If you want to be brought down over your morning coffee, spend some time perusing the numbers.
~~One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, and females who are 20-24 years of age are at the greatest risk for intimate partner violence.
~~In 2005, 389,100 women and 78,180 men were victimized by an intimate partner. These crimes accounted for 9 percent of all violent crime.
~~The majority (73%) of family violence victims are females: 84% were spousal abuse victims and 86% were victims at the hands of a boyfriend.
~~A 2004 study found that women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more than twice as likely to be the victims of intimate partner violence than women in more affluent neighborhoods.
~~One study found that women who have experienced any type of personal violence (even when the last episode was 14 to 30 years ago) reported a greater number of chronic physical symptoms than those who have not been abused. The risk of suffering from six or more chronic physical symptoms increased with the number of forms of violence experienced.
~~In 2003, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, or transgender people experienced 6,523 incidents of domestic violence; 44% were men, 36% women and 2% transgender.
But what they don’t tell me is the answer to the questions that come to mind when I consider the situation. What percentage of the population are large can be considered abusers. How many abusers are habitual? When I am in a room full of people there are victims, yes. But there are perpetrators as well, right?
I work in a male-dominated environment. Some percentage of the men I work with may have been abused. But…some of them may be abusers. Perpetrators of domestic violence. If statistics are an indicator, that is.
I don’t, in general, trust statistics. I want to know more. The link behind the “if” (above) don’t exactly match “the numbers” link, but they agree that about 1/4 of the women we know have probably been a victim of Domestic Violence. I used to not think about this. Now I do. Do you?
