On Tuesday, the Washington Post published an op-ed about sexual assault claiming:

The bottom line is this: Married women are notably safer than their unmarried peers, and girls raised in a home with their married father are markedly less likely to be abused or assaulted than children living without their own father.

The article’s headline was even more unambiguous and produced instant outrage online (the Post changed it soon after publication):




.... numbers, charts, analysis...

Finally, the Post’s op-ed used data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). That’s survey-data. As noted above, not all women are equally likely to report violence. And of all personal victimization crimes women reported in the NCVS between 1993 and 2012, only 50 percent were also reported to the police.

We don’t know if married women are more or less likely to report to the Bureau of Justice Statistics that they are being victimized by an intimate partner than unmarried women. The op-ed never addresses the fact that relationship status could affect reporting rates — and therefore the reliability of the authors’ conclusions.

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