Commonly Accepted Fallacious Statistics
December 13 2002
STATS Staff writers
stats.org
A woman is beaten every 12 seconds
Derivation: Radio address by President Clinton, Oct 28, 2000, repeating remarks he had made 5 years earlier. White House Press Secretary Mark McCurry withdrew the figure in March 1995. It seems to derive from misreadings of studies with broad definitions of abuse (including "stomping off" and other non-violent reactions).
Actually: One woman beaten every 12 seconds would yield more than 2,500,000 beatings a year. The actual figure as estimated by the Justice Department for 1999 is 220,000 serious violent incidents - equivalent to one incident every 2 minutes 20 seconds.
Food-borne illness - 9000 deaths a year
Derivation: High-end of an admitted "guesstimate" in report by Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, 1994. Latest citation, National Academy of Sciences, August 98.
Actually: CDC Foodnet survey, which covers 20 million people (8% of the US population) revealed only 33 deaths in 1997. Preliminary data for 1998 show a decrease in the number of food-borne illnesses.
Domestic violence - 85% against women, 6 million cases a year
Derivation: (Possibly disingenuous) confusion of archival data from the FBI and survey data from a variety of sources.
Actually: Archival data of crimes actually reported to the FBI reveal 85% of crimes of domestic violence are directed against women. The number of such crimes varies by year from 500,000 to 840,000. These figures are regarded as the "tip of the iceberg" and so various organizations have undertaken surveys to assess the true extent of the problem. These surveys show about 6 million female victims of domestic violence. But they also show about 6 million male victims of domestic violence, making the true split 50/50. These figures are borne out by a recent British Home Office survey which identified male victimization as equally prevalent as female victimization. So either there are 6 million cases of domestic violence against women a year, but its only 50% of the problem or domestic violence is overwhelmingly (85% of the time) directed against women, but there are only 800,000 cases a year.
Illness Caused by Tap Water - up to 400,000 confirmed cases a year
Derivation: Uncritical interpretation of CDC data, ignoring a significant data-spike.
Actually: From 1993 to 1996, the CDC reported 52 outbreaks of waterborne illness with 408,000 victims. The includes the biggest outbreak of cryptosporidiosis since the disease was detected - affecting 403,000 victims in Milwaukee in 1993. Excluding this one incident, there were about 2-3,000 confirmed cases of waterborne illness each year. The problem is certainly under-reported, but the extent is unknown.
Anorexia - 150,000 deaths a year
Derivation: Bad misinterpretation of a study that found 150,000 cases a year, almost none of them fatal.
Actually: The claim is revealed as foolish with a moment=s thought: the figure is three times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. There are very few deaths from anorexia.
Rapes - 700,000 a year
Derivation: A report from the Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center (CVRTC) in 1992, concluding that 683,000 women were forcibly raped each year. It also concluded that 84% of rapes were not reported to the police.
Actually: The figure is generally agreed to be somewhere around the level revealed in the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS) (survey-interview based). The FBI=s 1997 data of crimes actually reported to the police showed 96,122 forcible and attempted rapes per year (discounting an 8% incidence of Aunfounded@ rape reports), while the NCVS for 1996 estimated 98,000 rapes and 99,000 attempted rapes. There may still be a problem with under-reporting of the crime in the NCVS. Higher figures derive from surveys which seek to address this problem, but their methodology is often suspect, leading to probable inclusion of non-criminal incidents.
Hunger - 11.5 million American children at risk of hunger
Derivation: 1991 Survey of Childhood Hunger in the United States declared children Aat risk@ if their parents answered yes to any one of 8 questions, including "Did you ever rely on a limited number of foods to feed your children because you were running out of money to buy food for a meal?" This methodology resulted in an obvious over-estimate.
Actually: While difficult to estimate, the hunger level in the US is substantially less than 1 in 4 children.
Gulf war illness
The "Gulf War Syndrome" allegation is that 40,000-200,000 veterans suffer from a single identifiable illness, Gulf War Syndrome; from the end of the war to November 1995, 2,900 vets had died, by May 1996, the number skyrocketed to 4,291, and by 1997, 10,000-12,000 vets had died
Derivation: The original sources for the number of veterans suffering from Gulf War illness is unknown, and the numbers cited often change. Activist Denise Nichols propogated the first two fatality figures, splicing two different numbers. The first number was deaths from all causes among veterans of Operation Desert Storm itself, about 700,000 people. The second number was deaths among anyone who had served in the Gulf region since 1990, over a million people. The third figure was fabricated and spread by activist and militia member Joyce Riley von Kleist.
Actually: Despite millions of dollars in federal research dollars, there is no evidence of an all-encompassing syndrome affecting Gulf War veterans. Actual illness and fatality rates among veterans are lower than those of the general public for natural causes, and higher for external accidents. As of May 1998, approximately 5,425 veterans (0.78%) out of 697,000 participants in the Gulf War had died. The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) obtained this number by comparing lists of all Gulf War veterans with files of deaths recorded by the Social Security Administration. A similar comparison disclosed that, of the 2,372,327 members of the active duty force and the selective reserve who did not deploy to the Gulf, 19,475 (0.82%) had died. No information on cause of death was available from this data search.
Abducted Children - 1 to 2 million a year
Derivation: John Walsh, host of the television show America's Most Wanted, has testified before Congress that the annual total number of abducted children at more than 1.5 million, adding that "we don't have a clue what happens to over 50,000 of them." The U.S. Department of Justice issued the 1990 National Incidence of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART). It was the source of most figures.
Actually: The report gives two sets of numbers, one that reflects subjective impressions (Abroad scope@), and another, "serious" set of numbers on which policy can be based (Apolicy focal@). The Abroad scope@ numbers are significantly higher - as much as 35 times higher - than the more important Apolicy focal@ numbers, and are the ones most often cited. Also, reporters Diana Griego and Louis Kilzer, Pulitzer Prize-winners in 1985, found that 95% of missing children are runaways (most of whom come home before three days) and that most of the rest are child custody disputes. Child Find, the nation's oldest and best-known missing children organization, now says that the actual number is less than 600 per year. The number abducted and killed is probably around 50 each year.
Violent crime - 6% of criminals commit 70% of violent crimes
Derivation: A misreading of criminology studies in Pennsylvania in the 40s and 50s. The studies showed c.6% of boys committed 50-70% of the serious crime committed by the entire cohort studied.
Actually: A relatively small proportion of the population commits most of the crime, but the difference between that and a small proportion of criminals is enormous if this factor is to be used as the basis for a policy like Athree strikes and you=re out@.
Vietnam veteran suicides - 160,000 have committed suicide since returning from the war
Derivation: A 1980 manual from Disabled American Veterans entitled APost-Traumatic Stress Disorders of the Vietnam Veteran@ asserted 58,000 suicides. This was 7 years before the first comprehensive study of Vietnam veterans= mortality was even published. This dubious statistic grew from there.
Actually: No one knows precisely how many Vietnam veterans have taken their own lives, nor exactly how many have died from all causes. But these oft-cited figures are impossible. There would have had to have been roughly 15 vet suicides a day over the last 30 years for the figure to be true. A brief literature search by veteran Michael Kelly (AOne Vet=s Mission to Set the Record Straight,@ Washington Post, Aug. 15, 1999) reveals that, based on a Centers for Disease Control estimate of suicides accounting for no more than 1.2 percent of veteran deaths, the correct number would be approximately 3,750 suicides (out of approximately 3.1 million Americans who served in Southeast Adia) as of 1999.
Iraqi children killed by sanctions - 600,000
Derivation: in 1995, when two researchers from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), whose report had heavily relied on Iraqi government figures, asserted in The Lancet that 567,000 children had died, a story quickly picked up by The New York Times and CBS's 60 Minutes. Overnight, an FAO extrapolation based on nothing more than a sampling of 36 infant deaths and 245 child deaths, had become accepted fact. Others later inflated the figure to one million dead.
Actually: The Iraqi population has exploded by 29% over the past seven years, from 17.9 million to 23.1 million, and that the crude death rate per 1,000 was unchanged at nine between 1990 (before the sanctions) and 1996. According to UNICEF, children under five in Iraq die at a rate of 131 per 1,000 live births, ranking it between Haiti (at 132) and Pakistan (at 136). |
