Did that headline grab your attention? Certainly the graphic from which it was drawn grabbed my attention. But, as Janice Fiamengo explains, it’s a vast exaggeration in pursuit of a political goal:
Linden called on men and boys to educate themselves on violence and to call out one another for perpetrating or dismissing abusive behavior of any kind.
It’s not hard to understand why National Hockey League personality Trevor Linden, former captain of the Vancouver Canucks, has lent his star power to a YWCA campaign about women’s injuries from domestic violence. Hockey players have long been targets of feminist accusation for their association with a sport that allegedly promotes misogyny, racism, and violence against women. Even a beloved icon of the sport must continually strive to prove how much he despises his fellow men.
In this case, the campaign of vilification targets the purported frequency with which female victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) experience traumatic brain injury, and demands “increased support for diagnosis and treatment”. To do so, the campaign asserts some of the most dramatic numbers I’ve ever seen.
No stranger to concussions, Linden is said in a CBC report to have been “stunned” to learn that female victims are injured at a much higher rate than professional hockey players. “For every concussion incurred by an NHL player,” the report states, “approximately 7,000 women and girls in Canada are concussed because of intimate partner and domestic violence, according to a new estimate from YWCA Metro Vancouver and researchers at the University of British Columbia.”
Linden’s shock is understandable. We’ve all seen the hits meted out to professional hockey players. The thought of thousands upon thousands of Canadian women every year being treated in like manner — and suffering the consequences in traumatic brain injury (TBI) — is disturbing even to those of us who have learned to be skeptical of feminist research and inflammatory reports by Canada’s state-funded news agency.
The key paragraph in the story that justifies the staggering numbers tells us that
Approximately four in 10 women and girls in Canada will face violence from a current or former partner, according to a 2021 report by Statistics Canada, or about 290,000 every year. As many as 92 per cent of them will suffer a traumatic brain injury due to blows to their head or strangulation.
That sounds as if more than 3 in 10 women and girls in Canada (92% of 4 in 10) will at some point in their lives suffer brain injury from battering.
The statement might just qualify as the most outstanding exaggeration of violence against women ever made by a feminist organization. The good news for women and girls in Canada — and the bad news for the ever-declining credibility of feminist advocates and reporters — is that the numbers being promoted are flat-out false. They’re false even if we take note of the operative word “approximately” in the above statement. They’re false even if we accept the extraordinarily elastic definition of violence employed by the feminists who work for Statistics Canada. And they’re false even if we accept that a small study of black female victims of extreme violence can be generalized to all girls and women in Canada.
The numbers are false, ultimately, because the literature review from which the 92% number was extracted does not actually claim that 92 per cent of all IPV victims experience brain injury. A fundamental misreading and misrepresentation of data is at the heart of the campaign’s extraordinary claim.
Let’s trace, as much as possible, how the numbers have been manipulated and fudged. At the center of the hoopla is a report from Statistics Canada (“Intimate partner violence in Canada, 2018: An overview”) based on a large survey conducted by online questionnaire and telephone interview. This government-funded survey sought to measure the experience and frequency of intimate-partner violence as reported by victims — both men and women — over the previous year and over the lifetime of each victim. The sample size was large (43,296) but the response rate was low, at 43.1% overall in the Canadian provinces. (It is worth noting that response rates lower than 60% are considered by some researchers to produce unreliable and invalid results.)
