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In 2013, CNN made this claim:

Each day - Three or more women are murdered by their boyfriends or husbands on average, according to the American Psychology Association.

Indeed, the linked APA website makes the claim:

On average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day.

Unfortunately, this statistic is unreferenced (or, at least, it's not directly referenced; there's a bunch of references, but it's not clear which the statistic might be in).

I found a similar unreferenced claim in the article 3 Women Are Killed Every Day By Their Partners ... at the Huffington Post and in the article Three Women Are Murdered by Their Husbands, Boyfriends Every Day in America at AlterNet.

Question: In the US, are three women killed each day by their male partners?

Glorfindel
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Rebecca J. Stones
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  • Note that "Three or more" is implied by "more than three", but not the other way round. Also, "on average, more than three" make sense, but "boyfriends or husbands on average" does not. Your question also excludes the rare situation when the husband is a woman, while it is included in the original citations. –  Nov 02 '17 at 01:06
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    @user42671 Not really (to your first sentence). Given that it's a statistical average, it's very unlikely that it will be _exactly_ three over any useful time period. So the difference between >3 and >= 3 is kind of irrelevant. Also, I think you'll find that a "husband" is by definition male. – Dawood ibn Kareem Nov 02 '17 at 03:37
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    Sorry, but I can't read this question without thinking about the overpopulation joke: "Somewhere in the world, a woman gives birth every minute. Our job is to find that woman, and stop her." –  Nov 02 '17 at 12:10
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    Absolute numbers, even when referring to heinous crimes, are meaningless without reference to the total surveyed. The U.S. have the third largest population in the world, and virtually no one has a useful intuition about just how much 325,000,000 really is. Therefore such factoids are almost useless to convey a sense of what is or isn't an urgent problem. – Kilian Foth Nov 02 '17 at 17:47
  • @KilianFoth i agree, it's probably better to express it as a percentage of violent deaths or overall deaths (perhaps conditioning on gender, perhaps not). All those numbers still look bad, so I don't think this is a misleading statistic. – k_g Nov 02 '17 at 20:32
  • @KilianFoth although I can see the other side which is that if you express all statistics of this type in "people killed in the US by X per day on average" it would be more intuitive and closer to the individual experience. – k_g Nov 02 '17 at 20:33
  • @KilianFoth: Indeed. In fact, these statistics generally convince me there's nothing to worry about; the rate of something happening has to be uncomprehensibly small if, across the entire uncomprehensibly large population, it only manages to happen a few times per day! –  Nov 03 '17 at 06:07

2 Answers2

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This appears to be mostly correct and derived from a report published by the CDC: Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides of Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner Violence — United States, 2003–2014.

The report seems to look at two numbers: 2015 for all of the US and statistics 2003-2014 but only for 18 states. There is also an older report by the department of justice (Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008) which has more consistent data. The numbers don't quite add up, but seem to align to the following conclusions

  • There are around 3000 female homicide victims per year
  • about half of those are killed by a male partner
  • That would result in an average of about 4 per day

The absolute number, of course, doesn't mean much without putting in context: how many males are killed by their female partner. The Department of Justice report puts the "males killed by females" rate at about 7% vs 40% of "females killed by males". On the other hand the total number of males killed overall is also about 3.5 times higher (see for example Wikipedia: Homicide statistics by gender).

Putting this all together, one could estimate that the total number of females killed by male partners is about 60% higher than the other way around. In terms of daily average that would be around 4 for females and around 2.5 for males.

Laurel
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Hilmar
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    Not sure where you get the 7% figure; in the DoJ report you cite, the most recent statistics for "killed by intimates" were 4.9% for men and 45% for women. The greater incidence of men being victims of homicide still pertains, but the number is 300% higher, not 60%. – jdunlop Nov 01 '17 at 15:16
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    The first part of the answer does answer the OP's question, though: the statement is accurate. – jdunlop Nov 01 '17 at 15:25
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    @jdunlop: page 18 lists a decline from 10.4% to 4.9% . NPR has summarized that to 7% http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/21/538518569/cdc-half-of-all-female-murder-victims-are-killed-by-intimate-partners. Obviously this is subject to interpretation – Hilmar Nov 01 '17 at 15:51
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    *"The absolute number, of course, doesn't mean much without putting in context: how many males are killed by their female partner"* Eh? *Of course* the absolute male-on-female number has value without being compared to the female-on-male number; it gives us a (*rough*) idea of the total cost in human lives of domestic violence, and thereby helps us weigh the importance of domestic violence against other causes of death. The gender *ratio* is only useful if you want to impose some kind of gender-targeted anti-DV intervention (or just write a feminist thinkpiece about how evil men are, I guess). – Mark Amery Nov 01 '17 at 22:09
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    The numbers are intrestingly pointless without context. In germany there are 1-1.5 people murdered per day... – PlasmaHH Nov 01 '17 at 22:24
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    Your analysis omits the sgnificant case of violence domestic violence in same-sex partnerships, for whatever that's worth... maybe the underlying data omits it too. – HopelessN00b Nov 02 '17 at 05:13
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    @MarkAmery to weigh it against other causes of death you *need* context. Numbers without context like here usually just mislead. – CodeMonkey Nov 02 '17 at 08:25
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    @MarkAmery Its like saying x number of people die every second, without context (population count, average age etc.) that means nothing. (Theoretical) A 100 people could die every seconds but on a planet with 999 trillion people that wouldn't be a lot. Or in a country with a lot of elderly people (aka. baby boom 50-something years prior) it would be more logical if more people died per second. – EpicKip Nov 02 '17 at 10:18
  • This answer would be improved by extracting quotes that back your claims, instead of using links and then using approximate numbers you claim came from the links. Searching said links to prove that what you claim they said was *not* said is nearly impossible in the current format, which is poor form on skeptics. – Yakk Nov 02 '17 at 17:36
  • https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/2014001/article/14114/section02-eng.htm#a14 may be of interest -- Statistics Canada graph of IPV homicides over time per million population with gender breakdown. A different country, but it does lend credibility to your factor of 2 you calculate. – Yakk Nov 02 '17 at 17:36
  • @EpicKip I'd really like to see you go to a grieving family and tell them that since their loved one was only 1/(7 billion) of the world population, the death doesn't mean anything. 100 people dying on a planet with 999 trillion people is *exactly the same* amount of death as 100 people dying in a city of 100,000. – Acccumulation Nov 03 '17 at 02:09
  • @Acccumulation: Same amount of total death, but not the same amount of unexpected/accidental/premature death. – Ben Voigt Nov 03 '17 at 04:11
  • @Acccumulation Not if you're talking about percentages, if you are measuring murder under the population you have to look at it in perspective. Example: There is a city with 100 people and 10 get murdered each day, and there's another city with 1 million people and the same amount get murdered. Which city is the safest? You have way more chance of getting murdered in the small city. I was talking about context etc. not about grieving families.... In context of the question: More population will most likely mean more murders each day. – EpicKip Nov 03 '17 at 07:41
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    @Acccumulation still the important way to look at it for policy. a drug that has side effects which kill 100 out of 200 million patients is a lot less worrying than one where side effects kill 100 out of 200. Even if it's " exactly the same amount of death" – Murphy May 21 '19 at 15:43
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According to Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides of Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner Violence — United States, 2003–2014, table 2,

Out of a studied 10,018 females killed, 3,417 were by a current intimate partner and 618 were by a former intimate partner, for a total of 4045 (40.3%) by a current or former intimate partner.

(The 40.3% figure is very similar to the 41.5% found for the 1980-2008 time period in table 6 this report)

It is also stated:

In 2015, homicide caused the death of 3,519 girls and women in the United States

40.3% of 3,519 = 1418 females killed by an current or former intimate partner in a year.

3.9 per day.

DavePhD
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