The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [64]
Stories that blithely pass along frightening statistics on child abuse likewise promote the mythic impression of a nation teeming with potentially lethal women. Donna Shalala announced in 1996 that the number of children abused and neglected by their parents had doubled during a recent seven-year period, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million, and the number of seriously abused children had quadrupled from about 143,000 to nearly 570,000. She did not specify how much of the abuse was committed by mothers, but since the vast majority of single parents are women (and Shalala emphasized that children of single parents are almost twice as likely to be harmed), she implicitly singled out mothers.45
By and large reporters took the numbers at face value and labeled them “alarming,” and crusaders for various causes used them to argue for everything from greater spending on welfare programs to a ban on abortion—the latter from the author of an op-ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who argued that “abortion on demand has had a polluting effect, which is at least partially responsible for the dramatic rise in child abuse and neglect.”46
Absent from almost all of the coverage was readily available evidence suggesting that rates of child abuse had not increased as drastically as Shalala indicated. For instance, statistics from the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse showed that the annual number of fatalities resulting from child abuse had increased by only about 200 during the period in question, from 1,014 in 1986 to 1,216 in 1993. If the number of kids seriously abused and neglected quadrupled, as Shalala avows, should not then the number of deaths have increased by a large number as well?47
A closer look at Shalala’s study reveals that much of what is described as a “skyrocketing” increase in child abuse is really a growth in expectations of abuse. According to Douglas Besharov, a former director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect who helped design the study and lately has been on the staff of the American Enterprise Institute, more than half of the additional 1.4 million children were not actually said to be abused or neglected but rather “endangered.” That is to say, these children were deemed by social services professionals to be at risk of future harm.48
She Beats Her Old Man Too
Another ill-reported set of statistics further buttresses the illusion of an epidemic of savage mothers. Their interest sparked initially by Lorena Bobbitt, who severed her husband’s penis in 1993, and by O. J. Simpson, who claimed in 1994 that his murdered wife had battered him, journalists set out to inform the public about the prevalence of “husband abuse.”
“It’s Far More Widespread Than People Think” read a headline in the Washington Post in 1993 in a lengthy story revealing the existence of battered husbands, about whom the mental health community and general public “have been in deep denial,” according to the reporter. How common is husband battering? According to a headline in USA Today in 1994, “Husbands Are Battered as Often as Wives.” In an article the following year a writer for the National Review cited a study showing that “54 per cent of all severe domestic violence is committed by women.” In 1996, in one of several columns he has published on this issue, John Leo of U.S. News & World Report revealed that “children are now more likely to see mommy hit daddy” than the other way around. Not only that, the whole thing has been covered up by “feminist scholars,” according to Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Sun-Times. “Researchers have known for years that women are as, if not more, likely to report violently abusing