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This study provides estimates of the economic cost of intimate partner violence perpetrated against women in the US, including expenditures for medical care and mental health services, and lost productivity from injury and premature death. The analysis uses national survey data, including the National Violence Against Women Survey and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, to estimate costs for 1995. Intimate partner violence against women cost $5.8 billion dollars (95% confidence interval: $3.9 to $7.7 billion) in 1995, including $320 million ($136 to $503 million) for rapes, $4.2 billion ($2.4 to $6.1 billion) for physical assault, $342 million ($235 to $449 million) for stalking, and $893 million ($840 to $946 million) for murders. Updated to 2003 dollars, costs would total over $8.3 billion. Intimate partner violence is costly in the US. The potential savings from efforts to reduce this violence are substantial. More comprehensive data are needed to refine cost estimates and monitor costs over time.
Keywords: economics; abuse; domestic abuse; intimate partner violence; sexual abuse
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major public health problem that impacts all strata of society, including the medical and mental health care, social services, economic, and criminal justice systems. Abused women have more physical health problems (Golding, 1996), higher use of medical and mental health care services (Miller, Cohen, & Rossman, 1993), higher levels of depression (Campbell, Sullivan, & Davidson, 1995; Golding, 1999), and abuse alcohol and other substances (Golding, 1999; Kessler et al., 1994) and attempt suicide (Golding, 1999) more frequently than nonabused women. Intimate partner violence drains health care resources, causes victims to lose time from productive activity, reduces the quality of life for victims and their relatives (e.g., children of victims), and even results in death to some victims (Institute for Women's Policy Research, 1995; Meyer, 1992). Yet, the economic toll of this problem has been largely unknown.
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Improvement Act of 1994, P.L. 103-322, directed the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct a study to obtain a national projection of the incidence of injuries resulting from domestic violence, the cost of injuries to health care facilities, and recommend health care strategies for reducing the incidence and cost of these injuries. As a...