"Reality check: domestic violence of all kinds is a chronic problem for about 7% of women and men in Canada.
Let's look at this. First, note carefully the word "chronic", that means there are many more people for whom domestic violence is an acute problem, rather than a chronic problem. Is domestic violence somehow OK when it is not chronic?
Second note carefully the phrase "women and men", in other words, the stats for women and men are being lumped together. We know that women are three times more likely than men to be the victims of domestic violence, so what's this mean? If we have 100 women and 100 men you're saying 14 of them will be victims of "chronic" domestic violence (and many more victims of acute cases of violence). Or, in other words, about 3.5 men and 10.5 women. Rounding that out that means that roughly 1 in 10 women are victims of chronic domestic violence.
That clearly, very clearly makes domestic violence the #1 source of violence that the average woman will face in her life, with 10% of them facing chronic violence, and an unstated but presumably much larger fraction facing acute cases of domestic violence. In terms of what sorts of violence are a problem, that makes violence against women pretty much the biggest problem out there.
Thanks for confirming it!
Note that it is your own number from your cited article that confirms it is a huge problem, so hard to see how you are going to quibble with it.
The overall homicide rate for women killed as a result of domestic violence is about 40 a year in Canada (about 20 men are killed by their intimate partners). That is a statistically trivial figure.
Your numbers are wrong. Let's go to the source, and use the correct figures:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-224-x/2010000/aftertoc-aprestdm2-eng.htm
"Between 2000 and 2009, there were 738 spousal homicides, representing 16% of all solved homicides and nearly half (47%) of all family-related homicides.
The 2009 spousal homicide rate remained stable for the third consecutive year. This follows nearly three decades of gradual decline.
Women continue to be more likely than men to be victims of spousal homicide. In 2009, the rate of spousal homicide against women was about three times higher than that for men."
Note that all you have to do to get to a statistically non-trivial figure is to look at a larger number of years, since the rate of spousal homicides is stable, this produces a statistically valid result over a 10 year period, such as above. And again, we see that in fact women are three times more likely than men to be victims. You can run away from this all you want--but that is an inescapable and well documented fact.
The significance of the murder rate is that it is ACCURATE. All other reports can be criticized for reporting bias--men may be less likely to call police when they are victims, and so on. But when someone is murdered the police are called, the case is thoroughly investigated, and the results are as reliable and accurate as crime statistics ever get.
It is then possible to use the murder rate to validate that you are getting sensible data elsewhere. If women are three times more likely to be murdered it is natural to expect they are three times more likely to be assaulted. In fact that is what we see:
So for example:
"For example, in 2009, females who reported spousal violence were about three times more likely than males (34% versus 10% 3 ) to report that they had been sexually assaulted, beaten, choked or threatened with a gun or a knife by their partner or ex-partner in the previous 5 years."
When we see that murders are three times more likely to have female victims, and then other statistics telling us that women are three times more likely to be victims there as well, we can be certain that we have eliminated reporting bias as an explanation for the difference and that in reality the most sensible thing to believe, based on the data, is that women are three times more likely than men to be the victims of serious domestic violence.