RADAR ALERT:
Are You Ready For Some Football ... Mythology?

It's Super Bowl time, and you know what that means. Wings, beer, new commercials, more beer, play stealing, and, oh yeah, domestic violence mythology. There's a statistic that's trotted out this time of year – "More women are victims of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year" – that has no basis in fact but is fervently believed and/or promulgated nonetheless. See, for example, http://www.fair.org/extra/9304/superbowl.html. And more than a decade after it was shown to be a fabrication, the people who make our laws clearly still believe it. See, http://web.archive.org/web/20060925152221/http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a24/press04/p242004004.htm.

Snopes.com, the scourge of urban legends everywhere, has a good article on the apparent origins and subsequent debunking of the myth: http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/superbowl.asp

According to the folks at Snopes, "The claim that Super Bowl Sunday is 'the biggest day of the year for violence against women' demonstrates how easily an idea congruous with what people want to believe can be implanted in the public consciousness and anointed as 'fact' even when it has been fabricated out of whole cloth."

Even though the claim has been thoroughly discredited, it's so immediately plausible to those already inclined toward anti-male ideology – inside every man is a slavering beast waiting for a surge of testosterone to be released – that it gets repeated as fact. So, everyone, please be on the lookout for the spreading of Super Bowl mythology. If your local media spreads the myth, please tell them to check the Snopes article mentioned above for a factual account.

Date of RADAR Release: January 28, 2008

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R.A.D.A.R. – Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting – is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of men and women working to improve the effectiveness of our nation's approach to solving domestic violence. http://mediaradar.org