Homicide News in Canada is Good; DV Advocates Glum
October 31, 2009
The recently released report on homicide in Canada by that nation's official statistics agency shows that Canadians enjoy safety undreamed of by Americans (StatsCan, 10/28/09). Canadian women in particular are safe. Indeed, homicides to Canadians who manage to stay out of gangs are vanishingly rare.
The most recent figures are for 2008. They show that, in a nation of about 34 million, there were a total of 611 homicides, which the Glossary of Terms says corresponds to the statistics in the U.S. on "non-negligent" homicides. In other words, they're excluding accidental deaths. That means that, on average, about 1 in 55,000 Canadians was a victim of homicide last year. That's less than one-third the rate of non-negligent homicide victimization in the United States. Still, it represented a 2% uptick since 2007.
Some 138 of those 611 victims were gang-related. Only 24% of victims were women which is the lowest rate of female victimization since 1961. Homicides by spouses and former spouses totalled 62 with 45 victims being women versus 17 men. StatsCan doesn't include in its report whether it counts murder by proxy as spousal murder or a "multiple offender" crime as is done in the U.S. Because wives tend more than husbands to hire out the murder of their spouse, in the States, murders of husbands are often obscured in the "multiple offender" category.
Whatever the case, the spousal homicide rate was the lowest in over 40 years. Homicides with a female victim dropped by 17 to 146, or 0.87 per 100,000 population.
But domestic violence advocates weren't buying it. This article quotes Lori Rudniski of the Family Violence Consortium of Manitoba as saying,
"Does it mean domestic violence incidents are down? I don't think so. At the agency levels, we're seeing more complex needs from the women and the families, (and) we're seeing the impact of longer-term incidents of domestic violence (680 News, 10/28/09)."
That last sentence presumably means something, but neither Ms. Rudniski nor the article explained.Â
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In Tucson, No Room at the Inn for Homeless Single Dads
October 31, 2009
But there's one need most shelters are not even close to meeting."I'm a single dad and I have this baby and we've fallen upon hard times," says Attila Streyar as he holds his toddler daughter, Layla."I needed some help, just to get shelter. There was no place in this town that I could find that takes care of men with children by themselves," Streyar says.
Times are hard. People are out of work and cold weather is just around the corner. In some places, it's arrived. And for homeless people, that makes their already-hard lives all the harder. This article talks about the hardships of the out-of-work and homeless in the Tucson, Arizona area (KOLD, 10/28/09). There, people who have never been homeless before are living in their cars because shelters are bursting at the seams.
But the article raises more than just the usual issues surrounding the fraying social safety net. In Tucson at least, if you're a single father without a home, you're almost certainly out of luck and so is your child. There are lots of shelters in the area, but only one, Primavera Foundation, accepts single men with children. Others will accept a man with children if there's also a woman present, but the rule in all Tucson shelters but one is "No Single Dads Allowed."
It occurred to me to ask why that's the case, so I called Primavera to see if they knew. Their response: "That's a good question." Have they ever had any problem with accepting single fathers? No. They get very few of them, but they've never had a problem.Â
I spoke with Pastor Danny Hansen, Associate Executive Director of Gospel Rescue Mission in Tucson. His mission has a women's and children's shelter and a men's shelter. If a family with children comes to them for shelter, the mother and child are sent to the women's and children's shelter and the man is housed in the men's shelter.  A single mother with a child is housed in the women's and children's shelter, but a single father with a child is simply turned away. Why? Pastor Hansen said "That would not be appropriate."Â
Further discussion elicited the information that the board of directors of the Gospel Rescue Mission perceived that children in a men's shelter would be in greater danger than children in a women's shelter.  Pastor Hansen went on to explain that the Gospel Rescue Mission is considering establishing a family shelter that would accept any parent or parents with children. But if that happens at all, it won't be soon.
The bottom line? If you're a single dad, keep your job and keep your house. If you don't, it's the street for you and your children.
Â
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International Group of Scientists to Push for PAS Inclusion in DSM
October 31, 2009
Bernet is leading an effort to add "parental alienation" to the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association's "bible" of diagnoses, scheduled for 2012. He and some 50 contributing authors from 10 countries will make their case in the American Journal of Family Therapy early next year. Inclusion, says Bernet, would spur insurance coverage, stimulate more systematic research, lend credence to a charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment.
This article is a serious discussion of Parental Alienation Syndrome and parental alienation generally (U.S. News and World Report, 10/29/09). Although it tends to elide the difference between the two, it's balanced, doesn't promote an agenda, but does understand the reality of PAS and the pain it can cause. As the article shows, parental alienation can come in a variety of forms, from the unintentional and trivial to the malicious and psychologically damaging. As to whether a discrete syndrome can be manifested by children of alienating parents, the article takes no stand. Clearly, that question has yet to be decided by the community of mental health professionals.Â
And the caution expressed by former American Psychiatric Association president, Elissa Benedek, is commendable. Ever-increasing diagnoses of mental illness inevitably result in the ever-increasing treatment thereof, often by psychotropic medication. Mistaken diagnoses of PAS in cases of appropriate anger on a child's part about divorce, or the simple preference for one parent or the other would be inevitable. As always, there is behavior that is appropriate to trying circumstances and behavior that's not. Knowing the difference can be tricky and not all mental health professionals will get it right.
And other diagnoses can look suspiciously like societal preference for controlling obstreperous masculine behavior. After decades of diagnoses under a variety of names, Attention Deficit Disorder was first included in the DSM in 1980 and changed to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in 1987. And, as Dr. Christopher Lane of Northwestern University has written,
But since ADHD was officially defined as a mental disorder in 1980, the number of diagnoses each year has skyrocketed—there's simply no other word for it. When a mental disorder mushrooms by hundreds of percent each year, as in this case, it's in everyone's interests to pay attention—even to ask what's going on, and why. Is there a major uptick due to recognition, finally, of a once-hidden, underrecognized phenomenon? Or does the issue also involve a bandwagon effect, where aggressive direct-to-consumer marketing, patent cycles, media interest, "diagnostic bracket creep" (Peter Kramer's term in Listening to Prozac), and even in this case education policies and practices seem to prioritize certain disorders and treatments over others.
Vastly more boys than girls are diagnosed with ADHD. And therefore, vastly more boys than girls are treated with psychotropic drugs for the condition. The psychological profession wonders why that should be, but generally fails to look at the possibility of anti-male bias in society. As a colleague of Dr. Lane's once put it, "We used to have a word for sufferers of ADHD; we called them boys." The implication is that what was once understood as acceptable masculine behavior is now considered unacceptable masculine behavior.  Are we entirely surprised that the skyrocketing diagnosis of ADHD coincided with the rise in the general societal distaste for behaviors identified as masculine?Â
So I, like Dr. Benedek, am nervous about expanding diagnostic categories in the behavioral sciences. But I'm all in favor of recognizing parental alienation when it occurs. In short, I'd prefer to place the emphasis on the person doing the alienating rather than the one alienated. After all, if we want to control or alter someone's behavior, let's go to the source, the cause. And the cause of an alienated child is not the child, but the parent.  That, of course is not to say that alienated children shouldn't receive appropriate care. Obviously, they should, but we must never ignore the alienating parent in favor of psychotropic drug therapy to control understandable behavior in alienated children.
Whatever the process of the PAS diagnosis in the future, it's good to see sane, balanced articles on the subject. With the trend toward recognizing the phenomenon, whether it's finally defined as a "syndrome" or not, articles like the recent op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor that seek to deny the existence of alienation altogether will, I suspect, finally fade to black.
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More on the Great Sex Trafficking Scam in the U.K.
October 30, 2009
In this BBC Newsnight interview, moderator Jeremy Paxman questions former British MP for Europe, Dennis McShane and Nikki Adams of the English Collective for Prostitutes about the recent article in The Guardian showing that the Home Office had, over many years blown out of all proportion the problem of human trafficking for sex in Britain (BBC, 10/21/09). That article revealed government documents showing that a massive sweep of English brothels by dozens of law enforcement agencies and that resulted in the arrests of over 400 people, had netted not a single person who had coerced anyone into prostitution.
So Paxman understandably wants to know how McShane and so many others could have trumpeted the claim that 25,000 women per year were trafficked into the U.K. for the purposes of prostitution. Tellingly, McShane never gets around to defending the claim other than to say that he was simply quoting, presumably the Home Office figures that have so distorted national dialogue and policy on the issue.Â
Indeed, throughout the whole interview, McShane never provides any guidance as to how much trafficking, if any, is going on. At one point he tries to change the entire topic to that of rape (where have we seen that before?), but never gets close to explaining how, if so many women are trafficked into the U.K. each year, such a vast police effort could locate none of them.
Nikki Adams, for her part, has some ideas about that. She and her organization have defended sex workers in court and attempted to help them in many ways for years. She says that in all that time of helping prostitutes in the United Kingdom, she has encountered a grand total of two who had been coerced into the trade. Her very strong opinion is that essentially all prostitutes engage in sex for hire as their free choice for the purposes of earning an income. That view, of course, accords with the findings (or non-findings) of Operation Parameter Two, the police sweep of houses of prostitution, that found no traffickers whatsoever.
As a brief aside, clearly some level of sex trafficking goes on in Britain, but as recent events have made clear, the level is nowhere near that claimed by the Home Office and numerous other organizations.
Interestingly enough, when McShane inquired incredulously whether Paxman believes that Amnesty International and other organizations were just making up figures about sex trafficking, Adams quietly responded that there are "a lot of vested interests" at work. The interview was cut short, so neither followed up on that statement, but what I believe Adams to have been saying was that certain entities have developed entrenched interests, both financial and "moral" in the issue of sex trafficking.Â
We see this frequently. As but one obvious example, in the United States, DV shelters, advocates, and those who claim to provide treatment, receive massive sums of money from state and federal governments as well as private fundraising. For them to admit the truth about domestic violence - that it is nowhere near as pervasive as they've claimed all along, that their approach to it has no hope of solving the problem and that they ignore, as a matter of policy, half the population who need services - would be to seriously jeopardize their livelihoods. Likewise, they've staked out certain intellectual positions - that women don't perpetrate and men aren't victims of domestic violence - from which it would be embarrassing to climb down.
And so it is with sex trafficking in the U.K. I don't pretend to know what the financial arrangements are, but the intellectual ones are clear. Countless people in the Home Office and elsewhere, as well as a welter of NGOs have staked out the position that sex trafficking is a pervasive blight on British society. For them to acknowledge the painful (for them) truth, to in effect say "never mind," would be to display greater reserves of character and honesty than I suspect they're capable of.
And if Dennis McShane's performance on BBC NewsNight is any indication, my suspicions are correct.Â
Thanks to Kendall for the heads-up.Â
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New Trend in Law Enforcement – DV Fraud
October 30, 2009
 “For everybody who calls, everyone who walks through the door, their claims are taken at face value.â€
That's Yolanda Jimenez talking. She's the commissioner of the New York City Mayor's Office to Combat Domestic Violence. It seems six women have just been popped for posing as DV victims in order to receive subsidized public housing. This article that tells us about the case seems to be battling multiple personality disorder (New York Times, 10/22/09). On one hand it informs us that scams of the sort alleged,
are so rare, and the issue so sensitive, that city officials and advocates for domestic violence victims said that they are not usually on the lookout for fraud when people come forward with claims of abuse.
Which leads a normally inquiring mind to wonder if they're not "on the lookout" for them and if all "claims are taken at face value," how city officials know false claims are rare. The simple fact seems to be that those who provide the benefits believe any and all women who claim to have been abused.Â
Jimenez's belief that there has been no fraud in any of the 36,000 cases of DV claims over the past four years sounds a lot like the governor of Texas claiming that the state has never executed an innocent man. You can only hold those beliefs if you make no effort to ascertain the truth. And from the article, it's crystal clear that little or nothing is done to find out if a claimant is on the level or not.
Indeed, the article goes on to list a variety of benefits to being a seen as a victim of domestic violence, from subsidized housing to green cards for immigrants to free legal advice and in some cases job training. Those benefits, together with laughably lax standards for proving DV victim status make scams like the one charged closer to inevitable than to rare.
To "document" one's status as a DV victim, one need only produce a police report and a restraining order or a family court petition. The women charged had forged those documents, or at least that's what prosecutors say, but in many cases, even that documentation isn't necessary.
In that regard, the attitude of Maureen Curtis of Safe Horizon seems typical. She's quoted as saying,
“Some of them can’t or don’t have the documents they need... Does it mean that the person is not a victim of domestic violence? No.â€
Very true, but can you imagine any other governmental agency taking that attitude? For example, come next April 15th, I think I'll just claim some massive deduction on my income tax filing and when the IRS asks me for documentation, I'll just tell them "No, I don't have it, but does that mean I didn't incur the expense? No."Â
Think that'll work? I hope they let me keep blogging from prison.
But seriously, Curtis' statement seems to typify the attitude of people on whom the taxpayers are relying to root out DV scams. After all, tax money spent for benefits for DV victims should go to, you know, actual victims, not someone who wants to abuse the system. So, if governments are going to provide these benefits, they need to realize that, wherever there's something to be gained, there will be corruption. In short, they need to institute safeguards to make sure the people receiving the benefits are the ones they're meant for.
It is beyond amazing that apparently no one has yet thought of this in the context of DV. In every other context, yes, but not DV. It's high time we left "Believe the Woman" out of public policy.
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Barbara Kay Speaks; Do Canadian Pols Listen?
October 30, 2009
They should. For a long time now, Barbara Kay has been calling Canadian liberal feminists on their multiple hypocrisies and overall lack of intellectual honesty. This article is more of the same (National Post, 10/23/09). If more people read Kay's work, it would go a long way toward restoring a measure of sanity to Canadian law and public policy.
The Liberal Women's Caucus has coughed up its annual "Pink Book" which supposedly analyzes the condition of women in the country and recommends changes for Parliament to consider. This year it looks like the Pink Book is pretty tame stuff. As Kay points out, it goes right out on a limb and fearlessly calls for Canadians to be secure and prosperous. Ho hum.
Even its obligatory anti-male sexism is less exciting than usual. For example, it calls for government-subsidized micro-loans to women who want to start small businesses. Consider that for just a moment. If there's a need for micro-loans in Canada, which I very much doubt, are they only needed by women? Don't men want to start small businesses? My wild guess is that they do. So why is it that the Liberal Women's Caucus couldn't find it in their egalitarian hearts to include men in their call for micro-loans?
The answer is obvious, but I wonder if it occurs to most people that this feminist group actively opposes gender equality. For them, it's all about "more for us." Feminism got started with the entirely justifiable call for women and men to have equal opportunities, equal treatment by the law and equal respect in public discourse and affairs. That's not only been accomplished in Canada and many other countries, but the gender imbalance now favors women in every category I can think of. So true feminists, i.e. those who actually believe in the concept of gender equality, should be shouting as loudly on behalf of men's and fathers' rights as they ever did for women's rights.Â
A few do, but most don't. "Gender equality" has come to mean "more for us." Or, as Kay puts it, "...when the Women's Caucus says 'gender,' they mean 'women's interests.'"
I can't think of a single statistical category here in the United States in which women do worse than men. They live longer, get custody of children 84% of the time, get more undergraduate degrees, an equal number of advanced degrees, don't have to register with the Selective Service System or fight in combat if they join the armed services, but receive equal benefits for having served. Women make up only about one-third of the victims of violent crime, are only 10% of workplace fatalities and a minority of workplace injuries. They receive strikingly more lenient sentences for criminal conduct and are paroled earlier than men. Although women and men use pot about equally, 90% of those incarcerated for its simple possession are men. Seventy-five percent of the homeless are men. Fifty-five percent of adults without health insurance are men. I could go on and on.Â
Meanwhile, women earn and save less than do men, but that is strictly a function of their own choices - of careers and of time worked in those careers. Some 50 separate studies show that and even former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich admits the fact. So it's not like women can't change their earnings any time they want to and it's not like any individual woman can't do so herself irrespective of what others do.
I suspect that much the same is going on in Canada, which, like the U.S. has laws prohibiting discrimination against anyone based on sex.Â
And coincidentally, that's just what Barbara Kay's response is to the Liberal Women's Caucus call for a "gender equity commissioner," the very concept of which assumes some unstated inferiority on the part of women.Â
As for a gender commissioner, if the Women's Caucus really wants to go there, they might start by recommending the abolition of equity programs in university. Enrolment in most programs is so female-skewed, an outsider might think men have fallen victim to some mysterious plague. And given the dropout rates of boys, one might call it a plague, because gender-wise the education system is sick. Boys are disadvantaged K-12, with teaching methods geared for girls and a very poor understanding of how boys learn best. Just this week Toronto proposed sweeping changes to education to make up for years of apathy toward the eroding performance gap.
Maybe this putative gender commissioner could ask why Ontario health units only screen for abuse in incoming female patients 12 and older, not male patients, even though male adolescents suffer nearly as much sexual abuse as girls.
And how about a thorough investigation of the family court system, where almost 90% of contested custody cases end up with sole custody going to mothers? How about support for equal parenting, a long-overdue gender-fair initiative that can't get traction because groups like the Liberal Women's Caucus aren't interested in gender fairness?
Preach it sister. But are there any members of parliament in the congregation?
Thanks to Jeremy for the heads-up.
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Passing the Buck for Homicide to the Guy in Diapers
October 29, 2009
You've got to love anyone with a new idea. After all, that's the entrepreneurial spirit, the spirit of invention and discovery. It's what makes America great, right?Â
This article is about just such a person with a cutting edge idea (Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 10/28/09). Now, as with all new ideas, it didn't work out so well the first time. I'm sure the first steam engine blew up too. But like all great ideas, there will doubtless be others who refine and perfect it.
In this case, it was Betsy Hanks who had the new idea. It comes in the field of criminal law. Hanks, it appears had a lengthy, er, "discussion" with her husband Matthew Albert in the wee hours of the morning, about his stated belief that she was stepping out on him. Hanks, it's been charged, then waited until he was asleep and shot him in the head. He died a few hours later at a local hospital.Â
But did Hanks do what so many murderous wives have done in the past - hide behind the Mary Winkler defense? Did she claim domestic violence as the reason why she murdered her sleeping and defenseless husband? Perhaps a lesser woman would have, but not Hanks. No, it fell to her to advance the cause of gender equality by claiming an all-new defense - the three-year-old did it.Â
Or maybe it was the 18-month old. The article isn't clear on that, saying that the three-year-old was with Hanks elsewhere when the killing happened and only the 18-month-old was at home with Albert. So it's not apparent how the three-year-old could have pulled the trigger from miles away.
Hanks has owned up to the shooting herself, even leading police to the swamp where she tossed the murder weapon. She's in jail on $1.5 million bond charged with second-degree intentional murder. But as I said earlier, every great idea has to have the bugs worked out of it at first.Â
In this case, the advantages of the toddler defense should be clear. Even better, just think of pinning the rap on a child who's too young to talk. I can imagine entire fields of legal expertise required to ascertain the mental capability of children who've not yet said their first words. Surely the potty training drove them to it. Or the mashed peas and carrots.Â
Mashed peas and carrots? Hey, even I'd believe that one.Â
Thanks to Charlie for the heads-up.
Passing the Buck for Homicide to the Guy in Diapers
October 29, 2009
You've got to love anyone with a new idea. After all, that's the entrepreneurial spirit, the spirit of invention and discovery. It's what makes America great, right?Â
This article is about just such a person with a cutting edge idea (Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 10/28/09). Now, as with all new ideas, it didn't work out so well the first time. I'm sure the first steam engine blew up too. But like all great ideas, there will doubtless be others who refine and perfect it.
In this case, it was Betsy Hanks who had the new idea. It comes in the field of criminal law. Hanks, it appears had a lengthy, er, "discussion" with her husband Matthew Albert in the wee hours of the morning, about his stated belief that she was stepping out on him. Hanks, it's been charged, then waited until he was asleep and shot him in the head. He died a few hours later at a local hospital.Â
But did Hanks do what so many murderous wives have done in the past - hide behind the Mary Winkler defense? Did she claim domestic violence as the reason why she murdered her sleeping and defenseless husband? Perhaps a lesser woman would have, but not Hanks. No, it fell to her to advance the cause of gender equality by claiming an all-new defense - the three-year-old did it.Â
Or maybe it was the 18-month old. The article isn't clear on that, saying that the three-year-old was with Hanks elsewhere when the killing happened and only the 18-month-old was at home with Albert. So it's not apparent how the three-year-old could have pulled the trigger from miles away.
Hanks has owned up to the shooting herself, even leading police to the swamp where she tossed the murder weapon. She's in jail on $1.5 million bond charged with second-degree intentional murder. But as I said earlier, every great idea has to have the bugs worked out of it at first.Â
In this case, the advantages of the toddler defense should be clear. Even better, just think of pinning the rap on a child who's too young to talk. I can imagine entire fields of legal expertise required to ascertain the mental capability of children who've not yet said their first words. Surely the potty training drove them to it. Or the mashed peas and carrots.Â
Mashed peas and carrots? Hey, even I'd believe that one.Â
Thanks to Charlie for the heads-up.
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Animal Studies Show Fatherlessness Alters Brain Structure and Functioning
October 29, 2009
This article is about the neurobiology of developing animal brains (WSJ Online, 10/27/09). And because it's about laboratory animals, it can't be extrapolated to humans. Still, when neuroscience seems to corroborate sociology, it's easy to want more.
 It seems German scientists have been doing controlled experiments on degus, a rodent related to chinchillas. Degus are biparental creatures, meaning that both parents take part in raising young. The German researchers raised a set of degus with two parents and another set with just the mother, the father having been taken away the day after the pups were born. At 21 days of age (90 days is maturity in degus), they examined the pups' neuronal growth and compared the fatherless and biparental pups. They also observed the behaviors of pups raised with both parents and those with just a mother.
It turns out that fatherless pups exhibit significantly different neuronal growth patterns than do their peers raised with fathers. Their behavior is much more aggressive and anti-social as well.
The article mentions that Canadian studies have shown similar behavior in voles raised without fathers. Voles too are biparental. (One possibly misleading statement in the article says that only 10 percent of species are biparental.  That may well be true if all species are counted, but about 40% of mammal species, including humans, are biparental and over 90% of birds are.)
One of the German researchers, Dr. Anna Katharina Braun, explained,
The basic wiring between the brain regions in the degus is the same as in humans, and the nerve cells are identical in their function. "So on that level we can assume that what happens in the animal's brain when it's raised in an impoverished environment ... should be very similar to what happens in our children's brain," Dr. Braun says.
The behavioral changes seem to result from changes in the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex.
The balance between these two brain parts is critical to normal emotional and cognitive functioning, according to Dr. Braun. If the OFC isn't active, the amygdala "goes crazy, like a horse without a rider," she says.
Do human children raised without fathers exhibit similar differences in neuronal growth? Certainly the sociology that deals with children of single-parent families clearly shows the behavioral damage fatherlessness can do. Would it be a surprise that physiological changes in the brain were at the root of those sets of behavior long recognized by sociologists?
For example, one thing I'd like to know is whether fatherlessness has anything to do with the increased diagnosis of ADHD. One of the three sets of behaviors that are diagnostic of ADHD is impulsiveness, i.e. the "horse without a rider" type of behavior. Also, the rise in the diagnosis of ADHD began as significant out-of-wedlock childbearing and fatherlessness generally began to become an important feature of our social landscape. Finally, the brain physiology of ADHD includes, among other things, smaller prefrontal cortex structures in children diagnosed with the condition. Could that be the human counterpart of what Dr. Braun and her colleagues have discovered in fatherless dugus?
Obviously, I don't claim to know that ADHD has a connection to fatherless upbringing. To date, there's no proof of that. But it's intriguing enough for me to be eager to follow the research that is sure to come.   Â
Case Throws Light on Underreporting of Husbands Murdered by Wives
October 29, 2009
We don't yet know what happened in this case (WHSV, 10/27/09). The pair have just been arrested and of course are presumed to be innocent of criminal wrongdoing.Â
What appears to have happened, though is that Dennis "Chip" Taylor and Lorie Taylor were married and had three children. They got divorced and were in the middle of a heated dispute about child custody. In the meantime, it looks like Lorie married Nakia Keller. On the night of October 23rd, Chip Taylor, his new wife Alaina Taylor and her daughter Kaylee Grace Whetzel were shot to death. Kaylee was five years old. The house they were in was then torched. Nakia Kelly and Lorie Taylor have been arrested in connection with the shootings and fire which has been ruled arson.
Again, we don't know if Kelly and Lorie Taylor committed the crimes described, but let's assume they did for the sake of this question: if Lorie Taylor took part in the murder of her ex-husband, would it appear on the records of the Department of Justice as the murder of an ex-husband by his wife?Â
The answer is 'no.'Â It would appear as a multiple offender homicide.
The latest figures we have for husband/wife homicide show that about 1,200 husbands killed their wives that year (2007) and about 400 wives killed their husbands. But the problem with those figures is that women, much more than men, hire or persuade someone else to do their dirty work for them. So the figures for women murdering their husbands leave out all those murders-by-proxy.  Those are all hidden inside the multiple offender murders.
The good news of course is that husbands and wives both are, to a large degree, safe with each other. As of March 2007, there were about 56 million married couples living in the United States. That's about 112 million people. If 1,200 wives were killed by husbands that year, each wife in the country would stand a one in 47,000 chance of being killed by her husband. Since the numbers of husbands killed by wives is less certain, we don't know what each husband's chances of being killed by his wife are, but it's probably somewhat less than one in 47,000.Â
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