Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Can seven violent deaths go unreported?

According to Human Rights Commissioner, Joy Liddicoat, quoting the National Collective of Women's Refuges, seven women have been killed in domestic violence incidents this year alone. In trying to verify this I checked the Sensible Sentencing website.

It has recorded 9 murders this year. But none of them were women. Seven were men in either their late twenties or early thirties. The other two were a three year-old boy and a 14 month-old baby girl.

What am I missing here? There is no mention of this fact at the Women's Refuge website

I've searched "woman killed in domestic incident nz 2006" to no avail and I've searched the Police press releases, also to no avail.

According to Stop Violence Against Women historically a woman is killed by a partner or ex every five weeks or around 11 women a year. So if seven have been lost already something is seriously awry (as though it isn't anyway.)

I can only conclude that these seven deaths slipped completely beneath the media's radar.

UPDATE: Now it's in the newspaper so it must be true.

7 comments:

Libertyscott said...

Is there a risk that the "statistic" is as valid as the claim in the mid 80s that one third of girls are molested by their dads?

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Libertyscott, I considered that but our homicide rate is around 100 per year. So the Sensible Sentencing number looks a bit light. Statistically speaking there is room for seven more deaths but where and when were they?

Libertyscott said...

Unless they claim no government money and are unemployed and own no businesses, and have no family - they would be murdered or missing... hmmm

Anonymous said...

Hi, I'm the Sensible Sentencing Trust's webmaster, and I came across this excellent blog while I was trawling through our site stats. I can shed some light upon this disparity. The murders that are on our Murder map are those that are reported somewhere in the media... and it seems that these days, not every murder is news as it would have been back in the days when we had 5-10 a year :-( Unfortunately it is quite possible that yes, seven violent deaths could go unreported is today's society. And liberals complain that the media "over-report crime" and make the public think things are worse than they actually are, when it is the other way round in reality...

Anyway keep up the good work Lindsay. Not only intelligent but a huge artistic talent as well I noticed! (Go take a look at the Gallery people)

sagenz said...

I could believe 2005 & sloppy reporting. Any thoughts?

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Sagenz, I think you may be right. There were at least two deaths in Dec 2005. Xmas/holiday typically produces more domestics. But they should get their facts right if they want to be credible. Otherwise they risk the appearance of manipulating or politicising statistics. Then they lose support.
Peter, thanks for your comments and your very useful website.

Anonymous said...

Anyone know the statistics regarding how much domestic violence increases when the all blacks lose? I read somewhere it was about 5x as much? But want to get the actual statistic.