You really are more likely to be killed by a random human male than a random Grizzly bear

EDIT: I desperately want access to this: https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/856279/ could anyone with a UK university email address grab it for me?

We are the internet’s premier source of bear philosophy, with a healthy dosage of bear politics, bear psychology and bear political economy, so when this opportunity to defend the honor of bears arose, I had to take it.

Women have been using the idea that they are more scared of men than bears to try to convey to men just how scary gendered violence is to them. This has turned into a statistical debate. So far the debate has centered on two dueling points:

1. As a woman, you are much more likely to die because a man kills you than a bear (fact-check: true)

2. But a woman encountering a random bear in a forest is much more likely to die than a woman encountering a random man in a forest (fact-check: also true)

But I found myself curious about a different question. Which is more likely to kill you if you live in the US and are a woman? A random grizzly bear or a random man (or boy)?

Start with the bears

• There are 55,000 Grizzly bears in the United States (estimated).

• In the last ten years, 7 women have been killed by Grizzily Bears in the United States. I chose the last ten years, because the sample is small, and I think this balances making the data current with sample size.

• Therefore, about 1.3 women are killed per year, per 100,000 Grizzly bears.

Now, the men

• 4251 women were murdered in 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388777/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-gender/

• 87.7% of murderers in the United States are men (or boys) where the gender of the murderer was known in 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/251886/murder-offenders-in-the-us-by-gender/

• We actually don’t have great statistics on the percentage of murder victims are men killed by men. It seems Florida and Alabama are missing, and these are big states. However, I will approximate the rate as the number of women who were killed, times the percentage of killers who were men. This is not great, because it assumes independence, but we’re only trying to do a rough estimate. This gives:

• 3730 women killed by men or boys (estimated)

• In 2022, there were 165.13 million men and boys.

• This gives 2.26 murders of women per year per 100,000 men and boys. Substantially more than the bear figure. If we only included men and killings per men, the figure per 100,000 would go up further.

Finally, let me add to the debate in another way. The framing of the debate so far focuses on ‘stranger danger’, encountering a random stranger in the woods. In truth, well over 90% of women killed by a man are killed by a man they know, and most of these are killed by a husband or a lover. Stranger danger has, I think, been greatly overstated by a bunch of forces- rightwingers who see it as useful to a certain narrative about rogue criminals on the streets, tabloids that sell through fear, ‘true crime’ podcasts for whom these sorts of stories are often more exciting, etc.

But we must always remember that the supermajority of murders of women and girls are acts of domestic violence.

To get women and girls out of domestic violence situations, we need:

• A decent welfare system that gives women the money they need to escape abusive households.

• Plenty of cheap housing, for the same reason.

• Free therapy, counseling, and psychiatric care to make it harder to prey on vulnerable women.

• Free medical care to make the detection of violence against women and girls easier

• Decent child protection systems.

The NGO sector, of course, does its best to help women escape violence, but the NGO sector is not enough. The government must take responsibility.

Edit: Let me add something specific to Australia. If the government doesn’t raise the Centrelink rate, many more women will stay with abusive partners. Albanese has been urged many times to raise the Centrelink rate and doubtless knows of this connection. His inaction speaks volumes.