Monitoring the rage of domestic violence

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Though numbers are down, experts warn that tough times often trigger incidents

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- It's a stunning statistic: In any group of four women, chances are that one of them has been or will be a victim of domestic violence. That's the likelihood facing women in the United States today, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

And experts are worried that the current economic recession could spark a new wave of domestic violence.

"Unemployment is a stressor," said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor and chairwoman of the Department of Community Public Health at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. "Young men feel like they're less able to fulfill the normal role of the man, that they can't be a good provider for their families. Unemployment contributes to males committing domestic violence."

October has been designated National Domestic Violence Prevention Month, and experts will use the occasion to help inform people about spouse abuse and how to prevent it from occurring.

Domestic violence has been on the decrease over the past decade, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 1993, nearly six of every 1,000 people aged 12 and older were injured by domestic violence, and 1,563 women and 638 men were killed by their domestic partners. By comparison, in 2005 just over two of every 1,000 teenagers and adults were injured, and 1,181 women and 329 men were killed.

Much of that decrease has come as a result of increased access to domestic violence shelters and greater judicial emphasis on conflict resolution and anger management classes, said Dr. Carl C. Bell, president and chief executive officer of the Community Mental Health Council in Chicago and a professor of psychiatry and acting director of the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois School of Public Health.

"In every relationship there's going to be conflict," Bell said. "If you can help people learn how to be calm and not reactive, you can prevent violence."

About 1.3 million women are the victims of a physical assault by an intimate partner each year, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

But domestic violence isn't just limited to injury, says the American Academy of Family Physicians. It can include:

The use of physical force to harm.
Forced sexual activity.
Emotional abuse in the form of demeaning put-downs, constant criticism and threats.
What's called "control abuse," in which, for example, a man limits a woman's ability to choose and think for herself.

The most risky time for domestic violence occurs when one or both partners are 18 to 25 years old, Campbell said. Women who are between 20 and 24 years of age are at the greatest risk of nonfatal domestic violence.

"Young people are less able to deal with the stresses of relationships in a useful way," she said. "Young men are more likely to resolve conflicts in general with violence. It also has to do with the volatility of young relationships. There's a lot of coming and going and breaking up and re-forming."

And if a young man loses his job, that further increases the risk for domestic violence. "If you don't have meaningful work," Campbell said, "that's a risk for all kinds of unhealthy behavior."

The damage from domestic violence doesn't end with the partners, however. If their children witness the violence, it is likely to perpetuate itself in unpredictable ways, research has found.

A French study released in June found that adults who witnessed domestic violence as children are more likely to suffer mental health problems. They are four times more likely to have depression and nearly twice as likely to have alcohol dependence.

The likelihood that they will be involved in intimate partner violence more than triples, and they are almost five times more likely to mistreat their children, the study also found -- results that confirm what many experts have believed for some time.

"Growing up in a violent home, where you see your role models hitting each other or you are abused -- that kind of experience teaches you the way to solve things is through hitting," Campbell said. "Many of these effects last a lifetime unless there's some sort of intervention for it."

And that's the point, as far as Bell is concerned: There are ways to break the cycle of violence.

"If you've been in previous abusive relationships as a child, you're at escalated risk," he said. "But being at risk is different from being a predictive factor. Just because you were from a home with domestic violence, it does not mean you would gravitate toward domestic violence as either a perpetrator or a victim."

More efforts to reach out to the children of domestic violence are needed, the experts say. And there is also a need to improve the ways that current perpetrators of domestic violence are treated -- to stop what rages inside them.

"Many women want the relationship to continue," Campbell said. "They just want the violence to end. We don't have very good interventions for that."

On the Web

The American Psychiatric Association has more on domestic violence. domestic violence.