Startling data on battering

Evelyn Henry sees a common theme among some of the battered women who come in for help.

"Some are abused but they go back into the same situations," the director of shelters at Charleston's Crisis Ministries said Wednesday. "It's better than being homeless, they guess."

A new federal report on abuse indicates that a startling one in every four women surveyed by the government say they were violently attacked by their husbands or boyfriends, numbers that are even more concentrated in many Southern states, including South Carolina.

Experts in domestic violence don't find the results too surprising given trends seen in other data, although some aspects of how the survey was conducted may have led to higher numbers than are sometimes reported, they say. Even so, a government official who oversaw the research called the results "astounding."

"It's the first time we've had this kind of estimate" on the prevalence of intimate partner violence, said Linda Degutis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The survey, released Wednesday by the CDC, marks the beginning of a new annual project to look at how many women say they've been abused.

South Carolina's base figure for estimated number of female lifetime victims of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner was set at 752,000, according to the CDC report.

Other groups have placed South Carolina among the most violent in America for women. South Carolina ranked No. 7 in the nation for the rate of women killed by men in a Violence Policy Center report released in September.

Elimire Raven, executive director of My Sister's House shelter in Charleston, said the report further illustrates South Carolina's trend as a top 10 state for incidents of domestic violence. The problem, she said, appears to be rooted in the state's poor economic, education and rural life conditioning.

"People still see domestic violence as a family and personal problem, when it should be a community problem," she said.

One expert called the CDC report estimates on rape and attempted rape "extremely high" -- with 1 in 5 women saying they were victims, with about half saying it involved intimate partners.

But some advocates say the numbers should be seen as plausible. "It's a major problem that often is underestimated and overlooked," said Linda James, director of health for Futures Without Violence, a San Francisco-based organization that advocates against domestic abuse.

No documentation was sought to verify the women's claims, which were made anonymously.

The CDC report is based on a randomized telephone survey of about 9,000 women and 7,400 men.

Among the findings:

Several of the CDC numbers are higher than those of other sources. For example, the CDC study suggests that 1.3 million women have suffered rape, attempted rape or had sex forced on them in the previous year.

That statistic is more than seven times greater than what was reported by a Department of Justice household survey conducted last year.

The CDC rape numbers seem "extremely high," but there may be several reasons for the differences, including how the surveys were done, who chose to participate and how "rape" and other types of assault were defined or interpreted, said Shannan Catalano, a statistician with the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

"It is an evolving field, and everyone is striving to get a handle on what's the best estimate," Catalano said.