U.S. domestic violence falling, study says

WASHINGTON – In a sweeping study of crime in U.S. households, the Justice Department reported Thursday that domestic violence, one of the most common offenses against women, has fallen by more than half since 1993.

Assaults, rapes, homicides and robberies against a current or former partner dropped from about 10 per 1,000 women in 1993 to four per 1,000 in 2004, researchers found.

“It’s a substantial decline in the amount of violence between intimates, that’s the good news,” said Michael Rand, chief of victimization statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington. “The bad news, of course, is there still is a significant amount of violence that occurs.”

The downward trend in violence by so-called “intimate partners” mirrors an overall decrease in violent crime nationally since the early 1990s, justice officials said. While the study did not attempt to explain the decline in domestic violence, some experts have credited more vigorous law enforcement, increased education and an expanded network of services for battered partners, said Shannan Catalano, a bureau statistician and the report’s author.

But she and others emphasized the report may not reflect the actual level of violence taking place behind closed doors. Indeed, the apparent decline could mean that women are choosing to suffer in silence rather than seek help.

If the rate of domestic violence has fallen, many experts in the field are not seeing it, said Gail E. Wyatt, professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Semel Institute. She said shelters are still filled and hotlines still buzz with pleas for help.

“Are we really seeing a decrease? Or are we seeing that people are more reluctant to reveal these incidents because of the consequences?” said Wyatt. “Many of these intimate partners are still in relationships – they have mortgages, children, a life – and they don’t see that incarceration will necessarily resolve the problem. Who’s going to pay the bills?”

The two-year study was based on both reported and nonreported instances against men and women. Researchers contacted a representative sample of U.S. households identified through census data. Respondents were asked whether they had been the victim of a crime at the hands of a current or former partner, and if they told the police or anyone else.

The results showed what society has long known – that women are far more likely than men to be battered or assaulted. While crimes at the hands of an intimate partner represented nearly a quarter of violent assaults against women in the period of the study, they accounted for only 3 percent of such assaults against men.

Domestic crimes against men fell too, though less dramatically, from 1.6 per 1,000 to 1.3 per 1,000.

Women who were separated or divorced reported the highest rates of violence, while married women reported the lowest. But the researchers and other experts warned against presumptions that married women were less vulnerable, because they also might be least inclined to recognize violent behavior as abusive, or to report it if they did.

During the period studied, researchers found 627,400 nonfatal crimes by an intimate partner – nearly 476,000 of them against women. About a third of those were serious violent crimes – sexual assaults, robberies and aggravated assaults – involving weapons and resulting in serious injury.