Conversation

@phildobangnz @hakui The mastodon bot is pulling that quote from an article in independent who is pulling that from a research study. Too many levels of simplification ruin the original fact just like a game of telephone that starts with "traps are gay" and ends with "vote for jeb".

First the study uses some pretty broad definitions of abuse. Its a definition they take from another place. Partner abuse includes

"non-sexual abuse by a partner or ex-partner: physical force, emotional or financial abuse, or threats to hurt the respondent or someone close to them, carried out by a current or former partner"

"sexual assault carried out by a partner or ex-partner: rape or assault by penetration (including attempts), or indecent exposure or unwanted touching carried out by a current or former partner"

and

"stalking carried out by a partner or ex-partner: two or more incidents (causing distress, fear or alarm) of receiving obscene or threatening unwanted letters, emails, text messages or phone calls, having had obscene or threatening information about them placed on the internet, waiting or loitering around home or workplace, or following or watching by a current or former partner"

The source of these definitions state

"for the survey year ending March 2017 showed that 1.2 million women (7.5%) aged 16 to 59 years were victims of “Any domestic abuse” in the last 12 months1. Of these women, 985,000 (5.9% of women aged 16 to 59 years) experienced partner abuse in the last year. Non-sexual partner abuse was one of the most common forms of abuse against women."

For the minors in this group simply not buying lunch for your partner can be taken as financial abuse and thus partner abuse. An absolute strawman but minors should not be part of this survey and the definition should be more stringent. The paper goes on to state

"Young women aged between 16 and 19 years (7.6%) and 20 and 24 years (7.4%) were significantly more likely to have experienced partner abuse in the 12 months before interview than women aged between 45 and 54 years (5.6%) and 55 and 59 years (4.4%). "

This is an expected behavior when partner abuse includes things like shitposting your partner on facebook. Electronic communication is more prevalent in younger age groups. This data does not normalize against such generational habits.

Here is where that five times quote comes in

"Bisexual women were nearly twice as likely to have experienced partner abuse in the last 12 months than heterosexual women (10.9% compared with 6.0%). When we look at the specific types of abuse, bisexual women were again twice as likely as heterosexual women to have experienced non-physical abuse (6.8% compared with 3.9%), but were nearly five times as likely to have experienced sexual assault by a partner or ex-partner (1.9% compared with 0.4%)."

So indeed bisexual women are 5 times more likely to experience sexual assault by a partner or former partner. The phrasing of this sentence is misleading. 0.4 percent means 4 in 1000 heterosexual women are sexually assaulted versus about 20 in 1000. Indeed there are substantially more abused bisexuals but the language "five times more likely" carries a connotation to the layman of some 50% or more bisexual women being abused. Quite a distance from 2%. The study does not attempt to normalize for whether the attacker was male, female or something else so we are left at hakui's point.

The study goes on with presenting findings of things most of us would not be surprised at. This includes

1. Mixed race women most likely to experience partner abuse (10%)
2. Non-religious women most likely to experience partner abuse (7%)
3. Separated and divorced women most likely to experience partner abuse (18% and 16% respectively)
4. Unemployed women most likely to experience partner abuse (10%)
5. Low income women most likely to experience partner abuse (14%)
6. Single moms most likely to experience partner abuse (21%)
7. Women on social assistance/welfare most likely to experience partner abuse (11%)
8. Women with long-term illness or disability that limits daily life most likely to experience partner abuse (13%)

Remind yourself of the definition of partner abuse here. Financial and emotional terms are present in this data. One would expect to find low-income situations are more likely to experience financial abuse. Long-term illness is not cheap too. Emotional support goes the same way which their data shows as married people regardless of sexual orientation were the least likely to experience partner abuse.

Overall this whole study is doing nothing more than pointing out the obvious with some very basic statistics. The authors fail to go further and seek out meaningful information and only tout pretty one-liners for the media and their brain dead followers to scarf down to morning tea.

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