ABSTRACT
When we think of violence and victimization, many of us believe that it is something that happens among strangers or acquaintances in faraway places. The mugging in a dark alley, the high school massacre, terrorist attacks, and the gang-related drive-by shooting have become the prototypes of violence in our culture. However, there is mounting evidence
that, for women at least, the most dangerous place is the home, and her most likely assailant is her domestic partner. In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a summary of a 10-country study of domestic violence. Interviews with over 24,000 women revealed that between 15 to 71% of the respondents had experienced either sexual or physical abuse by their intimate partners. Twenty-four percent of the women surveyed in rural Peru, 30% of women in Bangladesh, and 40% of women in South Africa said their first sexual experience was nonconsensual. Annually, about 5,000 women in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and Tanzania are murdered by their families in the name of honor. Closer to home, a National Violence Against Women Survey (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000) conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice found that 17.6% of the women reported that they had been sexually assaulted; 22.1% of women (compared to 7.4% of men) reported that they had been abused or assaulted by an intimate partner. Estimates put the number of women assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States at 1.3 million as compared to 835,000 men. Finally, of the women who said that they had been physically assaulted, stalked, or raped, 64% reported to having experienced these assaults at the hands of an intimate partner.
