Violence Against Women By Country

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Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man. Forty six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.

At least according to ultra-leftist Stieg Larsson (of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame).

But thing is, if you actually ask women if they’ve been experienced violence sexual or physical violence from a partner, one will find that it is actually East Asian and White countries that have the lowest rates. Via The Inductivist:

In the WHO study, the lowest prevalence of lifetime and current partner violence was found in urban Japan and Serbia and Montenegro, which suggests that rates of abuse may reflect, in part, different levels of economic development.

Japan yes, but Serbia, with a GDP (PPP) per capita of $12,000, isn’t all that rich; at least, not significantly more so than Brazil or Thailand. And yet rates of abuse in the past 12 month are as low as in Japan, and far lower than in any other of the other surveyed areas: Brazil, Ethiopia, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Thailand, Tanzania.

Even the lifetime risk of assault in Serbia was lower than in any of those other places bar Japan – this despite it being lawless and war-torn for much of the 1990′s.

In short this appears to be primarily an HBD thing, and not so much an economic development thing.

15 thoughts on “Violence Against Women By Country”

  1. Pingback: Daily Linkage – September 3, 2012 | The Second Estate

  2. There was no war inside Serbia proper. It is also beside the point as this only asks about assault by people who you have a deep relation with.

    Big difference is also cultural. Japan and Serbia the bride choose her own man while that isn’t always true in the higher scoring countries*

    There is also a difference in media culture. The number of American movies in which the heroine kills her rapist at the end is not zero. In Thailand she ends pregnant and married to him.

    ps. I read intimate as person who you likely have sex with if everything goes its expected way.Dates, boyfriends and husbands, not neighbours, creeps in the subway or enemy soldiers.

        • “Would compare it more with a natural disaster.”
          Some places seem to get more lawless after natural disasters, while some don’t. New Orleans and Haiti both had a spike in crime after being hit by major disasters, while Japan remained stable after their recent earthquake. How people react in times of compromised ability by the authorities to respond to crimes tells us a lot about their predilections.

          • I wouldn’t call it a big disturbance. More like a Winter storm. Nasty but not civilization destroying.

  3. On Stieg Larsson’s feminism:

    Sweden couldn’t have become so freakishly feminist if Swedes didn’t constantly worry about not being feminist enough. And Singapore couldn’t have become so clean without Singaporeans constantly worrying about not being clean enough. I’m often subjected to R&B radio at work. One of the biggest lyrical cliches in that genre is “I want to lose control”. I’ve probably heard this phrase in hundreds of different R&B songs over the years. An outsider’s first reaction would be “they want even LESS control?” Ah, but if they wanted more of it with any regularity, their lives wouldn’t be quite as chaotic as they are now. A typical outsider’s reaction to reading descriptions of Larssen’s opus is “he thinks Sweden isn’t feminist ENOUGH?” But it actually makes sense that he would have thought that. Anorexics approach death from starvation by constantly telling themselves that they look too fat.

  4. It’d be interesting to know what the equivalent figures are for Japan (rural), Serbia and Montenegro (rural) and Ethiopia (urban). In Japan (city), the low figures could be explained in part by high density living and small dwellings which enable single-person households. Also work culture in the city demands that men socialise with their bosses and work colleagues after work so men would hardly ever see their families.

    The high level of partner-related violence against women in Ethiopia might be a consequence of the civil war between that country and Eritrea that lasted from 1960 to the early 1990s but unless there are comparable figures for Ethiopia (urban) and Eritrea (urban and rural), we just don’t know. Also the repression and poverty that were fostered by governments in the past and which led to and were fed by the war would be factors. Throw in the fact that some 80 – 90% of urban Ethiopians live in slums, most of them in Addis Ababa (largest city in Ethiopia at 3.3 million and 10 times the size of the next biggest city Mekele), and for that country anyway, partner-related violence is partly an economic development problem.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Urban_population_living_in_slums.svg

    • They still have a civil war in the West of Ethiopia. But forced marriages are AFAIK a problem in Ethiopia

  5. How did they take into consideration different attitudes to reporting sexual violence/harrassment in different cultures, which is a real taboo in many societies, along with different attitudes to what constitutes sexual harrasment & violence (Sweden & Japan are two pretty odd cases themselves).

    PS. Have you been following the massive explosion of sexual assaults & open harrassment that is going on in Egypt? There have been a number of cases where groups of young males have been literally dragging women off the streets in the middle of the day in busy neighborhoods & raping them in alleys, & many women are afraid to go out. Harrassment has become a brutal group sport in many places.
    In interviews with young males on the streets over there they apparently believe they now have the right to do so, as the women were “asking for it” due to their clothing & attitudes.

    Interestingly enough, much of the violence is targeted towards women who are already wearing veils & full burqa’s, with the generally young men saying that the burqa’s were too tight or the veils too “provocative”.
    From what I can tell, the attitudes & actions of these guys seem more like lawless gangs in a societal breakdown than the traditional islamic intolerance, but with what was opposing traditions mixing together in a bizarre & brutal cocktail – the western “freedoms” to do what you want without limits, but targeting & justifications from the attitiudes of the extreme islamic sects.

    Many of the gangs that have taken over in Libya show similar attitudes & behaviours, but in an even more extreme manner..

  6. “During the interview Winberg said that 40 percent of Swedish women are exposed to violence and that the numbers have climbed steadily as equality has increased. The Brazilian journalists were quick to explain that equality was harmful to women, noting that violence towards women was only 11 percent in the less equal society in Spain.”

    http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/sanandaji2.html

    • Dear Namae,

      The pity and irony behind the article you quote is that for 40 years in Sweden, there was a mass eugenics campaign waged mostly against young women and teenage girls of working class background starting in the 1930s. The mass sterilisation program was started by social democrats to promote social conformity, racial hygiene and stamp out / prevent activities considered deviant. The people who applied for permission to force sterilisation on a girl thought to be mentally retarded or somehow unfit to breed were often teachers, social workers, neighbours and relatives. I can imagine a lot of these people were themselves women of broadly similar personality, prejudice and inclination as the feminists mentioned in the Lew Rockwell article: they had a particular vision of society and enforced it through co-opting the state and its mechanisms.
      http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999/euge-19m.shtml

      The other thing is that Sweden has a very broad and hazy definition of what constitutes partner-related violence against women (as, erm, one J Assange discovered) which encourages over-reporting and even frivolous reporting compared to, say, Brazil and Spain where partner-related violence against women could be under-reported, in part due to how it’s defined. In some countries, rape within marriage does not count as partner-related violence.

      One thing that discourages women from reporting domestic violence is their perception of the courts’ treatment of victims like themselves; if the courts favour perpetrators of violence rather than victims in their decisions, or if the legal process involved is seen as long, expensive and stressful, then women will be reluctant to report violence. I think this is the situation in Spain.

  8. “Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man. Forty six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.”

    That is simply not true.

    “Russia seems to always be an outlier when it comes to HBD.”
    Well, Russia’s actually a pretty diverse place. There are Slavic ethnic Russians, who make up the majority, but there are also Central Asians, aboriginal Siberians, various subgroups of non-European Caucasians, and a few other groups who reside in the territory of Russia. Also, hbd chick has some interesting theories about the roots of Russian (and Eastern European) levels of corruption versus Northwestern European levels of corruption, based on historical inbreeding in these societies.

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