Debunking the `Day of Dread' for Women; Data Lacking for Claim of Domestic Violence Surge

Debunking the `Day of Dread' for Women; Data Lacking for Claim of 
Domestic Violence Surge After Super Bowl

Byline: Ken Ringle

01/31/93

THE WASHINGTON POST

    As the beer cools and the testosterone surges on this mega-day
of professional football, a network of feminist activists has
orchestrated a national campaign to ask males to stop beating their
wives and girlfriends after the Super Bowl.
    In an effort to combat what the Associated Press and CBS have
labeled a "day of dread" for women, the organizers have prevailed on
NBC, broadcaster of the Super Bowl, to air a public service
announcement against wife-beating before tonight's big game.
"Domestic violence is a crime," the announcer intones.
     Despite their dramatic claims, none of the activists appears to
have any evidence that a link actually exists between football and
wife-beating. Yet the concept has gained such credence that their
campaign has rolled on anyway, unabated. Last week, it produced:A
news conference near Super Bowl Central in Pasadena, Calif.,
declaring Super Bowl Sunday "the biggest day of the year for
violence against women." An interview on "Good Morning America" in
which Denver psychiatrist Lenore Walker claimed to have compiled a
10-year record of violent incidents against women on Super Bowl
Sundays. A story in the Boston Globe declaring that women's shelters
and violence hot lines are "flooded with more calls from victims {on
Super Bowl Sunday} than any day of the year." Announcement of a
nationwide phone bank to field calls about domestic violence during
the Super Bowl and seek funds for the phone bank, by Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group with an active
feminist wing. A public relations mailing from Dobisky Associates in
Keene, N.H., warning at-risk women: "Don't remain alone with him
during the game."
    Some experts on domestic violence, however, are dubious.
     "You're dealing in an area where there's a lot more folklore
than fact," said David Silber, chairman of the Department of
Psychology at George Washington University and a longtime scholar of
domestic violence. "I know of no study documenting any such link"
between football and/or Super Bowls and domestic violence. "And I
know the literature very well."
     "I don't think anybody has any systematic data on any of this,"
said Charles Patrick Ewing, a forensic psychologist and author of
"Battered Women Who Kill."
     Yet Ewing is quoted in the release from Dobisky Associates
declaring "Super Bowl Sunday is one day in the year when hot lines,
shelters and other agencies that work with battered women get the
most reports and complaints of domestic violence."
     "I never said that," Ewing said. "I don't know that to be
true."
     Told of Ewing's response, Frank Dobisky acknowledged that the
quote should have read "one of the days of the year." That could
mean one of many days in the year.
     The news conference in Pasadena Thursday cited a study
purporting to document a link between domestic violence in Northern
Virginia and games played by the Washington Redskins in 1988-89.
     According to an AP story on the conference, Sheila Kuehl,
managing lawyer of the California Women's Law Center, said a study
by sociologists at Old Dominion University in Norfolk found police
reports of beatings and hospital admissions in Northern Virginia
rose 40 percent after games won by the Washington Redskins during
those years.
     But when asked about that assertion, Janet Katz, professor of
sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion and one of the
authors of that study, said "that's not what we found at all. "
     One of the most notable findings, she said, was that an
increase of emergency room admissions "was not associated with the
occurrence of football games in general, nor with watching a team
lose." When they looked at win days alone, however, they found that
the number of women admitted for gunshot wounds, stabbings,
assaults, falls, lacerations and wounds from being hit by objects
was slightly higher than average. But certainly not 40 percent.
    "These are interesting but very tentative findings, suggesting
what violence there is from males after football may spring not from
a feeling of defensive insecurity, which you'd associate with a
loss, but from the sense of empowerment following a win. We found
that significant. But it certainly doesn't support what those women
are saying in Pasadena," Katz said.
     Kuehl, who described the study at the news conference in
Pasadena, could not be reached at her office. She later returned the
call but did not leave a number where she could be reached.
     Linda Mitchell of FAIR, who appeared at the news conference
with Kuehl and made similar links between domestic violence and
Super Bowl Sunday, said she recognized at the time that Kuehl was
misrepresenting the Old Dominion study.
     Did she, as a representative of Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting, challenge her colleague?
     "I wouldn't do that in front of the media," Mitchell said. "She
has a right to report it as she wants."
     And what of psychiatrist Walker, who made the case on "Good
Morning America" for the link between domestic violence and
football? She was out of town when called Friday, but her office
referred callers to Michael Lindsey, a Denver psychotherapist and
authority on battered women.
     "I haven't been any more successful than you in tracking down
any of this," Lindsey said.
     And the Boston Globe article, citing "one study of women's
shelters out west" that "showed a 40 percent climb in calls" to
shelters and hot lines on Super Bowl Sunday?
     Globe reporter Lynda Gorov said she never saw the study but had
been told about it by FAIR. FAIR's Mitchell said the authority on it
was Walker. Walker's office referred callers to Lindsey.
     "You think," Lindsey asked, "maybe we have one of these myth
things here?"
     Could be. Part of what's going on, apparently, is the twin
phenomena of media convergence and media orchestration, in which
causists show up wherever the most TV lenses are focused, hoping to
piggyback their message out to a global audience of millions.
     Said author/psychologist Ewing: "It's true there may be an
agenda on the part of some people to have this issue put forward
just now. They can force NBC to put on those {public service}
spots."
     In her appearance on "Good Morning America" with Walker, FAIR
Women's Desk coordinator Laura Flanders said NBC's broadcast of the
public service spot was the result of a "nationwide campaign"
mobilized by FAIR and groups like the Women's Action Coalition and
"national and statewide anti-domestic violence coalitions."
     However, NBC spokesman Curt Block said the anti-abuse coalition
was "only one of many groups hoping to get their message out to the
very large Super Bowl audience" and said NBC made the decision to
help them "because their cause is a good one" and not because of any
link, real or imagined, between domestic violence and football.
     As for the anecdotal evidence of such a link that the advocates
cite, Ewing said, "I think the best you could do would be to go to
some women's shelters and ask people."
     Dan Byrne, coordinator for domestic violence at the House of
Ruth here in the District, said "we've never run any figures" on
such things after the Super Bowl or Redskins games. If there had
been the sort of major yearly increase feminist critics of the Super
Bowl were describing, wouldn't it have come to his attention?
     "Well, yes." And had it? "No."
     Grace Osini, educational coordinator at the District shelter
called My Sister's Place, said flatly that her shelter has noted "no
increase at all" in calls or admissions after either the Super Bowl
or any other football game. "I'm a sociologist myself," she said.
"When I heard those figures on television, they didn't add up to me
either."
     "You know," Lindsey said, "I hate this. I've devoted 14 years
of my life trying to bring to the public's attention the very
serious problem of battered women. And when people make crazy
statements like this, the credibility of the whole cause can go
right out the window."


   Football's Day of Dread
02/05/93
WALL STREET JOURNAL

   It was not unlike Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" -- the radio
broadcast whose report of an invasion from another planet produced
panic among gulled listeners. But this time it wasn't the public
that panicked.
   Shortly before Super Bowl Sunday, word went forth from a devoutly
progressive media "watchdog" group called Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR) that on the big football day wives and girlfriends
en masse could expect to be battered and assaulted by the man of the
house. And indeed, NBC broadcast a somber public service spot before
the game, announcing that "domestic violence is a crime."
   Word went forth also that "studies" existed, proving that
woman-battering by football-crazed husbands and boyfriends rose by
an astounding 40% on Super Bowl Sundays -- that battered women's
shelters were besieged on this day by calls for help. Thus, FAIR's
specter of shelters' staffs grimly awaiting the blood-drenched tides
of victims seeking refuge from males run amok during the Bills and
Cowboys game.
   All these pronouncements were received as sacred writ by an
entirely credulous army of journalists. We are talking here, after
all, about the toughest investigative battalions. But feed them a
story about mass victimization and how the women of the nation have
to go into hiding on a certain Sunday of the year, and they have no
questions.
   In addition to the air time given this myth by NBC, ABC and CBS,
the Boston Globe reported, "Domestic violence hot lines light up as
game kicks off. . . ." The San Francisco Examiner recorded the
reflections of a woman remembering how she walked down a San
Francisco street having "this feeling of dread" during a game,
because there were sure to be so many battered women that night.
   Michael Collier of the Oakland Tribune wrote with evident
assurance that the Super Bowl causes "boyfriends, husbands and
fathers" who watch the game to "explode like mad linemen leaving
girlfriends, wives and children beaten."
   A Toronto Star writer instructed readers that "the Super Bowl's
most brutal hits will occur in living rooms across Canada and the
United States." The list of media believers who embraced the story
goes on and on.
   The Super Bowl ring, however, goes to an exceedingly anxious
Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times: "A big game electrifies the
rec-room with violent action and sexy advertising, heightening
male-female tensions, creating a climate of aggression. . . .
Someone shut up that kid or someone's going to get pounded."
   There was one exception to all this. The Washington Post's Ken
Ringle decided to look into the Day of Dread story. He pursued an
arcane reporting technique that has apparently slipped from favor:
Mr. Ringle called up the source of the original story to ask if it
were true.
   The basis for the FAIR activists' sensational assertions about
Super Bowl Sunday was an Old Dominion University study that, they
said, concluded that beatings and hospital admissions rose 40% after
Washington Redskins' football victories. "That's not what we found
at all," Professor Janet Katz, one of the authors of the study, told
Mr. Ringle. There were some "very tentative findings" about women
receiving treatment after televised football games, but the study
"certainly doesn't support what these women are saying," the
professor concluded.
   FAIR's publicists, Dobisky Associates, also quoted forensic
psychologist Charles Patrick Ewing as having declared Super Bowl
Sunday a day when agencies get most reports of domestic battering
and violence. Mr. Ewing told the Post: "I never said that." Further,
"I don't know that to be true."
   David Silber, the chairman of the psychology department at George
Washington University and an expert on domestic violence told the
Post's reporter: "I know of no study documenting any such link"
between domestic violence and football. "And I know the literature
very well."
   FAIR representative Linda Mitchell said that she recognized
during a Super Bowl news conference that an attorney for the
California Women's Law Center was misrepresenting the Old Dominion
study. But this member of a media watchdog group devoted to
"fairness and accuracy" hadn't corrected her colleague's statements,
believing that "she has a right to report it as she wants."
   There's some fear that this fiasco has hurt the credibility of
efforts to curtail the beating of spouses. Not so. It has mainly
hurt the relationship between groups like FAIR and reporters whose
sympathies get in the way of doing their jobs right.



A skeptical eye
When feminists cite figures, better recheck facts
07/10/94
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS

MEMO:  Christina Hoff Sommers is professor of philosophy at Clark
University. This article, which first appeared in the National
Review, is adapted from her book ``Who Stole Feminism?'' (Simon &
Schuster).
   In Revolution from Within, Gloria Steinem informed her readers
that "in this country alone . . . about 150,000 females die of
anorexia each year." That is more than three times the annual
number of auto fatalities. Steinem refers readers to Naomi Wolf's
The Beauty Myth, where one again finds the statistic, along with
the author's outrage. "How," Wolf asks, "would America react to the
mass self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons?"
   Where did Wolf get her figures? Her source is Fasting Girls: The
Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease by Joan Brumberg,
former director of women's studies at Cornell University. She, too,
is fully aware of the political significance of the startling
statistic. She points out that the women who study eating problems
"seek to demonstrate that these disorders are an inevitable
consequence of a misogynistic society that demeans women . . . by
objectifying their bodies." Brumberg, in turn, attributes the
figure to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association.
   I called the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association and spoke
to Dr. Diane Mickley, its president. "We were misquoted," she said.
In a 1985 newsletter the association had referred to 150,000 to
200,000 sufferers (not fatalities) of anorexia nervosa.
   What is the correct morbidity rate? Most experts are reluctant
to give exact figures, but  Thomas Dunn of the Division of Vital
Statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics reports
that in 1991 there were 54 deaths from anorexia nervosa and no
deaths from bulimia. The deaths of these young women are a tragedy,
certainly, but in a country of 100 million adult females, such
numbers are hardly evidence of "mass self-immolation."
   Yet now the false figure, supporting the view that our "sexist
society" demeans women by objectifying their bodies, is widely
accepted as true.
   Will Steinem advise her readers of the egregious statistical
error?  Will it even matter? By now, the 150,000 figure has made it
into college textbooks.
   The anorexia "crisis" is only one example of the kind of
provocative but inaccurate information being purveyed by women
about "women's issues."  On Nov. 4, 1992, Deborah Louis, president
of the National Women's Studies Association, sent a message to the
Women's Studies Electronic Bulletin Board: "According to (the) last
March of Dimes report, domestic violence (vs. pregnant women) is
now responsible for more birth defects than all other causes
combined. Personally this strikes me as the most disgusting piece
of data I've seen in a long while." This was, indeed, unsettling
news. But it seemed implausible.
   I called the March of Dimes to get a copy of the report. A
spokeswoman  denied any knowledge of it. I did a search and found
that - study or no study - journalists around the country were
citing it.
   I called the March of Dimes again. Andrea Ziltzer of their media
relations department told me that the rumor was spinning out of
control.
   When I finally reached Jeanne McDowell, who had written the Time
article, the first thing she said was, "That was an error." She
sounded genuinely sorry and embarrassed. She explained that she is
always careful about checking sources, but this time, for some
reason, she had not. An official retraction finally appeared in the
magazine on Dec. 6, 1993.
   I asked McDowell about her source. She had relied on information
given her by the San Francisco Family Violence Prevention Fund,
which had obtained it from Sarah Buel, a founder of the
domestic-violence advocacy project at Harvard Law School. She in
turn had obtained it from Caroline Whitehead, a maternal nurse and
child-care specialist in Raleigh, N.C. I called Whitehead.
   "It blows my mind. It is not true," she said. The whole mix-up
began, she explained, when she introduced Sarah Buel as a speaker
at a 1989 conference for nurses and social workers. In presenting
her, Whitehead mentioned that according to some March of Dimes
research she had seen, more women are screened for birth defects
than are ever screened for domestic battery. Whitehead had said
nothing at all about battery causing birth defects. "Sarah
misunderstood me," she said.
   I called Buel and told her that it seemed she had misheard
Caroline Whitehead. She was surprised. "Oh, I must have
misunderstood her. I'll have to give her a call. She is my
source." She thanked me for having informed her of the error,
pointing out that she had been about to repeat it yet again in a new
article.
   Why was everybody so credulous? Battery responsible for more
birth defects than all other causes combined? More than genetic
disorders such as spina bifida, Down's syndrome, Tay-Sachs,
sickle-cell anemia? More than congenital heart disorders? More than
alcohol, crack or AIDS - more than all these things combined? Where
were the fact-checkers, the editors, the skeptical journalists?
   To that question we must add another: Why are certain feminists
so eager to put men in a bad light? I shall try to answer both
these questions.
   American feminism is currently dominated by a group of women who
seek to persuade the public that American women are not the free
creatures we think we are. The leaders and theorists of the women's
movement believe that our society is best described as a
patriarchy, a "male hegemony," in which the dominant gender works
to keep women cowering and submissive.
 Believing that women are virtually under siege, the "gender
feminists" naturally seek recruits to their side of the gender war.
They seek support. They seek vindication. tion. They seek
ammunition.
   They are constantly on the lookout for the smoking gun, the
telling fact that will drive home how profoundly the system is
rigged against women. It is not enough to remind us that many
brutal and selfish men harm women. They must persuade us that the
system itself sanctions male brutality.
   Thus gender-feminist ideology holds that physical menace toward
women is the norm. Gloria Steinem's portrait of male-female
intimacy under patriarchy is typical: "Patriarchy requires violence
or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself .
. . The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man
in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover
in the isolation of their own home."
   Steinem's description of the dangers women face in their own
home is reminiscent of the Super Bowl hoax of January 1993. Here is
the chronology:
   On Jan. 27, a news conference was called in Pasadena, Calif.,
site of the forthcoming Super Bowl game, by a coalition of women's
groups. At the news conference, reporters were informed that Super
Bowl Sunday "is the biggest day of the year for violence against
women." Forty percent more women would be battered on that day,
said Sheila Kuehl of the California Women's Law Center, citing a
study done at Virginia's Old Dominion University.
   On Jan. 28, Lenore Walker, a Denver psychologist and author of
The Battered Woman, appeared on Good Morning America claiming to
have compiled a 10-year record showing a sharp increase in violent
incidents against women on Super Bowl Sundays. And on Jan. 29, a
story in the Boston Globe reported that women's shelter and
hotlines are "flooded with more calls from victims (on Super Bowl
Sunday) than on any other day of the year."
   In this roiling sea of media credulity was a lone island of
professional integrity. Ken Ringle, a Washington Post staff writer,
took the time to call around. When he asked Janet Katz, professor
of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion and one of the
principal authors of the study cited by Kuehl, about the connection
between violence and football games, she said: "That's not what we
found at all." Instead, she told him, they had found that an
increase in emergency-room admissions "was not associated with the
occurrence of football games in general."
   Despite Ringle's expose, however, the Super Bowl "statistic"
will be with us for a while, doing its divisive work of generating
fear and resentment.
   In the book How to Make the World a Better Place for Women in
Five Minutes a Day, a comment under the heading "Did You Know?"
informs readers that "Super Bowl Sunday is the most violent day of
the year, with the highest reported number of domestic battering
cases." How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a
better place for women is not explained.