Violent Crime - Extreme Domestic Violence

Home safe and sound, a familiar phrase that conjures up all the warmth that one should feel about one's home. Home: a place of comfort and safety, a place of refuge from the wider world, somewhere to relax and rest. Domestic violence destroys the refuge.

American women have more to fear from the men they know and once loved than from any stranger. During 1999, females experienced 671,110 violent victimizations at the hand of an intimate partner ⁶. The number of males victimized by a partner that year was 120,100⁷.

Domestic violence lives in the shadows. Victims are often reluctant to seek help or admit that a problem exists for fear of making the situation worse. Collecting reliable data with which to quantify and measure the problem is therefore difficult. A much easier task, sadly, is to count the number of people killed by a domestic partner. The graph presents homicide rates for women who were killed by a partner (husband, ex-husband, boyfriend or ex-boyfriend) in 1976 through 1999. The total homicide rate and the homicide rate for all females are also provided by way of comparison.

Happily, the trend is downward. Rates for white and black women are very different. Black women have on average a rate 4.5 times higher than white women. In 1999 for women of both races, wives and ex-wives were killed by a partner at the lowest rates for the entire period 1976-1999. The rate for white wives and ex-wives declined by 45% over the period and for black wives and ex-wives by 76% thus reducing slightly the wide difference between them.

The rate at which black girlfriends are killed is also down substantially over the period, from a high of 10.7 per 100,000 in 1976 to a low of 3.9 in 1999. The data on white girlfriends paints a somewhat less rosy picture. They started out the period with a rate of homicide by intimate partner of 1.7. Over the next 24 years their rate fluctuated on its upward trajectory ending in 1999 at 2.1 per 100,000. Of the four categories of woman charted, white girlfriends were the only ones who saw their rate rise over the period.

For both white and black women, the rates at which wives and ex-wives are killed by a partner has been surpassed by the rates at which girlfriends are killed. In 1999 there were many more women who had never married than there were in 1976, primarily the result of later average entry into marriage. However, since we are looking at rates per 100,000 in the defined category, changes in population size don't explain changes in rates.

We do know that many more unmarried couples cohabited in 1999 than did so in 1976⁸. The relationship pressures on a couple who is dating versus a couple who is living together are different and may account for some small part of the rise in the rate of girlfriend homicide. So too might the added pressure on an unmarried couple caused when one of them is raising children for whom the other is not officially a parent. This does not, however, explain why black woman, who are single mothers at a higher rate than women in any other racial group, have seen a decline in their rate of intimate homicide while white girlfriends have seen their rate increase. The idea that added pressure in the relationship may be one factor in the rates of homicides among intimate unmarried couples is only a theory and one that is impossible to prove with the data available today.

Although many fewer men are murdered by their mates than are women, we should at least look briefly at trends in their rates of intimate homicide. That is what we turn to in the next panel.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics , Homicide Trends in the United States, "Intimate Homicides," January 4, 2001, available online at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/intimates.htm. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, Intimate Partner Violence and Age of Victim, 1993-1999, October 2001, p. 1. U.S. Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics, "Homicide rate per 100,000 population, 1900-2000," October 2002, available online at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/hmrt.htm.