Violence Against Women Pervasive, Panel Told : Society: Expert witnesses testify before a city commission on the rising incidence of sexual assault and other crimes, and the role of mass media in contributing to the problem.

From movie screens to university campuses to living rooms, violence against women is pervasive, largely condoned and on the rise, according to expert witnesses who testified Tuesday before the city’s Commission on the Status of Women.

“Violence and the threat of violence is omnipresent in the lives of women,” said Sheila J. Kuehl, managing attorney of the Southern California Women’s Law Center. “ . . . We must recognize rape and domestic violence as women-hating crimes.”

The commission, holding its second hearing on the issue in an attempt to collect information on violence against women, took four hours of testimony Tuesday. It will make recommendations to the mayor’s office and the City Council by the end of the year.

Sociologists, psychologists and others at the hearing said rape is still a grossly under-reported crime because victims are ashamed, afraid or intimidated by an overburdened police and judicial system; failure to report the crime often means the rapist goes unpunished and continues to rape.

Furthermore, the commission was told, violence against women is often perpetuated by images in commercial advertising or in movies that show women as victims or as sex objects. Authoritative roles on screen are rarely portrayed by women, and movie studios in search of profits most often produce violent films that star big-name male leads, according to other witnesses, including representatives of the Screen Actors Guild.

Gail Wyatt, a professor of medical psychiatry at UCLA, said rape and other acts of violence against women, and society’s tolerance of it, are deep-rooted in world history.

Still today, she said, many victims blame themselves, and many people believe myths and stereotypes surrounding rapists and rape victims.

Wyatt said UCLA conducted a monthlong survey of 248 women in Los Angeles County, which found that one of every four black women and one of every five white women were the victims of rape or attempted rape. From her research, Wyatt has concluded that one of every three women in Los Angeles will probably be sexually abused at some time in her life.

“The prevalence is quite high,” she said, adding that only 3% of the surveyed women who were attacked had reported the crime to police.

Kathleen Bartle-Schulweis, women’s issues advocate at USC, works with students who have been raped, including three juniors who were assaulted last month.

She blamed “institutional misogyny,” sex discrimination in the workplace and at home, and exploitative images of women in advertising as root causes of the victimization of women.

Women are seen as “easy and appropriate targets for violence,” she said. “It’s all right to hate women. It’s all right to hurt women.”

The commission has released statistics showing that more men who beat their partners are being arrested but that government-sponsored care for the victims still falls short. Nationally, one woman is beaten every 18 seconds and one is raped every six minutes.

In Los Angeles last year, police investigated 31,867 reports of domestic violence and made 6,921 felony arrests. The police said 1,983 rapes and attempted rapes were reported last year.