On Honor Killings, veracity of facts, and people in glass houses

So this evening I came across the following tweet:

stacyhyatt Stacy Hyatt 

3000 Women Have Been Killed LAST YEAR, in Great Britain Alone, as #Muslim.Honor Killings : youtu.be/vOqAVTZY1Ok #Sharia #Islam

39 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Honor kills are a horrible. I have no room in  my life for violence against women (or men) in any form. I've sat in my office with Muslim women who escaped terrible violence (or are enduring terrible violence) as well as with Muslim women who have never known violence.

My attention, of course, was drawn to the exaggerated spewing of hate from the 700 Club that you can find in the link shared by Stacy Hyatt. The xenophobic-baiting gets me every time.

I did a little fact checking. Interestingly, the Guardian reports that the murder rate in England and Wales was 619 in 2010. Seems like someone has their facts wrong. I listened to the 700 Club clip--what was actually reported is that there were 3,000 honor attacks in Britain. Honor attacks are not quite murder, though both are pretty horrible things. I dug a little deeper and discovered that the actual number of honor attacks, as reported by the BBC, is 2,823.

Okay. So they aren't murders, they are attacks. There aren't 3,000 of them, there are 2,823. Some of you might say I'm quibbling about details. I think accuracy matters. Careful attention to details like this helps me judge whether or not anything else someone is saying has any veracity.

Why do I care? I care because I see our media covering the extreme and ignorming the mainstream. I'm also tired that 37.8 percent of our population who voted in the 2010 election speak for the other 62.2 percent (this doesn't really belong here, but I'm annoyed about it and just had to say it).

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

From all reports, violence against women in Muslim countries is pretty horrific. However not every Muslim women is abused. Those interested in domestic violence in Muslim countries might check out the website Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality.

This really isn't the point. It's not about who is experiencing violence and who is not. It isn't about what kind of violence is worse. What really got my goat about this whole kerfuffle was two fold: inaccurate information being shared and an emphasis on 2,823 dramatic crimes with no attention paid to the millions of other women (in the United States and the world, many of whom are not Muslim) who suffer violence.

Our own country has abysmal statistics about violence against women. Before the folks from the 700 Club and the Stacy Hyatts of the world run to the street corners casing aspersions against the entire Muslim civilization, they need to look inside their own house.

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Let's look at our glass house, also known as the statistics about domestic violence in the United States. Click here for the full report

• On average more than three women a day are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in the United States. 
• In 2005 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner.
• In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and prevention published data collected in 2005 that finds that women experience two million injuries from intimate partner violence each year. 
• There were 248,300 rapes/sexual assaults in the United States in 2007, more than 500 per day, up from 190,600 in 2005. 

None of this is okay. We all need to own the violence perpetrated in our communities. We all need to be part of the solution to this violence.

UPDATE: January 14, 2012

Someone on Twitter, Abdul-Azim Ahmed, sent me this reference to crime statistics in the United Kingdom. To put the honor attacks in perspective in terms the general crime rate, click here. 

Slave Narratives: Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

It looks like I'm going to be a regular visitor to the digital archives at the Library of Congress. Did you know they have a collection of oral histories taken in the 1930s by people employed by the WPA (Works Progress Administration)? They make for riveting, harrowing, and enlightening reading.

Personal narratives like this are like opening a little tiny window in the fabric of time. Through that window I get to glance back and see an unvarnished, unprocessed, and unadorned view of life at it was. These windows are irresistible--when I find it I need to open it and look through it. Whether it be historical narratives likes these, or more contemporary narratives like the ones told by patients in my office, I'm transfixed. Each window opened gives me another perspective to understand the complex fabric of our shared experience.

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves was born sometime around 1850 somewhere near Louisville. She told her story to a WPA interviewer in 1937. The nameless interviewer wrote this of Sarah:

"Her life story is one of contrasts; contrasts of thought; contrasts of culture, beneficial inventions and suffrage. Not far from her home the glistening streamlined Zephyr speeds on twin rails beside the Missouri River, near the route of the slow-moving, creaking wagons on the ox-road of the 1850s."

Let's open up one of those tiny little windows in the fabric of time and let Sarah speak.

"My name is Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, or Aunt Sally as everybody calls me. Yes'm that's a lot of name an' I come by it like this, My husband was owned by a man named Graves, and I was owned by a man named Shaw, so when we were freed we took the surnames of our masters. I was born march 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right now. I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had alloted her to a man named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes." 

"Yes'm. Allotted? Yes'm. i'm goin' to explain that," she replied. "you see there was slave traders in those days, jes' like you got horse and mule an' auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired 'em out. Ye'm, rented 'em out. Allotted means somthin' like hired out. But the slave never got no wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the master." 

"I was never sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. yes'm when a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest. A chattel mortgage." 

A down payment!! 

"Times don't change, just the merchandise." 

I am amazed at how connected I feel to Sarah. Despite having been born more than seventy years before I was, and having died on July 3, 1943, when my grandparents were in their early 20s and neither of my parents were born, I can feel her presence here in my living room as I sit on my couch writing this in an undisclosed location in the Merrimack River Valley. That's the power of a personal narrative.

Sarah gives us a glimpse into the life of a person in slavery that we don't read about in history text books. Her personal story gives contour, shape, and texture to the disembodied facts our teachers lecture about. Sarah also offers us so much more. She was a simple woman. She worked hard and struggled to survive through an era of history that was not kind to people of color. She received no formal education, won no prizes, and left no inventions, books, or other intellectual products behind.

Yet reading her narrative, I'm incredibly moved the the gifts I have received. Sarah mattered not for what she left behind. She mattered because she was here. Her story illuminates her humanity that, in the end, is all we ever really have.

Rape, Injustice "Facts," and a Call to Better Scholarship

Those of you who regularly pay attention to me on Twitter know that I go a little crazy over items presented as "facts" that are either not referenced or not verifiable. I've seen way too many examples of blatant misinformation spread as well as generally smart people who become misinformed vectors spreading about even more misinformation.

Take for example the Twitter entity known as InjusticeFacts. They describe themselves as "an open, circulating database of facts that deal with the injustices which plague our world." In general, I think the idea is great. There are copious amounts of horrible injustices that happen in the world. Many of us have no idea that they are occurring. Consciousness raising is an important tool of social change, and I'm glad Injustice Facts is doing some of that work.

My complaint is that Injustice Facts offers up sloppy scholarship. People can provide them "facts" through their website. The organizers of the website then disseminate those facts. Are the facts vetted? Are there references that are made available so we know that the fact is true? 

No. At lest Injustice Facts does not explicitly say they do fact checking. The organization also doesn't not respond to Tweets asking if they fact check.

Arguably, good scholarship involves checking out the veracity of information. Not everyone does that. I think an organization or person who presents things as facts has some responsibility to actually verify whether facts are facts -- or if they are propaganda. We've become too trusting, and have rapidly lost our ability to critically think about the world around us.

Yesterday, someone who  I follow on Twitter re-tweeted this:

InjusticeFacts Injustice Facts 

29 women out of every 100,000 are raped in the U.S. each year, 1.6 women out of every 100,000 are raped in Canada each year.

13 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

My (somewhat snarky) response :

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

.@InjusticeFacts @amandamcneil I usually like my facts with a side of references.

13 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

My twitter follower's response, which has since been deleted by the follower, was "Questioning rape facts. Classy." I of course wasn't questioning rape. Violence is a despicable thing, and a good deal of my work as a psychologist is with women and men who have endured sexual violence. My complaint was about a disembodied fact--without reference, context, or verification--being represented as truth.

The snark probably obscured my message a bit.

I continued (I edited a few auto correct errors from my original tweets):

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

I question our collective lack of critical thinking about information that is presented without reference @amandamcneil @injusticefacts

12 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

Why should I believe stats that aren't verified? That is not questioning rape. Its demanding good scholarship @amandamcneil@injusticefacts

12 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

My twitter follower elected to unfollow me and ignore my responses. A shame, really, as she and I probably agree more than we disagree. I also think, by the way, that it's important to regularly be exposed to people who think differently than me. It makes my world bigger, richer and more diverse.

I've taken it upon myself to do a little fact checking. The UN's statistics for forcible rape in the United States for 2009 was 28.6 per 100,000 people. The count for Canada? 1.5 per 100,000 people. Ms. Magazine has put together a helpful table to demonstrate how difficult it is to get accurate statistics on rape. Scary, sad, and heartbreaking reading.

In this case Injustice Facts were accurate facts (there was a little rounding that happened). To be a more worthwhile source of information, and a trustworthy source of information, a simple addition of a reference would change everything.

It really isn't good enough to say something is true "because I said so." It's poor scholarship, breeds misinformation, and has the potential for great harm.

We need to be critical thinkers. We need to question what we read. We need to search out references to know that the facts we see are accurate and not propaganda. We need to be better scholars.

That is my point. I'm sad my Twitter follower didn't stick around long enough to hear me out.