Yes, carry-concealed handguns. I lived in Alaska, Missouri and Texas where guns are common place, carry-concealed permits a formaility and use of lethal force in self-defence (in MI &TX even for property defence) legal and seen as a civil right.

Results

Good – Crimes like stranger rape, stalking, flashing etc were extremely rare and women were happy to walk alone anywhere (seedy downtown, parks etc) at any time (potential perps were put off by the fact that a purse could hold a dainty but deadly .22).

Likewise car theft, break-ins etc – almost unheard of.

Bad – High murder rates. In Houston, Dallas etc each week the Sunday night news started with a body-count of people (usually men) killed locally because a drink or drug fuelled dispute in a bar or at a BBQ or party lead to shootings from a carry-concealed or glove-box gun. State of 14 Million people had over 2000 murders per year while even with the current knife crime epidemic England has around 700 per year.

Men are also killing men on a large scale. In fact the large majority of murder victims, assault victims, mugging victims, etc. are male. See e.g. here

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2004/11/20292/47178

I don’t think it’s useful to focus on the gender of the victims*. It would be nice if violent men would stop being violent, period. Now does anyone know how to make them?

* Obviously except when this is of practical relevance – clearly preventing rape might requires different strategies to preventing organized crime.

I hadn’t even heard of the Californian experience, which sounds interesting, and it appears to be better than what we have here.

I’ve crunched the numbers, and even in California, it looks as though 80% of rapes are going unpunished so, as you say, it ain’t perfect.

I was interested to see the comparative figures for prevalence of rape in the US and UK. Assuming that the Californian system is not universal, the US appears to have something else that we don’t, since their victimisation rate is less than half ours.

If you think that then you’ve not taken a good look at California’s Rape Crisis programme, which funds 84 centres covering all 58 counties.

The program has had non competitive statutory funding since 1992, running to over $16 million in 2007 and is linked into the State’s specialist rape prosecution programmes, providing specialist victim/witness support alongside crisis and recovery counselling.

In California, as a whole, 44% of reported rapes result in an arrest and 64% of those cases are prosecuted, with some cities recording 80-90% conviction rates, all of which puts our pathetic prosecution rates into perspective, especially when you consider that the US criminal justice system is much more stringent than our own on things like pre-charge detention, right to silence, warrant requirements for searches, DNA evidence, etc. and presumptions of innocence and the burden of proof.

The US constitution precludes efforts to rig the criminal justice system to (unsuccessfully) increase prosecution and conviction rates for the sake of cheap newspaper headlines, which has meant that states like California have had to invest, instead, in specialist prosecutors and forensic teams and in rape support services, which support women as cases move through the criminal justice system – and California outperforms the UK on every significant indicator.

It ain’t perfect but it works about five times better than piecemeal system we have here and rape support services play a big part in that.

There’s also scope for a rather vicious circle going on here, which is that if the CPS know that the conviction rate in rape trials is 6% or whatever, then any rape case that comes to them is going to have a hard time meeting the first criterion for them to justify proceding to trial. Isn’t it?

I read the title as meaning “tackling the subject of domestic violence in the medium of blog”, in which case it’s very apt.

But you’re right, in terms of what can be done about it, while support services to help clean up the mess are definitely needed, what would be even more brilliant would be an ounce of prevention, and some joined up thinking in government and elsewhere. It’s a bit like telling people they shouldn’t smoke, while at the same time happily collecting the tax revenue…

Getting support to women helps to cut the attrition rate due to witness withdrawals,

Also, do we have to actually die before someone sits up and takes notice? All this is rather a bit late for all the poor sods who go into making these types of statistics…

As a woman, I do find all this nit-picking over the details rather offensive. It feels like people are looking for a way out of making a big deal about this. I know that’s not what you’re doing, it’s just what it feels like from where I’m sitting.

Whether male violence is the first second third or fourth biggest killer or harmer of women in whatever age-group you care to mention – what actual difference does it make in terms of how you feel about it, or what you want to do about it?

it’s not impossible that if you segment the data for ‘alcohol-related’ you could come up with figures showing that the number one alcohol-related cause of admission for women is ‘got the shit kicked out of me by my pissed up boyfriend/partner/husband’, closely followed by ‘drank a half bottle of gin on top of a few sleepers because my arsehole of a partner treats me like shit and batters me’.

Clinical categories can very often hide as much as they reveal.

The context of her comments clearly seems to imply mortality…

Let’s look at the other statistics. One in four women experience domestic violence at some point in their lives and 10 kill themselves because of it every week. Two are murdered each week. For women under 44, it is the most common cause of morbidity – above both cancer and road accidents.

Which makes the sudden shift to morbidity a little odd and somewhat disingenuous, although whether that’s conscious thing or she’s simply cherry-picking to suit her argument is less than clear..

It would be nice to know what her source for these numbers is.

This error has appeared on the thread a few times but I’m surprised to see you make it. Morbidity does not mean the same thing as mortality (i.e. death rate). Morbidity means illness – in this case, probably hospital admissions.

This is not to say Bindel’s rather outlandish claim is statistically correct (I doubt it), but death rate figures aren’t what you need in order to counter it.

The BCS incidence figures for England and Wales for all interpersonal violence against women, which includes DV, family violence, sexual violence and stalking weigh in at around 6% per annum – around a million women in total – and prevalence is around 1 in 3.

She may well be adding the DV and sexual violence figures together when the reality is that the two figures significantly overlap but, to be fair, we’re up a level where the exact figure start to blur and its really the scale of the issue and not the exact numbers that matters to the general debate.

She’s also way off with the morbidity claim – if we accept her figures (10 suicides, 2 murders per week) that gives a death rate in women under 45 of 4 per 100,000. For cancer its 15-18 per 100,000, which circulatory diseases come in at 8-10 per 100,000.

It is on a par with deaths from respiratory disease (4 per 100,000) which is pretty alarming but not the leading cause of morbidity by quite a distance.

Again, I wonder if the error is a simple misreading of the numbers – death by injury and poisoning are the largest recorded cause of death in women under 30, but this is rapidly overtaken by the death rate for cancer in the 30-44 age group, which is 30 per 100,000.

Julie Bindel on the same subject at Comment is Free