Misinformation Central: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
October 28, 2005
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. - Socrates
The National Women’s Health Information Center (NWHIC) is a service of the Office on Women’s Health (OWH) in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Perhaps it is just me but, I wondered why our public policy makers have provided no National Men’s Health Information Center? Do our public policy makers value the lives of women over men and girls over boys?
After a bit of a struggle I discovered that this website does not completely ignore men and does have some information about violence against men. And the section about violence is particularly interesting.
This section of the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services documents quite clearly that the agency either is ignorant of the facts or has a less than subtle bias against male victimization http://www.4woman.gov/mens/men.cfm?page=124&mtitle=Violence.
I thought that, because this agency is paid by taxpayer dollars, it would present information that is bias free, fair, and accurate. I soon found that it was three strikes and I was out. This section of the site turns out to be misinformation central. In fact the HHS website makes a claim that has no basis in fact:
Although more women suffer from acts of violence, violence is a man’s issue for many reasons.
There is no data, either public or private that documents women suffer more violence than men. If it is not true that women suffer from more violence than men why does the HHS website make that misleading and clearly inaccurate claim?
A few sentences later I was surprised to discover that the very same paragraph notes that, “…data from 1998 shows that males of all ages were 3 time more likely to be murdered than females.” Now, perhaps it is just me but, three times as many men as being murdered as women seems to dispute the opening sentence of the same paragraph.
Well I thought, perhaps HHS does not want to count murders, rather HHS would prefer to count assaults. I checked the National Institute of Justice and National Center for Injury Prevention and Control sponsored, Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women, for data about assaults http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf.
The executive summary of the above study documents that an estimated 1.9 million women and 3.2 million men are physically assaulted annually in the United States. It also notes that 51.9 percent of surveyed women and 66.4 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of attacker.
I then decided to check the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance in the United States, 2003
http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/yrbs/index.htm. On page 37 of that report it notes that 25.1% of girls and 40.5% of boys report they were in a physical fight and 2.6% of girls and 5.7% of boys report being injured in that fight.
I looked long and hard and have yet to discover a single study, either public or private that documents women suffer from more violence than men. Again, why would the HHS website make this obviously false claim?
In fact I discovered a study on the HHS website that documents that physically abused boys may be more likely than boys who are not abused, to commit domestic violence as an adult http://www.4woman.gov/news/english/528578.htm.
Of the men in the study, 51% had experienced some form of childhood physical abuse. The abuse included being kicked, hit with an object, choked, burned, bit, scalded or punched. The violence against boys was most often by parents and most often by their mothers.
Perhaps some day in the not to distant future we might have a National Men’s Health Information Center. Last time I check men were humans. Then again, if our public policy makers and the US Department of Health and Human Services continue minimizing or ignoring male victimization, that date will remain in the very far and distant future.
**UPDATE**
Email from HSS received October 28, 2005:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jones, Wanda K. (OPHS)" <WJones@OSOPHS.DHHS.GOV>
To: <rldavis@post.harvard.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2005 2:36 PM
Subject: Your posting about NWHIC
Dear Mr. Davis:
We were alerted to your posting of the information in the Men's Health/violence section of our website, the National Women's Health Information Center. We are taking steps immediately to correct the errors you point out--this page went through several edits, changing from a focus on intimate partner violence to a broader violence focus, and somehow that opening sentence was overlooked as the other content changed.
For a long time, we were the ONLY site in HHS with a men's health page; it has been part of NWHIC since our launch in 1998, and we have sought to keep it as lively and up to date as we can. Of course now there are many internet options for men's health information, but our men's health site continues to be heavily accessed. We welcome constructive comments, even as we recognize now a rich array of men's health resources HHS-wide.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention; I hope you will share our corrective action with your readers.
Wanda K. Jones, Dr.P.H.
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (Women's Health)
US Department of Health and Human Services
