We’re Number One! Female Murder Victims in Nevada

One of the bills stalled in the Do Absolutely Nothing 112th Congress of the United States of America is the Violence Against Women Act.  The Senate version extends the protections of the Act to LGBT citizens, Native Americans, and immigrants.  The GOP leadership of the  House of Representatives objects to the extensions.  [CD]  The objections are spurious.  However, that doesn’t prevent the bill from being stalled, and the Next Great Big Debt Crisis — which evidently wasn’t a problem for the Bush Administration “Deficits Don’t Matter” crowd — is chewing up the air time on the cable news networks.  Meanwhile, we have a real economic problem on our hands — domestic violence.

Intimate partner violence is expensive.  We’ve known this since the 2003 Center for Disease Control report. (pdf)

“The costs of intimate partner rape, physical assault, and stalking exceed $5.8 billion each year, nearly $4.1 billion of which is for direct medical and mental health care services. The total costs of IPV also include nearly $0.9 billion in lost productivity from paid work and household chores for victims of nonfatal IPV and $0.9  billion in lifetime earnings lost by victims of IPV homicide. The largest proportion of the costs is derived from physical assault victimization because that type of IPV is the most prevalent. The largest component of IPV-related costs is health care, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the total costs.”

So, as of 2003 the price tag for domestic violence was $5.8 billion annually, and the price tag for the health care component was $4.1 billion.  Want to help bring down health care costs in this country, then reduce the instances of domestic violence!

For those who persist in speaking of the issue as a police matter, or a “woman’s issue,” consider the following information from that 2003 CDC study:

As of nine years ago we were pitching the equivalent of 32,114 full time jobs in the dust bin because women lost valuable work days due to incidents of domestic violence.

The Corporate Alliance to End Partner Violence updated the numbers and reported that as of 2005, “The annual cost of lost productivity due to domestic violence is estimated as $727.8 million with over 7.9 million paid workdays lost per year.”   That, of course, is $727.8 million that doesn’t add anything to the national economy every year.

If we could delve only in the realm of national, and therefore generalized, statistics Nevadans might be more comfortable.  However, the Silver State has a problem according to Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto:

“Victims of domestic violence comprise the largest crime victim category in Nevada. Although domestic violence is significantly underreported and statistics are incomplete, the Nevada Department of Public Safety Uniform Crime Report for 2009 reported 29,091 female victims and 12,060 children present at incidents of domestic violence. The Nevada Network Against Domestic Violence reports that 42,877 first-time victims received services from domestic violence programs in fiscal year 2010-11.” [LVSun]

The numbers sting more when they’re describing what is going on in this state alone.   The sting is even greater when reading headlines like this one: “Nevada Ranks #1 in Rate of Women Murdered by Men for Third Year in a Row According to VPC Study Released Annually for Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.”   That’s right… We’re Number One… in the rate of women murdered by men for the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW.  But wait, the news actually gets worse.

“The state has held the top position for five of the last six years. The annual VPC report details national and state-by-state information on female homicides involving one female murder victim and one male offender. The study uses the most recent data available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s unpublished Supplementary Homicide Report and is released each year to coincide with Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October.

Ranked behind Nevada (2.62) were: South Carolina at 2 with a rate of 1.94 per 100,000; Tennessee at 3 with a rate of 1.91 per 100,000; Louisiana at 4 with a rate of 1.86 per 100,000; Virginia at 5 with a rate of 1.77 per 100,000; Texas at 6 with a rate of 1.75 per 100,000; New Mexico at 7 with a rate of 1.63 per 100,000; Hawaii at 8 (tie) with a rate of 1.62 per 100,000; Arizona at 8 (tie) with a rate of 1.62 per 100,000; and, Georgia at 10 with a rate of 1.61 per 100,000. Nationally, the rate of women killed by men in single victim/single offender instances was 1.22 per 100,000.” [VPC] (emphasis added)

We can extrapolate that the national trends might apply to the Nevada cases.  For example, 94% of the victims knew their attackers.  Of the victims who knew their attackers, 65% were murdered by husbands or intimate partners.  70% of the murders were accomplished with a firearm, followed by the use of knives or cutting instruments (20%), bodily force (12%), and the ubiquitous “blunt object” was the implement of choice in about 7% of the homicides.  (full study, pdf link)

For once, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) didn’t sign on to the misogynistic agenda of some of his GOP colleagues, and he joined the Democratic majority in the Senate voting in favor of the renewed VAWA. [LVSun] Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) voted with the 67 other Senators who favored the renewal of the act.   Sometimes being Number One isn’t the place to be.

Congressman Joe Heck was eager to trumpet his vote for the VAWA, however it was the watered down House version (H.R. 4970), with no protection for immigrant women, LGBT citizens, and Native American women.  [NVProg]  Congressman Mark Amodei (R-NV2) tapped danced around the issue of tribal jurisdiction over rapes and assaults perpetrated on tribal lands, and supported the House version of the bill.  What might their positions be on the ‘real’ VAWA bill, S. 1925?

They, and their cohorts in the U.S. House of Representatives will have to work quickly to deal with the back-load of bills piling up, especially given that they are only scheduled to be in session for 126 days next year.

One of those precious days should really be devoted to the loss of the equivalent of 32,000 full time jobs, the loss of at least $727.8 million to the economy every year, and to the $5.8 billion in health care costs attributable to domestic violence.   Perhaps then Nevada could lose the dubious honor of being “Number One?”

Not So Fun Facts I Rather Wish I Didn’t Know

Federal Food Safety Inspection Service: “FSIS’s workforce has contracted even more. FSIS employed about 190 workers per billion pounds of meat and poultry inspected and passed in FY 1981. In FY 2011, FSIS employed 88 workers per billion pounds, a 54 percent decrease.”  [OMBWatch]

 

Suicide rate among veterans and military personnel: “For every two American combatants killed by enemy action, one more dies by suicide. The Department of Defense reports that in the last 10 years 4,989 military personnel have been killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, while in the same period 2,293 active duty personnel have taken their own lives. American veterans of these and other wars account for 20% of U.S. suicides. “  [PolicyMic]

School Bullying: “Over half, about 56 percent, of all students have witnessed a bullying crime take place while at school. A reported 15 percent of all students who don’t show up for school report it to being out of fear of being bullied while at school. There are about 71 percent of students that report bullying as an on-going problem.There are about 282,000 students that are reportedly attacked in high schools throughout the nation each month. ” [BullyStats]

Teen Safety: “Of the 6,493 adolescent deaths in 2007 due to unintentional injuries, motor vehicle traffic was the leading cause death (70.7 percent), followed by poisoning (12.9 percent). However, of the 10,415 deaths due to both unintentional and intentional (or violence-related) injuries, motor vehicle traffic accounted for 44.1 percent of deaths, while homicide by firearm was the second leading cause of injury death, accounting for 18.2 percent of adolescent deaths of this nature. Firearms accounted for 85.3 percent of homicide deaths and 42.5 percent of suicide deaths among adolescents.”  [HRSA]

Shut Up And Drive: “Of those people killed in distracted-driving-related crashes, 995 involved reports of a cell phone as a distraction (18% of fatalities in distraction-related crashes).  Of those injured in distracted-driving-related crashes, 24,000 involved reports of a cell phone as a distraction (5% of injured people in distraction-related crashes).” [NTSA pdf]

Love to Hate?  “Meanwhile, the SPLC counted 1,018 hate groups operating in the United States last year, up from 1,002 in 2010. That was the latest in a string of annual increases going all the way back to 2000, when there were 602 hate groups. The long-running rise seemed for most of that time to be a product of hate groups’ very successful exploitation of the issue of non-white immigration. Obama’s election and the crashing economy have played a key role in the last three years.”

 

 

 

>Politics, Rhetoric, Violence, and Responsibility

>As this post is being drafted the medical status of Representative Giffords (D-AZ8) is still undetermined. She was conducting a Congress-on-the-Corner meeting with constituents, just as former Representative Dina Titus (D-NV3) used to do in her district. Representative Giffords was shot by a young man. Thus far we know where, and when, but we don’t know why. And, this will be the point at which the controversy begins.

One approach might be to categorize this assassination or attempt as a “random act of violence.” This absolves any person or group from any responsibility for the attack, other than the individual who did it. For all we know at this moment, this may be true. However, this raises the question: For all the Congress-on-the-Corner sessions run by members of the House of Representatives, in all their Congressional Districts, why did this one become a tragedy?

Do we need to take a look at our propensity for violence? The Canadians are as well armed as citizens of the United States, but their crime statistics in regard to gun use come nowhere near matching our own. Have we inured ourselves to shootings?  Have we somehow managed to create a culture in which shooting is a young man’s acceptable answer to relieving feelings of frustration, anger, or hate?  If so, then we’d be well advised to take a long, hard, look at how we teach children to conduct themselves in our society. We can’t evade responsibility for gun violence by simply reverting to aphorisms like “guns don’t kill people…” and avoiding the issue of how individuals become enamored of the notion that guns are an appropriate way to settle arguments. Even in the most forgiving context, there is still an element of responsibility attached.

Perhaps the notion that this act of violence was the result of a deranged mind will become popular in some circles. If this is the case then there are two problems to address. First, if this individual was, in fact, mentally incompetent to understand the consequences of his actions, when – where – and how did his family and community miss the signals that his mental health was deteriorating?  Did they attempt to seek help for him? Where mental health services available? Affordable?

The second issue is, of course, who filled that fragile mind?  Was he listening to hate radio broadcasts — ones with fiery rhetoric replete with visions of doom and gloom for the republic? Was he watching broadcasts or reading inflammatory media which made violence an attractive option? There’s a precedent for this. In April 2007 a man was arrested in California for stalking and harassing then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. [WaPo] In April 2010, Charles Alan Wilson, stalked and harassed Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) leaving messages saying “It only takes one piece of lead.” His family was disturbed by the effect Glenn Beck’s television show had on him.  [HP] August 10, 2010, the California Highway Patrol arrested Byron Williams while he was wearing his body armor and threatening to take out the Tides Foundation, because, as his family explained, Beck had “opened his mind.” [WaPo] [SFgate]

These weren’t the first incidents. In April 2009 three police officers were assassinated in Pittsburgh by Ron Poplawski, who feared, “Obama would take away his gun rights.” [NDN] In July 2008, Jim Adkisson of Powell, TN, killed 2 and wounded 7 in his attack on a Knoxville church. Adkisson explained: “He felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets,” the affidavit said. “Because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement … he would then target those that had voted them into office.” [CNN] In June 2009, white supremacist and former resident of Butler’s Hayden Lake, ID compound walked into the U.S. Holocaust Museum and killed the African American guard who opened the door for him. [CNN] It only took a very few individuals to bring down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. [wik] There’s an older song about all this:

“You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!” [link, credits]

Demonization, and de-humanization are not social skills.  And, projection isn’t a very good substitute for analysis.

Objectifying one’s opponents doesn’t lend itself well to civil discourse. An “object” can be dismissed as unworthy of respect, interest, and even of life itself. It’s relatively easy to spot the process. First, all or nearly all of the opposition are categorized into one single mass, and then labeled with negative epithets, usually in the form of ad hominem attacks. There’s a heightened level of sensitivity attached as well. Assume, for example, that an opponent of health care reform says that the ACA will result in higher taxes, and an advocate says in response that repeal will result in eliminating tax breaks for small businesses. To assume that the advocate’s remarks are an “attack” is hypersensitivity. To assume that the advocate is “anti-business” is hyperbole. Neither is analysis.

Projection is one of the mind’s little defense mechanisms: “people project their own feelings of hostility onto the targets of their hostility. It is a psychological defense strategy. First, projection enables you to disown your hostility by attributing to an external source. Second, it rationalizes the hostility that you do acknowledge. You convince yourself that you only hate the other guy because he hated you first.”[soda]  How comforting, but also how unproductive.

Was the latest example of a fragile mind filled with right wing hyperbole? With decades of carefully taught ‘hate?’ With the residue of objectification, demonization, de-humanization, and paranoid projection?  We don’t know yet, and may not know until the dust settles and reports become more comprehensive and accurate. What we do know is that violence and violent speech don’t solve anything. Ever.