No, new research does NOT show that violence decreases under the Nordic model
Posted on January 24, 2013 by Wendy Lyon
[Update: in response to communication from Feminist Current's Meghan Murphy, I am happy to clarify that the article critiqued below is not a "Feminist Current piece" but a Sam Berg piece which Feminist Current merely hosted.]
There’s been a bit of a social media buzz over this article on a radical feminist website, which claims that a recent Pro Sentret report from Norway – which you can read in English here – shows that “violence decreases under the Nordic model”. The author backs up her claims with an impressive array of graphs (and a fair smattering of ad hominems), and unsurprisingly receives glowing praise in her comments from people who were clearly predisposed to believe anything she said on the subject anyway.
I hate to burst their bubble. Well, actually I don’t.
The author kindly linked to one of my own posts on the report, though she seems not to have read it. If she had, she would have noticed that very near the start I referred to “methodological limitations” that made it unsafe to draw cause-and-effect conclusions from the study. At the time I didn’t feel it important to get into those limitations, but I will now.