Domestic Violence, Starring... Women

In 2005 there were 1,181 women murdered by their partner. That’s 3 women being murdered a day. In essence 1/3 of the women murdered in the U.S are victims of domestic violence. Those numbers are staggering. Over the years violent crimes against women have increased. The upward trend in this crime is disturbing. Domestic violence has a huge impact on many aspects of ones life. Those areas include: relationships, job, self-worth, confidence, mental health, just to name a few.
Domestic violence is defined as a pattern of abuse in a relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power over an intimate partner. the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control reported, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. Less than 20 percent of battered women sought medical treatment following an injury.
Sexual violence in a relationship is also a crime which is on the rise. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes crimes that were not reported to the police, 232,960 women in the U.S. were raped or sexually assaulted in 2006. That averages more than 600 women a day being assaulted and not reporting it. A significant number of crimes are never even reported for the main reasons including the victim's feeling that nothing can or will be done and the personal nature of the incident is too intense to share with anyone let aone a srtanger.
The women being targeted are not in anyway limited to a certain race, social stature, geographical location, or age. Young women, low-income women and some minorities are disproportionately victims of domestic violence and rape. Women ages 20-24 are at greatest risk of nonfatal domestic violence. and women age 24 and under suffer from the highest rates of rape. The Justice Department estimates that one in five women will experience rape or attempted rape during their college years, and that less than five percent of these rapes will be reported. Income is also a factor, the poorer the household, the higher the rate of domestic violence, women in the lowest income category experiencing more than six times the rate of nonfatal intimate partner violence as compared to women in the highest income category. When taking race into consideration, African-American women face higher rates of domestic violence than white women, and American-Indian women are victimized at a rate more than double that of women of other races.
In 1994, the National Organization for Women, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is now called Legal Momentum, the Feminist Majority and other organizations finally secured passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which provided a $1.6 billion to address issues of violence against women. VAWA was reauthorized in 2005, with nearly $4 billion in funding over five years.
As women become more independent and gain the confidence they need in order to report these crimes the numbers will continue to rise. This is a problem that we as a society need to address and correct. No one deserves to be put through the mental and physical hell domestic violence unleashes on people.