Female Victims of Violent Crime

• NCJ Number: 162602
• Author(s): D Craven
• Date Published: December 1996
• Length: 3 pages
• Publication Series: BJS Selected Findings
• Agencies: BJS
• Publication Type: Statistics

Annotation

This report summarizes findings from several U.S. Department of Justice published reports that focus on the number of violent victimizations of women, rates of victimization, and the contexts in which the incidents occurred.

Abstract

This 3-page report includes 1992-94 data for rape/sexual assault, robbery, and assault from the redesigned National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), victimization trend data for 1973-94 adjusted for the redesign, and homicide data from the 1995 FBI Uniform Crime Reports. It summarizes the latest published data on both fatal and nonfatal violence between intimates (present or former spouse, boyfriend, or girlfriend) as opposed to relatives, friends or acquaintances, and strangers.

• Between 1992 and 1994, the number of violent incidents involving a female victim averaged 4.6 million a year--nearly 14 million crimes during the 3-year period.
• In 1995, women were about two-thirds as likely as men to be victims of violence; 20 years ago, they were half as likely.
• In 1994 females represented 23% of all known homicide victims in the United States; 9 out of 10 female victims were murdered by males.
• In 1992-93, women were more likely to be victims of nonfatal violence by someone they knew (78%) than by a stranger (23%). Male victims were about as likely to be victimized by a stranger (49%) as by someone they knew (51%).
• For rape, robbery, and assault in 1992-93, female victims experienced 7 times as many incidents of violence by an intimate (present and former spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends) as male victims.