The reality is very different. The actual figure for 1991 was 54, according to the US National Centre for Health Statistics, These days people will accept even the wildest claims, as long as they make women out to be victims. Particularly if they also put men in a poor light. Since the 1980s it has become increasingly difficult to read publications from bodies as diverse as the federal government, the United Nations children's fund and Amnesty International without finding wildly exaggerated claims about violence against women. Frequently, such bodies put out information which varies from misleading to simply false.
Some academics contribute to the confusion, in the media.
In one recent case, a University of Adelaide law lecturer, Hilary Charlesworth, stated on the ABC show Women Out Loud that the majority of victims in war were now women. She later gave the Red Cross as the source. In fact the Red Cross does not collect such figures, although it has stated that 80 per cent of the world's refugees are women and children. Presumably men are unrepresented because they are either still within the war zone or are dead. In May 1995 a Queensland academic, Jeanne Madison, was reported as having stated that 67 per cent of nurses she had surveyed complained of being the target of sexual harassment.