Cool! Yeah, a yearly abuse case count of 1,000 in a county of 100,000 is 1%. But that same raw count of 1,000 in a county of 1,000,000 is only 0.1%.

👍So right! Well said!💪💞

A lot of this is raw count data is simply correlation data (not true incident rates) closely related to time spent with children. Comparing raw counts can be very misleading, and make people think that "moms are 2X more likely to abuse children", which is not true...

Moms have much higher raw numbers than dads, not necessarily because they are more abusive, but because there are 5X more kids living with single moms than single dads by looking at divorce child custody rates, plus single parent rates, and overall living arrangement percentages.

According to a 2022 Living Arrangements of Children report released by the U.S. Census Bureau, "the majority (70.1%) of the nation's children under age 18 lived with two parents, 21.4% lived with their mother, 4.4% with their father, and 4.0% did not live with a parent". ( https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/living-arrangements-of-chldren.html )

Compare living arrangements percentages with Department of Justice abuse cases percentages. "The percentage of the total validated cases which involved abuse was determined for each of seven household types: two natural parents, 34.4 percent; natural mother only, 21.2 percent; natural father only, 30.4 percent; other relatives, 30.9 percent; natural mother and father substitute, 54.2 percent; natural father and mother substitute, 59.1 percent; and adoptive or foster parents, 59.1 percent. These results suggest that household composition is highly relevant to the risk of abuse and neglect." ( https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/household-composition-and-risk-child-abuse-and-neglect )

So as far as exposure risk due to simply "living full time with your mom" is about 91.5% compared to 74.5% living full time with dad. While that's still not 2X, there are more factors...

If you were to also factor in employment data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2022 that "Employed fathers remained more likely to work full time than employed mothers in 2021—95.5 percent compared with 79.6 percent." ( https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf ) So mothers in general provide more childcare than fathers and spend much more time with children.

Finally, there's a huge difference physically, mentally, and spiritually between occasional lighter verbal abuse, severe verbal & psychological abuse, occasional spankings deemed physical abuse, and debilitating & near deadly physical abuse. There are trends by mothers & fathers in that data, as well. (Do your own research on this one.)

This doesn't make child abuse acceptable in any way, but does help explain some of the larger trends in raw number data. Just remember that raw count data is never as good as per capita data or percentage of incidents type data.