Tracking the Evidence for a 'Mythical Number': Do UK Domestic Abuse Victims Suffer an Average of 35 Assaults Before Someone Calls the Police?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a widely repeated claim that victims of domestic abuse suffer an average of 35 incidents prior to someone calling the police. This claim is often made without reference to any evidence. When evidence has been cited, the citations often refer to studies that contain no such evidence. After extensive inquiry, the only evidence we can find for making this claim about abuse victims in England and Wales comes from a 1979 study of police responses in a small Canadian city (London, Ontario; 1979 population = 250,000). The estimate is based on only 53 women who said they had had a prior incident before the police had been called to help them; these women represent 24% of the 222 victims the study attempted to interview. A further 15 respondents said they had had no prior incidents, but their responses were left out of the calculation. By a broad consensus of statisticians, this evidence is inadequate to support an estimated rate of prior assaults in that sample or that city, let alone to support an international generalization to the UK in 2014. We conclude that the claim of ‘35’ in modern Britain has been a prime example of a ‘mythical number’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".