A government report shows that most forms of domestic violence, including murders by intimate partners, have declined sharply in recent years. The rate at which women were attacked or threatened with violence by husbands and boyfriends declined 21 percent during the mid-1990s, and the number of men murdered by wives or girlfriends plunged 60 percent from 1976 through 1998, the Justice Department reported today. 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. 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. For white men, it declined 44 percent.