Claim uses study data but ignores qualifiers

The statement

"Husbands rarely beat up their wives. Single women get beaten up more."

— Ann Coulter on Oct. 15 on the Fox News Channel

The ruling

On Sean Hannity's Fox News show recently, conservative pundit Ann Coulter chided the NFL as "easily very spooked by crazy left-wing hoaxes."

"You'll remember a few years ago the loopiest hoax of all, the claim that men beat up their wives more on Super Bowl Sunday," Coulter said. That claim was largely debunked in a Washington Post story published in 1993.

"The NFL not only believed it, and it was completely a fraud and completely insane," Coulter said. "The safest people in the world … are married women."

"Husbands rarely beat up their wives," Coulter told Hannity. "Single women get beaten up more."

We were curious whether she was right about that.

Coulter goes into this subject in her book, Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America.

Here's how she lays out her case: "According to the U.S. Department of Justice crime statistics, domestic abuse is virtually nonexistent for married women living with their husbands. From 1993 to 2005, the number of married women victimized by their husbands ranged from 0.9 to 3.2 per 1,000. Domestic violence was about 40 times more likely among divorced or separated women, ranging from 37.7 to 118.5 per 1,000. Even never-married women were more than twice as likely to be victims of domestic abuse as married women."

Coulter cites numbers from a Department of Justice report accurately, but she leaves out important qualifiers.

A page about the survey's methodology states: "Caution is warranted when interpreting intimate partner violence and marital status in the (survey) because marital status may be related to a respondent's willingness or ability to disclose violence by an intimate partner."

In other words, a woman who is still married to an abusive husband may be less likely to report the abuse than a woman who has since divorced or separated.

Coulter also leaves out the Department of Justice statistics on homicides committed by a person "intimate" with the victim. Historically, most "intimate" homicides involved spouses.

Coulter accurately cites figures, but she draws conclusions that the authors of the study specifically caution against. And so we rate Coulter's claim Half True.

PolitiFact staff writer Robert Farley. This ruling has been edited for print. For the full ruling — and others — see PolitiFact.com.