Department Of Made Up Statistics.

You may remember the great slapfight in the left section of the blogosphere over Amnesty's abuse of the data to make the claim that 1 in 10 women suffer from rape and violence each year, when as more numerate bloggers this was completely unsupported by any data.

Anyway one of Northern Ireland's hundreds of human rights quangos has produced a report claiming that 1 in 4 men in the province physically abuse their partners each year, because evidently 1 in 10 wasn't ludicrous enough. The actual evidence suggests that even the lifetime rate of abuse is substantially lower than that.

What is the motivation behind the absurd abuse of statistics to try and make out that violence against women is endemic? The actual figures suggest that it is a serious enough problem, but when they produce numbers that purport to prove that domestic violence is endemic within society they achieve three things- demonise all men, make domestic violence seem almost normal rather than deviant behaviour and to make sensible people sceptical of all claims made by the organisations that tell such big lies.