An advertisement scheduled to air during Sunday’s Super Bowl is enjoying some controversy — and this one doesn’t even feature naked beauties flaunting cheeseburgers. Produced by the women’s rights organization UltraViolet, the advertisement is intended to tackle, so to speak, the problem of domestic violence among National Football League players:
The hashtag that concludes the video, #GoodellMustGo, refers to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who has endured criticism for his handling of Ray Rice’s domestic abuse case and others.
Yet, provocative though it may be, the advertisement labors under the delusion that the NFL is an egregious source of violence against women. As I observed in an October issue of National Review’s print edition, this is far from so:
The stereotype does not match the facts. Writing at FiveThirtyEight, Benjamin Morris reports that the arrest rate of NFL players is just 13 percent of the national average for men ages 25 to 29 (the average age of players on NFL teams is about 26) — though the percentage varies with the crime. For example, relative to the general population of men in their age group, NFL players commit 5.5 percent as many thefts, but 27.7 percent as many DUIs — the most common offense among them. Still, the highest relative arrest rate, for domestic violence, is only half the national average (55.4 percent), a result that aligns with a 1999 study by criminologist Alfred Blumstein and author Jeff Benedict, which found that the incidence of overall violence among NFL players was half that of the general population. Add these results to the debunked claim that incidents of domestic violence spike on Super Bowl Sunday, and the numbers make clear that, pace the National Organization for Women, the NFL does not have “a violence against women problem.”
Domestic violence is despicable, and groups such as UltraViolet are right to apply themselves to ending it. But the data reveal that NFL players are far less likely than the average late-twenties male to be abusers, and it is shameful for advocacy groups to baselessly suggest otherwise.