In the course of our ongoing efforts to persuade government officials to phase out the flawed term ‘gender-based violence’, we recently had occasion to revisit the Centers for Disease Control’s webpage about teen dating violence. This webpage was beneficial to us last year when we exposed the gender bias in the Coaching Boys Into Men curriculum, which is used in certain Washington high schools.
The CDC used to include on the webpage a statistic that 1 in 11 female and 1 in 14 male high school students reported having experienced physical dating violence in the previous year. This buttressed our case that in focusing solely on boys’ mistreatment toward girls, the Coaching Boys Into Men program — and its complementary curriculum for girls, Athletes as Leaders — have a major blind spot.
CDC makes dubious webpage edits
On the CDC’s webpage on teen dating violence, we noticed some curious changes to the content under the section titled “How big is the problem?” (Using the Wayback Machine, we know the CDC made the edits in February 2022.)
Here we summarize the changes and then provide screenshots for evidence.
Before:
- The CDC presented survey findings that female and male high school students experience teen dating violence at nearly similar rates (“1 in 11” vs “1 in 14”).
- In the paragraph beginning “Some teens are at greater risk than others,” the CDC highlighted “sexual minority groups” and “some racial/ethnic minority groups” as being at greater risk of teen dating violence.
Now:
- The CDC replaced the “1 in 11” and “1 in 14” statistics with a “1 in 12” statistic that does not differentiated between male and female students.
- In the paragraph beginning “Some teens are at greater risk than others,” the CDC highlights “female students” and LGBTQ students as being at greater risk of teen dating violence.
The CDC’s statements — both before and now — refer to the exact same survey dataset. But the CDC’s recent edits have the dual effects of:
- Hiding the fact that male high schoolers report nearly as high rates of physical dating violence victimization as female high schoolers (1 in 14 compared to 1 in 11), and
- Adding a female victimization narrative
BEFORE
NOW
Given the prevailing gender bias among domestic violence advocates (see for example this piece by Gig Harbor counselor Ann Silvers), the CDC’s decisions to add a female victimization narrative and to obscure the rate at which male teens are victims of dating violence was quite a regressive move.
To the CDC’s credit, on their webpage about intimate partner violence, they include this statistic:
About 1 in 5 women and about 1 in 7 men report having experienced severe physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime.
Centers for Disease Control
See also: White House Gender Policy Council Will Neglect Boys’ and Men’s Issues