Women And Domestic Violence

Dear Priscilla Bennett Friends,

To honor Domestic Violence Awareness month and to expose this epidemic, I wanted to include more statistics from an article that I read.

  • Every 9 seconds a woman is battered in the United States.
    AMA, 1998, Georgia Department of Human Resources, 1999
  • Nearly 5.3 million intimate partner victimization occur each year among U.S. women ages 18 and older. This violence results in nearly 2 million injuries and nearly 1,300 deaths.
    Center for Disease Control, 2003
  • Conservatively, each year 1 million women suffer nonfatal violence by an intimate.
    Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report: Violence Against Women: Estimates from the Redesigned Survey (NCJ-154348), August 1995, p.3.
  • Other estimates include 4 million women in the U.S. are battered each year.
    American Psychl. Ass’n Violence and the Family: Report of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Violence and the Family (1996), p.10.
  • Nearly 1 in 3 women experience domestic violence in their lifetime.
    American Psychl. Ass’n Violence and the Family: Report of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Violence and the Family (1996), p.10.
  • Ninety to ninety-five percent of domestic violence victims are women.
    A Report of the Violence against Women Research Strategic Planning Workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Justice in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1995.
  • As many as 324,000 women each year experience intimate partner violence during their pregnancy.
    Gazmarairian et al, 2000
  • Estimates range from 960,000 incidents of violence against a current or former intimate, to 3.9 million women who are physically abused by their husbands or live-in partners per year.
    U.S. Department of Justice, Violence by Intimates: Analysis of Data on Crimes by Current or Former Spouses, March 1998: The Commonwealth Fund, First Comprehensive National Survey of American Women, July, 1993.
  • The U.S. Department of Justice reported that 37 percent of all women who sought care in hospital emergency rooms for violence-related injuries were injured by a current or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend.
    Department of Justice, August 1997. Violence related Injuries Treated in Hospital
  • Emergency Departments. Michael R. Rand. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
  • About four in ten female victims of intimate partner violence lived in households with children under age 12.
    Reprinted and adapted from ‘News Flash’ (http://www.fvpf.org/newsflash), an online newsletter of the Family Violence Prevention Fund.
  • In the United States, researchers estimate the 40 percent to 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, frequently in the context of an ongoing abusive relationship.
    Bailey et al., 1997
  • Fifty-seven percent of homeless families identified domestic violence as a primary cause of homelessness.
    The United States Conference of Mayors, A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America’s Cities: 1999, December 1999, p.94.

Take good care of yourselves,

PRISCILLA BENNETT XOXO