[jessaustin]

...had no arrest history, according to public records, but divorce papers from a previous marriage include allegations of threats and domestic violence.

Has there been a divorce in California in the last several decades in which child custody was an issue, which has not included such allegations? Are reporters really that ignorant, or do they just assume their readers are?

[Frompo]

Well, in Logan, Walker, Jordan, and Horvath (2002) 40% of cases in Kentucky over a two year period did not mention violence (and the court ruling was largely insensitive to the presence or not of violence allegations).

Using the number "Domestic Violence-Related Calls for Assistance" as reference on how to scale from Kentucky to California, ~60 % of divorce cases will have no mention of violence.

(In 2004 Kentucky had 800 calls per 100 000 inhabitants and California had 500; the assumption is that number of allegations in hearings scale with the calls of assistance).

https://aifs.gov.au/publications/allegations-family-violence...

https://oag.ca.gov/crime/cjsc/stats/domestic-violence

http://www.ncdsv.org/fortcampbell/I-12_Kentucky%20DV%20Facts...

http://www.census.gov/popest/data/state/totals/2004/tables/N...

[jessaustin]

Thank you for confirming my point that the domestic violence rate as reported in divorce proceedings far exceeds that as reported to police, by two orders of magnitude. (Presumably some of the reports to police are false, which lowers the actual rate even further. Many such reports are filed on the advice of divorce attorneys, after all.) Doesn't that seem like a fact that a serious journalist would include?

[Frompo]

What are you talking about? First off, your point was that reports of domestic violence was almost always involved in child dispute cases, which I remarked was not true.

Secondly, the calls for assistance is basically reports to the police, and they (8 per 1000 in Kentucky and 5 per 1000 in California [ACS 2008 estimate]) are close to the divorce rate in the respective states (13 per 1000 in Kentucky and 8 per 1000 in California). Overestimating by saying that all divorces are settled in court (some numbers say that ~ 4 % are), the 60% of cases involving domestic violence means that there would be 7.8 per 1000 domestic violence divorce cases. As this is the same amount as the number of calls for police assistance (8 per 1000), your claim that the rate of domestic violence reported is orders of magnitude greater in court is pure falsehood. The case in California is even worse, with estimated 3.2 per 1000 domestic violence cases versus 5 per 1000 calls about domestic violence.

https://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/marriage/data/acs/Evalua...

[avs733]

'just the facts' reporting strikes again. The lack of context is not an effective way of eliminating bias.