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Domestic violence has been a problem all too often ignored, covered up, and swept under the rug. Many well-intentioned and successful efforts have been made in the last few decades to bring the issue to public attention; to get the word out to women that they need not suffer silent, helpless, and alone; to advertise that there are organizations victims can turn to for help and support; and to educate others in spotting the signs of abuse. Unfortunately, nearly every cause will encompass a sub-group of advocates who, either through deliberate disingenuousness or earnest gullibility, end up spreading noble lies in the furtherance of that cause. The myth of Super Bowl Sunday violence is one such noble lie. The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for violence against women is a case study of how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as fact even when there is little or no supporting evidence behind it. Christina Hoff Sommers charted a timeline of how the apocryphal statistic about domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday was widely (if erroneously) publicized over the course of a few days leading up to the Super Bowl in January 1993: Commentators were quick to offers reasons why this fact was so obviously true: Men are mostly loutish brutes, and football is the epitome of mindless, aggressive, violent, testosterone-driven macho posturing, so certainly during the culmination of the football season and its final, spectacular, massively-hyped super game, more men than ever were going to express their excitement or disappointment by smacking their wives and girlfriends around. So much attention did the Super Bowl abuse stories garner that NBC aired a public service announcement before the 1993 game to remind men that domestic violence is a crime. Ken Ringle, a reporter for the Washington Post, was one of the few journalists to bother to check the sources behind the stories. When he contacted Janet Katz, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University, and one of the authors of the study cited during the January 28 news conference, he found: Likewise, Ringle checked the claim made by Dobisky Associates (the organization that had mailed warnings to women advising them not to stay at home with their husbands on Super Bowl Sunday) that Super Bowl Sunday is the one day in the year when hot lines, shelters, and other agencies that work with battered women get the most reports and complaints of domestic violence. Dobisky's source for this quote was Charles Patrick Ewing, a professor at the University at Buffalo, but Professor Ewing told Ringle he'd never said it: In addition, Ringle learned that Linda Gorov, the Boston Globe reporter who'd written that women's shelters and hotlines are flooded with more calls from victims [on Super Bowl Sunday] than on any other day of the year hadn't even seen the study she'd cited in support of that statement but had merely been told about it by Linda Mitchell, the FAIR representative who was present at the January 28 news conference that had kicked off the whole issue. Did any evidence back up the assertion that Super Bowl Sunday was the leading day for domestic violence? When the Washington Post's Ringle attempted to follow the chain by contacting Linda Mitchell of FAIR, Mitchell said her source had been Lenore Walker, the Denver psychologist who'd appeared on Good Morning America the day after the news conference. Ms. Walker's office referred Ringle to Michael Lindsey, another Denver psychologist who was also an authority on battered women. Mr. Lindsey told Ringle that I haven't been any more successful than you in tracking down any of this and asked, You think maybe we have one of these myth things here? The upshot? It turned out that Super Bowl Sunday in 1993 (as in other years) was not a significantly different day for those who monitor domestic abuse hotlines and staff battered women's shelters: So, on what day of the year is domestic violence against women most prevalent, if not Super Bowl Sunday? It appears domestic violence doesn't peak on any one specific day, but it does rise at particular times of the year. For example, a 2006 study published in the Handbook of Sports and Media that examined over 1.3 million domestic violence police reports from every day of the year in 15 NFL cities found only a very small rise in domestic violence dispatches on (or just after) Super Bowl Sunday, but nearly a quintupling of domestic violence police dispatch reports around major holidays such as Christmas. A 2007 study that analyzed patterns of women fleeing domestic abuse found that the highest intake rates of women with children at shelters coincided not with Super Bowl Sunday, but with breaks in the school calendar such as Christmas vacation, spring break, and summer vacation (although that study surveyed when women most often fled from their abusers rather than when they actually experienced the abuse that prompted them to flee). The weeks and months after the 1993 Super Bowl saw a fair amount of backpedaling by those who had propagated the Super Bowl Sunday violence myth, but as usual the retractions and corrections received far less attention than the sensational-but-false stories everyone wanted to believe, and the bogus Super Bowl statistic remains a widely-cited and believed piece of misinformation. As Sommers concluded, How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained. Variations: A similar item, circulated during the 2014 World Cup football (i.e., soccer) tournament and based on a study by researchers at Lancaster University, held that Every time England loses the World Cup, domestic violence against women raises 38%.
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