USA: Violence Against Women Rising

From CNN:

Fifteen years after passage of the Violence Against Women Act to combat physical abuse of women and girls, domestic violence remains especially acute among Native American and Alaska Native women, Justice officials said Monday.

"The levels of violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women are shocking, and cannot be tolerated," said Deputy Attorney General David Ogden. "Indeed, in some tribal land counties, murder rates for American Indian and Alaska Native women are 10 times the national average."

A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics released Monday said its victimization survey showed 652,000 incidents of overall violent crime inflicted by intimate partners in 2008.

More than 550,000 violent incidents targeted women; 101,050 targeted men.

Most of the incidents were classified as simple assaults, but there were 111,530 cases of aggravated assault, 44,000 rapes and sexual assaults and 38,820 robberies.

The number of homicides by intimate partners rose slightly in the past two years, while the cases of nonfatal intimate partner violence continued to decline, the Justice Department report said.