Intimate Partner Violence

The sad case of the murder of 26 year old Jessie Davis has gained national media attention.

Though the National Center for Health Statistics tracks deaths, and as a subset of that homicides, the feeder document for the National Vital Statistics System, in this case the death certificate, does not allow us to identify the number of persons murdered by intimate partners.

Our parent agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has done some research into the subject. In March 2005, three researchers, Jeani Chang, Cynthia J. Berg, and Joy Herndon from the Division of Reproductive Health, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health entitled Homicide: A Leading Cause of Injury Deaths Among Pregnant and Postpartum Women in the United States, 1991–1999. This paper was reported on by the Washington Post.Currently the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control has a fact sheet with summarizes current research on the subject.