IMPACT Safety

Key Violence Statistics

Sexual Assault

• One in seven Ohio women has been raped sometime in her life, a national report says.  That equates to 635,000 women but doesn’t tell the entire story. Children and men are victims, too.
• Each rape costs $86,500 in tangible and intangible costs, and rape costs $127 billion nationally each year, according to the National Institute of Justice, said Judi Moseley, program administrator for the sexual assault and domestic violence prevention program at the Ohio Health Department.
• Data from the National Women’s Study and the National Violence Against Women Survey found that 13.4 percent of women in the United States have been rape victims. In Ohio, the percentage was slightly higher: 14.3 percent.
• Crime records are grossly underestimated because most rapes go unreported. In 2001, there were 39.2 reports per 100,000 Ohioans. That number went to 42.1 in 2002, according to the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services.

Violence against Youth and Special Populations

• 3.7 million youth engage in bullying, and more than 3.2 million are victims of bullying annually. Since 1992, there have been 250 violent deaths in schools, and bullying has been a factor in virtually every school shooting. Direct, physical bullying increases in elementary school, peaks in middle school, and declines in high school. Verbal abuse, on the other hand, remains constant. Over two-thirds of students believe that schools respond poorly to bullying, with a high percentage of students believing that adult help is infrequent and ineffective. Twenty-five percent (25%) of teachers see nothing wrong with bullying or putdowns and consequently intervene in only 4% of bullying incidents.(Cohn & Cantor, 2003; Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association, 2002).
• According to the Boys Town National Research Hospital, children with disabilities wer found to be at greater risk of becoming victims of abuse and neglect than children without disabilities. The study showed that children with disabilities are 1.8 times more likely to be neglected, 1.6 times more likely to be physically abused, and 2.2 times more likely to be sexually abused than children without disabilities. The study by Westat, Inc. determined that, overall, the estimated incidence of maltreatment among children with disabilities was 1.7 times greater than the estimated incidence in children without disabilities. One study found the overall incidence of child maltreatment to be 39% in 150 children with multiple disabilities admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Of those children, 60% had been physically abused, 45% had been neglected, and 36% had been sexually abused.
• Large-scale statistics about the incidence of violence against adults with disabilities are rare. Smaller studies done in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and more recently in the United States consistently demonstrate the following: individuals with developmental disabilities are at a 4 to 10 times higher risk of becoming crime victims than those without disabilities; victims with developmental disabilities suffer repeated victimization because so few of the crimes against them are reported, and even when they are, there is sometimes a reluctance by police, prosecutors and judges to rely on the testimony of a person with a disability, making individuals with developmental disabilities a target for criminal predators; crimes against people with developmental disabilities are frequently committed by people they know, trust, and depend on. (Institute on Disabilities/UCEDDTemple University, February 2002)

Violence in High Risk Professions

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that there were 69 homicides in the health services from 1996 to 2000. BLS data shows that in 2000, 48 percent of all non-fatal injuries from occupational assaults and violent acts occurred in health care and social services. As significant as these numbers are, the actual number of incidents is probably much higher. Incidents of violence are likely to be underreported, perhaps due in part to the persistent perception within the health care industry that assaults are part of the job.  (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001).
• An alarming trend of violence against real estate agents has emerged throughout the country in the last decade. Agent safety was cited as an important issue by nearly 90 percent of respondents in a 2003 Ohio Association of Realtors member survey. By comparison, safety concerns received no mentions in a 1997 survey.