“at least 35% of women worldwide have experienced some form of physical or sexual violence.”
The article uses this statistic to try to motivate why we might be interested in charities that focus specifically on women. However, we cannot evaluate this statistic in isolation: to draw this conclusion we need to compare against assault rates for men.
I wasn’t able to immediately find a comparable stat for men—the source for the stat appears to be a women-specific WHO report—but I was able to find homicide data. This data is often regarded as especially reliable, because there are fewer issues about underreporting when there is a dead body. (I apologize in advance if the authors did in fact compare assault rates between sexes and just omitted this from the report).
So what does the data say? According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, men are dramatically more likely to be victims of homicide in virtually every country. Almost 80% of global homicide victims are male. And the small number of countries where this is not the case tend to be in the developed world, which is not where the charities in this post focus, or very small countries where I suspect there was only one homicide that year.
So a neutral observer would conclude this was a reason to support charities that reduced violence against men, not women, if one were inclined to choose one or the other.
The fact that this article does not seem to even investigate this makes me sceptical of the quality of the rest of the work. If EAs are going to write non-cause-neutral reports, we should at least be clear at the very beginning of the report that other causes are likely to be be better—rather than than presenting misleading evidence to the contrary. Otherwise we are in danger of sacrificing a very important part of what makes EA distinctive.
Very quick reply as I don’t have much time now: note that this statistic is about intimate partner violence and sexual violence (where there is a clear difference between men and women), not about violence as a whole. This is clear in the body of the report; the statistic was shortened (though still correct) for the executive summary. Of course this doesn’t fully change your point, but it does influence it a little bit. (I agree that when looking at violence generally we should compare the two)
Note also, as noted in the edit to the main post, that this report was not arrived at through cause prioritization, and that is not what the introduction tries to do; it merely gives an overview of the problems one could solve in this area. The introduction/overview is hence not what should be most interesting to a cause-neutral reader; that should be the charity evaluations, as they can be compared to charities in other areas.
Hi—am a little late to your comment, but unsure that the other replies address this. Though 80% of homicide victims are male, this doesn’t mean anything like 80% of men experience homicide. However 35% of women experience intimate partner violence or sexual violence. It seems to me like the homicide statistic you give doesn’t take the scale of homicide into account, which is much smaller than 35% of the male population. I would accept your point that the comparable rate for intimate partner violence of any kind for men isn’t given, which while my prior is that this is lower isn’t easily evidenced as you point out.
It seems reasonable to use homicides as a proxy for physical violence, especially if no other data is available, but very odd to use homicides as a proxy for sexual violence.
“at least 35% of women worldwide have experienced some form of physical or sexual violence.”
The article uses this statistic to try to motivate why we might be interested in charities that focus specifically on women. However, we cannot evaluate this statistic in isolation: to draw this conclusion we need to compare against assault rates for men.
I wasn’t able to immediately find a comparable stat for men—the source for the stat appears to be a women-specific WHO report—but I was able to find homicide data. This data is often regarded as especially reliable, because there are fewer issues about underreporting when there is a dead body. (I apologize in advance if the authors did in fact compare assault rates between sexes and just omitted this from the report).
So what does the data say? According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, men are dramatically more likely to be victims of homicide in virtually every country. Almost 80% of global homicide victims are male. And the small number of countries where this is not the case tend to be in the developed world, which is not where the charities in this post focus, or very small countries where I suspect there was only one homicide that year.
So a neutral observer would conclude this was a reason to support charities that reduced violence against men, not women, if one were inclined to choose one or the other.
The fact that this article does not seem to even investigate this makes me sceptical of the quality of the rest of the work. If EAs are going to write non-cause-neutral reports, we should at least be clear at the very beginning of the report that other causes are likely to be be better—rather than than presenting misleading evidence to the contrary. Otherwise we are in danger of sacrificing a very important part of what makes EA distinctive.
Source: http://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html
Very quick reply as I don’t have much time now: note that this statistic is about intimate partner violence and sexual violence (where there is a clear difference between men and women), not about violence as a whole. This is clear in the body of the report; the statistic was shortened (though still correct) for the executive summary. Of course this doesn’t fully change your point, but it does influence it a little bit. (I agree that when looking at violence generally we should compare the two) Note also, as noted in the edit to the main post, that this report was not arrived at through cause prioritization, and that is not what the introduction tries to do; it merely gives an overview of the problems one could solve in this area. The introduction/overview is hence not what should be most interesting to a cause-neutral reader; that should be the charity evaluations, as they can be compared to charities in other areas.
Hi—am a little late to your comment, but unsure that the other replies address this. Though 80% of homicide victims are male, this doesn’t mean anything like 80% of men experience homicide. However 35% of women experience intimate partner violence or sexual violence. It seems to me like the homicide statistic you give doesn’t take the scale of homicide into account, which is much smaller than 35% of the male population. I would accept your point that the comparable rate for intimate partner violence of any kind for men isn’t given, which while my prior is that this is lower isn’t easily evidenced as you point out.
It seems reasonable to use homicides as a proxy for physical violence, especially if no other data is available, but very odd to use homicides as a proxy for sexual violence.