The department's Bureau of Justice Statistics also found that the number of men murdered by their intimate partners plunged 60 percent from 1976 through 1998. The report defined intimate partners as current or former spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends, including incidents where both victim and attacker were of the same sex. For women, alternatives to violence The Intimate Partner Violence report describes a widespread decline, with a few exceptions, in both lethal and nonlethal violence among intimates that mirrors the general decline in serious crimes nationwide since 1992. And the largest beneficiaries have been men. The biggest drop is in women killing husbands.
Divorce is easier.
The number of intimate-partner homicides has declined substantially since 1976 for every race and gender group except white women, the bureau said, citing FBI data on homicides. White females represent the only category of victims for whom intimate partner homicide has not decreased substantially since 1976. In 1976, women had accounted for just over half of the 3,000 men and women killed by intimates. For black men, intimate murders declined by 74 percent from 1976 through 1998. For black women, the number of murders was down 45 percent.