Noble Lies

One of the staples of US feminism is the Superbowl violence myth, this is the claim that during the Superbowl there is a surge in domestic violence cases of around 40%. This is completely untrue and has zero basis in fact. Which is why it is disappointing to see that our own police forces have been promoting something similar- the World Cup domestic violence myth, something they also peddled 4 years ago.

Christina Hoff Summers writes:

Could the World Cup Abuse Nightmare be a copycat fraud?

“A stunt based on misleading figures,” is the verdict of BBC legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg and producer Wesley Stephenson. They recently investigated the alleged link between the televised World Cup games and violence in the home for their weekly program Law in Action. On June 22 — day twelve of the 2010 World Cup — they aired the story. It included an interview with a prominent Cambridge University statistician, Sheila Bird, whom they had asked to review the Home Office study and its finding of a 30 percent increase in domestic abuse. She found it to be so amateurish and riddled with flaws that it could not be taken seriously. The 30 percent claim was based on a cherry-picked sample of police districts; it failed to correct for seasonal differences and essentially ignored match days that showed little or no increase in domestic violence.

There's a very telling quote that says so much about how our modern police forces work:

The motives behind the British scare are harder to fathom. It was not the work of feminist hard-liners but rather of a network of government bureaucrats, social-service workers, police personnel, and public officials — including the new home secretary, Theresa May. History offers many examples of depraved societies pretending they are better than they really are. England, an enlightened and humane country, is perversely fascinated by stories that falsely depict its citizens as corrupt and degenerate. Those behind the exaggerated crisis are not going to recant in the face of mere facts. When the BBC investigators presented Carmel Napier, the deputy chief constable of Gwent, with the evidence that the study she and her colleagues were promoting was specious, she replied: “If it has saved lives, then it is worth it.”

The attitude of Carmel Napier- that what is expedient is preferable to what is true- is one of the reasons behind policing disasters like the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes or the fatal beating of a passerby at the G20 summit, when the police were more interested in spinning a yarn than establishing the facts.

As the article points out, it probably doesn't save lives anyway, seeing as it encourages victims to blame their plight on an external factor like the World Cup rather than being in a poisonous relationship with a thug.