Sixty-three percent of the young men between the ages of 11 and 20 who are serving time for homicide have killed their mother's abuser. (March of Dimes, 1992)

This statement can be found on at least two web sites that purport to offer factual information about domestic violence. It appears to be a total falsehood, literally made up for no reason.

The March of Dimes is a charitable institution that funds research into birth defects. It does not now, nor has it ever concerned itself with the reason that teenaged offenders are incarcerated.

Statistics of this sort are simply not kept. To substantiate the claim, one would need to know the victim-offender relationship in each murder committed by a juvenile, whose name would be difficult to obtain; and then cross-check that with tens of thousands of reports of assaults on women whose names might be different from their sons'. The FBI does not do this, nor does the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There is simply no basis in fact for the claim.

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