data to support the research. In concluding his inquiry, there was no data, statistics, or numbers and it was all fabricated. To this day, the claim continues to surface, but no hard facts are ever produced. The allegation may or may not be true, but facts eclipse fiction or conjecture.

What else could possibly increase and intensify domestic violence? Well, climate change of course. Just ask the Washington Post (WP) which published the article, “Climate change puts more women at risk for domestic violence.”

While there is no uncertainty about the criminality of domestic violence and while I’m confident that men are the violators on almost all occasions, the WP first uses extreme weather as the cause for an increase in this sadistic aggression. Such being the case and statistically, there being no increase in storms of any or every type or their intensities, no increase in droughts, floods, or wildfires, and no unusual increase in ocean water levels, and the continuing malpractice in the temperature records, the number of domestic violence cases, must be at the exact same ratio as always.

The only mechanism that could then realistically increase the number of cases is the growth in population. In 1990 for example the world’s population was 5,278,639,789. At the time of this writing, it was 8,009,452,423, an increase of 2,730,812,634, or an expansion of almost 52% in 33 years. It’s interesting to watch population and other worldwide statistics build at “WorldOMeters” which I link here – some find the values both staggering, astonishing, and scary.

Relative to climate change and domestic abuse, the article cites that, “Terry McGovern who heads the department of Population and Family Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, called the scientific evidence for this connection ‘overwhelming.’ Yet just a couple of lines down the article reads, “Several academics, activists and humanitarian workers said the links between violence against women and extreme weather events need more research. Unlike the hard science of climate change, they said, the complex drivers of violence cannot easily be captured in numbers.” Somebody is making up stories?

So the reality is that there is no hard science in either situation since there is no scientific evidence of climate change and the facts surrounding violence against women are “complex”. The Washington Post cherry-picks locations where extreme weather has occurred and places where intense storms often arise. Handpicking locations where they can concoct a story is not statistical science or comprehensive, all-inclusive, and factual evidence.

In summation, violent men and some women are violent people. This is what needs to be addressed and not attaching or exploiting some political ploy to an obviously appalling issue.