by Doctor Science
I was working on a post (about school and other shootings) and wanted to check one fact. Result: a couple days of work later, I have found out something really odd about murder in America. I’m nothing of an expert in the field, so I’m hoping that someone who *does* know about it can come along and say what the experts think is going on — or if I’ve noticed something that the experts haven’t.
I’m talking about two things, possibly related, concerning intimate partner homicide (IPH):
1. 30-40 years ago (and possibly earlier), it was almost as common for American men to be killed by their partners as for women. This is extremely unusual: in other countries and cultures, the rate of IPH for women is two to four times that for men.
a. Since then, the US pattern has changed, so that nowadays many more women are victims of IPH than men are.
Note on the charts: All data in this post are taken from Homicide Trends in the U.S. from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, especially the section on Intimate homicide. Charts with a gray background and yellow margin are taken directly from the BJS report, while those with a white background were created by me based on BJS data. Let me know if I need to show my work in GoogleDocs.
b. This is almost entirely due to a change in IPH among black Americans. The high American rate of husband-and-boyfriend killing was largely a black phenomenon. Since the 70s, the death rate for black men due to IPH has plummeted, faster than the drop in IPH for black women.
Cut for length and images —