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Researcher Response
The simple answer is – it depends. It depends on a variety of factors – including geographic location, culture, age group, etc. Between 2000 and 2005 in Canada, for example, 653,000 women reported being a victim of spousal violence, with 26% of these women being assaulted more than ten times. Statistics also show that younger age poses a higher risk, with women between the ages of 15 and 24 reporting the highest one-year rates of spousal violence. Aboriginal women are also more likely to experience violence, in fact they are three times more likely to be victims of spousal violence than non-Aboriginal women.
In Croatia, every third woman reported being a victim of physical aggression by her intimate partner. The numbers in Germany are slightly lower – with one in five women reporting physical or sexual violence at the hands of their partner. During the year of 1998 in Jamaica 92 women and 18 children were murdered, with a significant number of these taking place within a domestic context. Peruvian women appear to be especially at risk with 49% of every-partnered women in Lima reporting physical violence by a partner at some time in their life.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that nearly 5.3 million incidents of interpersonal violence occur each year among United States women ages 18 and older, resulting in nearly 2 million injuries and 1,300 deaths nationwide every year. In the year 2000, intimate partner homicides accounted for 33.5 percent of the murders of women and less than four percent of the murders of men. Nearly one-third of American women (31 percent) report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point in their lives.
So while “it depends” – the numbers are alarmingly high worldwide.
Barbara Fisher-Townsend, Ph.D. The RAVE Project
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