Intimate Partner Violence involves spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends.

This term is distinguished from relatives such as parents, children, siblings, grandparents, in-laws, cousins, etc. As well as acquaintances (friend, someone known) and strangers.

The type of violence committed by intimates often includes murders, rapes, robberies, or assaults.

Violence between intimates often occurs in private, and because of the shame and fear of reprisal involved victims are often reluctant to report incidents to anyone.

The most common form of intimate violence is assault: the intentional inflicting of injury on another person.

This type of domestic violence is most often against women and in most cases, the violent person is a husband, former husband, boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend

On average at least 3 women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day in America.

In 1992, 51% of the victims of intimate violence were attacked by boyfriends or girlfriends, 34% were attacked by spouses, and 15% were attacked by ex-spouses.

In 1992, 81% of the violent victimizations committed by spouses and ex-spouses were assaults. The remainder were rapes and robberies, which also may have involved assault.

Intimates commit an annual average of 621,015 rapes, robberies or assaults representing over 13% of all of these violent victimizations (According to an analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) from 1987-91)

According to the FBI's Crime in the U.S, 22,540 murders were committed nationwide in 1992; the relationship between the victims and the offender was known in 61% of these murders!

Of those murders where the relationship between the victim and the killer was known, about 10% involved the killing of a spouse or ex-spouse and nearly 6% involved the killing of a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Females are more likely than males to be victims of violence by intimates. Annually, compared to males, females experienced over 10 times as many incidents of violence by an intimate.

On average each year, women experienced over 572,000 violent victimizations committed by an intimate, compared to approximately 49,000 incidents committed against men.