Family Values: At Hearthside in the Homeland

Abuse in America, from the National Domestic Violence Hotline (via a steer from the Angry Arab). Excerpts:
• 4 million American women experience a serious assault by a partner during an average 12-month period.
• On the average, more than three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day.
• 1 in 5 female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner. Abused girls are significantly more likely to get involved in other risky behaviors. They are 4 to 6 times more likely to get pregnant and 8 to 9 times more likely to have tried to commit suicide.
• Women of all races are equally vulnerable to violence by an intimate partner.
• For 30% of women who experience abuse, the first incident occurs during pregnancy.
• As many as 324,000 women each year experience intimate partner violence during their pregnancy.
• 74% of employed battered women were harrassed by their partner while they were at work.
• Ninety-four percent of the offenders in murder-suicides were male
• Seventy-four percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner(spouse, common-law spouse, ex-spouse, or boyfriend/girlfriend). Of these, 96 percent were females killed by their intimate partners.
• Most murder-suicides with three or more victims involved a "family annihilator" -- a subcategory of intimate partner murder-suicide.Family annihilators are murderers who kill not only their wives/girlfriends and children, but often other family members as well,before killing themselves.
• Seventy-five percent of murder-suicides occurred in the home.
***