Domestic Abuse Incidents Drop 21%, U.S. Says

Years of stepped-up efforts by law enforcement, social services and women’s advocates to reduce the toll of domestic violence appear to be paying off: Far fewer women are being beaten by their husbands and boyfriends, according to new data released Wednesday.

“We’re giving women escape routes that didn’t exist 20 years ago,” said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who assisted in a new U.S. Justice Department study, the most extensive ever done on the incidence of domestic violence.

“Rather than staying in a relationship to the point of becoming a murder victim, people in domestic abuse situations now have alternatives, from restraining orders and hotlines to shelters, support groups and mandatory arrest procedures,” Fox said.

The Justice Department’s study found that instances of domestic violence have dropped 21% in recent years, falling from an estimated 1.1 million cases in 1993 to about 876,000 cases in 1998. The study’s conclusions were based on interviews at nearly 300,000 households.

And domestic abuse killings have dropped to their lowest numbers in a quarter century, with 1,830 homicides in 1998, the study found.

Even more encouraging, domestic violence activists said, was the finding that women are reporting abuse to police far more frequently than in the past. Nearly 6 in 10 victims filed reports in 1998, compared with 48% of victims six years earlier, the Justice Department found.

With new laws and police training programs in many states, officers now are much more likely to make arrests in domestic situations that once were largely ignored as “private” matters, experts said. That has meant less of a stigma for victims and more of a deterrent for abusers who once had little fear of punishment.

“We’re bringing domestic abuse out of the closet,” National Organization for Women President Patricia Ireland said in an interview.

“It’s a matter of showing women that this is not a problem of their own making and that it has very little to do with whether they had dinner on the table on time,” Ireland said.

Said Peggie Reyna, project director for the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women, a private nonprofit group: “It used to be that when someone slapped you around or gave you a black eye, you didn’t think about reporting it, unless it was horrendous or you were hospitalized or something. That’s changed.”

The nationwide statistics mirror trends in California. One measure of the problem, emergency calls to 911 about domestic violence, has fallen about 20% statewide over the last five years.

Records from the California Department of Justice also show that a police crackdown on offenders sent arrests for domestic violence soaring 78% in the 1990s.

In Orange County, domestic violence arrests have increased dramatically in the past decade and now account for more than half of felony assault cases handled by police, according to a review of state records.

In 1989, the Orange County district attorney’s office filed four felony domestic assault charges. In 1998, it filed 2,316. About three-fourths of those cases ended in conviction, according to figures from the district attorney’s office.

In Los Angeles, where experts estimated just a few years ago that one woman was killed by domestic abuse every five days, the death rate now has decreased to once every seven days, Reyna said.

“Whether we realize it or not, that’s quite a difference. And it’s happening clear across the United States,” she said.

While men’s rights groups have drawn more attention in the last few years to male victims of domestic abuse, female victims still outnumber their male counterparts by a rate of more than 5 to 1, according to the new study, which expands on 1998 federal data.

Domestic abuse against men in the 1993-98 study period was virtually unchanged, with about 1.5 men per 1,000 suffering violence at the hands of an “intimate partner,” defined as current or former spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends.

For women, the rate of abuse dropped from 9.8 victims per 1,000 in 1993 to 7.7 per 1,000 in 1998.

The new statistics offered a strong dose of good news for women’s rights advocates who were jolted earlier in the week by a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning a law that gave battered spouses and rape victims the right to sue their attackers in federal court.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, joined by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and other Democratic lawmakers at a Capitol Hill news conference Wednesday, said that the Supreme Court’s “disappointing” decision underscores the urgent need for Congress to reauthorize funding for the Violence Against Women Act, which expires in October.

Supporters said that the act’s provisions--$1.5 billion in federal funds for education, hotlines, battered women’s shelters and increased prosecutions--have had a direct effect on bringing down the rate of domestic abuse.

“There was a time in New York City,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), “when it was easier to find a shelter for battered animals than for battered women.”

Yet prospects remain unclear for reauthorization of the law, portions of which were not affected by Monday’s Supreme Court ruling.

“It’s either political finagling or just unwillingness, but the fact is that so far it has not moved,” Ireland said.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the measure has bipartisan support and that the senator hopes to see it passed by the full Senate.

Some of the new study’s findings are cause for concern. Domestic abuse has not declined as significantly as violent crime in general, which fell 27% from 1993 to 1998.

The drop in domestic abuse “is great, but, compared to the overall decline, it shows we still have a long way to go,” said Callie Marie Rennison, a statistician at the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and co-author of the new report. “While things are getting better, this appears to be a much more resistant form of violence.”

And some women still are at unusually high risk. Black women are victims at a rate 2 1/2 times more than that for other women.

Also particularly vulnerable are women who are divorced or separated, ages 20 to 24, or living in rental housing in an urban area, the study found.

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Times staff writer Jack Leonard contributed to this report.

Domestic Violence

A new Justice Department study finds that domestic violence has dropped.

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Source: Bureau of Justice statistics

Complied by SUNNY KAPLAN / Los Angeles Times