     Culusow | Wednesday, July 26, 2000 - 08:26 am
Source: The Toronto Star.
Abuse rates similar for both sexes
StatsCan report shows violence against women more severe
By Elaine Carey
Toronto Star Demographics Reporter
A new Statistics Canada report portraying men and women as equal victims of marital violence has ignited controversy among women's groups.
A total of 1.2 million people experienced some type of violence by their partner on at least one occasion in the past five years, a report released yesterday says. That's 8 per cent of women, or 690,000, and 7 per cent of men, or 549,000.
``They're basically equalizing men and women,'' said Vivien Green, co-ordinator of the Women Abuse Council of Toronto.
``It's an absolute crime to release this without putting it in context.
``When we talk about abusive behaviour, if you ask any man who's been hit `Are you afraid of her?' they say `Not at all,' whereas women are terrified.''
While men said they were slapped, kicked, bitten or had something thrown at them, more than twice as many women said they were beaten, five times as many said they were choked, and seven times as many said they had been sexually assaulted.
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`It's an absolute crime to release this without putting it in context. . . . If you ask any man who's been hit ``Are you afraid of her?'' they say ``Not at all,'' whereas women are terrified.'
- Vivien Green
Women Abuse Council ofToronto
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And five times more women than men said they feared for their lives. Also, 15 per cent of women required medical attention compared with 3 per cent of men.
But the proportion of women who reported they were assaulted by a spouse dropped from 12 per cent in 1993 to 8 per cent last year, StatsCan says. There was also a slight decline in the severity of the assaults.
StatsCan asked 26,000 men and women about abusive behaviour in their marriage or common-law relationship last year as part of a general survey on crime victimization.
The federal agency had looked at spousal violence once before in 1993 in a special survey for Health Canada. At that time, it only asked about violence against women, said Karen Mihorean, chief of StatsCan's investigative analysis program.
Both the United States and Britain have conducted similar surveys of men and women in recent years and found much the same result, that women suffer more severe consequences because of the violence than men, she said.
But Eileen Morrow, co-ordinator of the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses, said the current survey is a backlash against the 1993 study when StatsCan was accused of being biased for only including women.
``This is the wrong way to understand violence against women or violence in the family in general,'' Morrow said.
But she says even out of context, the survey ``confirms everything we've been saying about the kinds of violence women experience compared to men,'' she said.
The report found three times as many wives as husbands were killed by their spouse in the past two decades - 1,468 women and 433 men. The rate of spousal homicides has been generally decreasing over the last 20 years, particularly for women.
Young couples and those in common-law unions were at the greatest risk of domestic violence, as were people whose partners were emotionally abusive or who drank heavily.
Provincial rates of spousal abuse against women range from a low of 4 per cent in Newfoundland to a high of 12 per cent in Prince Edward Island. Ontario's rate of 7 per cent was below the national average, despite a recent spate of violent attacks on women. |
