Question

Is the divorce rate 50% as we often hear? how prevalent is domestic abuse? What age group does it affect most?

Answer 1

No

We've all heard that 50 percent of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.

And while that disheartening stat continues to get tossed around, the divorce rate isn't really at 50 percent -- and it isn't rising either. In fact, a new piece in the New York Times' data blog Upshot suggests that the divorce rate has actually been dropping for some time now. Looking at the numbers, the Times suggests the high divorce rate of the late 1970s and early 1980s may have just been a "historical anomaly," rather than a trend.

The most common age when intimate partner violence is first experienced by women is age 18-24 (38.6%), followed by age 11-17 (22.4%), age 35-44 (6.8%) and age 45+ (2.5%). For men the most common age is age 18-24 (47.1%), followed by age 25-34 (30.6%), age 11-17 (15.0%), age 35-44 (10.3%) and age 45+ (5.5%).

How prevalent is domestic violence?

Domestic violence is an alarming and pervasive problem in our country.

• On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States. Over the course of a year, that equals more than 12 million women and men.
• In just one day, across the United States and its territories, more than 67,000 victims of domestic violence sought services from domestic violence programs and shelters.
  
  Although anyone can be a victim of domestic violence, women are disproportionally a ected.
• One in 4 women is the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner while 1 in 7 men experiences severe physical violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.
• In 2010, the percentage of female victims (22%) of intimate partner violence was about 4 times that of male victims (5%).
• Approximately 2/3 of Americans say it is hard to determine whether someone has been a victim of domestic abuse. Moreover, more than 90% of Americans fail to de ne repeated emotional, verbal, sexual abuse and controlling behaviors as patterns of domestic violence and abuse.
• More than half of Americans (54%) say they may have been in situations where they believed domestic violence had occurred, but they didn't act because they were not sure what to do.
• The majority of nonfatal intimate partner victimizations occur at home; on average, approximately two-thirds of females and males are victimized at home.
• On average, children have been found to be residents of the households experiencing intimate partner violence in 38% of the incidents involving female victims and 21% of the incidents involving male victims.