How Widespread Is Intimate Partner Violence?

Statistics from selected NIJ-sponsored studies on the extent of intimate partner violence—often called "domestic violence"—illustrate the scope of the problem.

• Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).
• Women are significantly more likely than men to be injured during an intimate partner assault (39 percent compared with 24.8 percent) (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).
• Intimate partner homicides make up 40–50 percent of all murders of women in the United States. In 70–80 percent of intimate partner homicides, no matter which partner was killed, the man physically abused the woman before the murder (Campbell et al., 2003).
• Among National Violence Against Women Survey participants, the lifetime prevalence of all intimate partner victimization for women age 18 and older was nearly 25 percent, and 7.6 percent for men (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).
• Sexual assault or forced sex occurs in approximately 40–45 percent of battering relationships (Campbell and Soeken, 1999).
• Approximately 1.5 percent of surveyed women in the National Violence Against Women Survey sample experienced intimate partner violence (physical and/or sexual), and almost 0.5 percent were stalked by an intimate partner during the past year (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).
• For men, 0.9 percent of those surveyed experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence in the past year, and 0.2 percent were stalked by an intimate partner annually (Tjaden and Thoennes, 2000).