And that is why we have come to recognize that abuse is identified in fewer than one in twenty cases that enters the medical community, and as a result, the AMA is finally acknowledging that the medical response rarely addresses the cause of the problem, family violence, because it is not identified at the hospital level. And so we have only undertaken this year in this city to implement protocols in all the city hospitals to train emergency room personnel to separate the victim and the person who brings her into the hospital to try and identify and better explore what brings her there. I can assure you that there's not a private hospital yet in the city that is doing that. There's a fundamental relationship between family dysfunction and substance abuse. An enormous proportion of domestic assaults by guns, knives or battering occur when the assailant has ingested drugs or alcohol.
Alcohol is present in more than half of all domestic violence incidents.
The most common pattern is drinking by both the offender and the victim when the incident occurs in the home actually. We have to remember, and I think Karen said this, that family violence obviously encompasses an enormous range of violent conduct, not just spousal attacks. The next day his mother was arrested. Four of her five children had been born while she was addicted to cocaine. Her sister had repeatedly called the Bureau of Child Welfare for intervention.