> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alicia Smalley [SMTP:alicias@scs.unr.edu]
>
> Yes, many men die in battle, I believe about 58,000 men were
> killed in Vietnam while more than that number of females
> were killed by spouses or boyfriends during the same time
> period in the US. A staggering statistic.
That's staggering, all right. Lyndon Johnson sent the
first combat troops to Viet Nam in 1965, and the last of
them were withdrawn by Nixon in 1973. So for the US,
the Viet Nam war was eight years long. If 58,000
women were killed by spouses or boyfriends in those
eight years, there would have been 7,250 such murders
every year. That is almost twice as many women as
are murdered in total every year, not just by intimates.
In 1994, to pick a year for which the Bureau of Justice
Statistics has data on line, there were 4,489 women
murdered in total. 1,396 of those were murdered by
spouses, ex-spouses, or boyfriends. At that rate it
would take 42 years for the number of women murdered
by intimates to equal the number of men killed in Viet Nam.
I don't know what the murder rates were in the 1960's, but
that they were five times higher than they are now
doesn't sound possible.
I don't think anyone should quote this statistic until it
has been demonstrated to be true. A more accurate
rendering looks to be, "about 58,000 men were killed in
Vietnam while about one-fifth that number of women
and one-ninth that number of men were killed by spouses
or boyfriends/girlfriends during the same time period in
the US." And even those numbers might be high... my
hunch is that murder rates were lower then.