Women and Violence

Violence Against Women

Historically, violence against women had gone largely unnoticed and unspoken, but in recent years, it has become a topic of great concern. As then Senator Joseph Biden (1993) wrote:

Throughout their lifetimes, women are at risk of becoming victims of every form of criminal violence. The APA Task Force on Male Violence Against Women conceptualized violence on a continuum ranging from coercive uses of power in a nonphysical sense (e.g., threatening one's job through sexual harassment) to abuses of power in a physical sense (e.g., incest, rape, domestic violence). Although females can be victimized in many ways and at any age, here, only physical forms of violence against adult women will be discussed.

In recent years, the violent victimization rates of men and women have converged. In 1973, women's likelihood of victimization was less than half that of men, but by 1994, women were approximately two thirds as likely as men to be victims of violent crimes (Craven, 1996). This was propelled by a decrease in violence against men and a stable or slightly increasing rate of violence against women. However, for both fatal and nonfatal violence, women were at higher risk from intimate others than were men. Only 23% of women indicated that the offenders who victimized [Page 526]them were strangers, compared with 49% the of men who indicated their victimizers were strangers (Craven, 1996).

Using data gathered from the National Crime Victim Survey (NCVS), Greenfeld (1997) reported that in most cases, sexual assault (by both intimates and nonintimates) is a crime committed against a female by a male; 99 of 100 rapists are male and 91% of the victims are female. One of the most striking characteristics of sexual assault is that although people of all ages are victimized, in a high percentage of cases, the victims are young women. In fact, the per capita rate of sexual assault is highest among those in the 16- to 19-year-old age range (Greenfeld, 1997). The number of sexual assaults has been decreasing in recent years; still, in 1995, there was one violent offense for every 625 residents. However, of the approximately 355,000 rapes and sexual assaults experienced in 1995, only 113,000 were reported to the authorities (Greenfeld, 1997). Many cases of sexual assault are also accompanied by other physical injuries. For example, about 40% of rape victims suffer some additional injury, and 5% suffer a major injury in addition to the rape (Greenfeld, 1997).

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