A new study led by Emily Liu, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, has revealed that overall rates of violence against women in California have remained unchanged for nearly two decades, with women of color experiencing the highest risks.
In an examination of some 763,000 assault injuries in California that resulted in hospitalization or death between 2005 and 2022, Liu and her co-authors found that the assault injury rates among women of all racial groups in 2022 exceeded those in 2005. Black women accounted for more than one-fifth of all injuries over the study period, with the greatest risk facing Black women ages 20 to 24. Among women under the age of 65, rates of injury were highest among Black women, whereas among those over the age of 65, rates were highest among multiracial women. Across all ages, assault rates among Black women were 3.82 times higher than those of White women. American Indian and multiracial women experienced the next highest rates of assault injury.
“We have these persistent racial disparities that just haven’t changed over time,” said Liu. “And in general among women, violence has stayed pretty stable across time, which says that we’re not paying enough attention to systemic issues driving these trends.”
Speaking to future areas of research, Liu added, “We feel like these hospital-based data add to the conversation in terms of being able to look at both race and age with more accuracy. We’re hoping that this type of research spurs more of those questions, where people see one specific trend in one specific group that falls in their area of focus and look into it further.”