Rates of violence against women have remained largely unchanged in California for nearly two decades, with Black and multiracial women facing the highest risks, a sweeping new analysis by UC Berkeley public health researchers has found.
Black women under age 65 were at the highest risk of violence, researchers found. Across all ages, assault injury rates among Black women were 3.8 times those of white women. Notably, the group at greatest risk of violence over age 65 shifted to multiracial women, signaling how vulnerability evolves throughout one's life.
"We have these persistent racial disparities that just haven't changed over time," said Emily Liu, a Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the study. "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."
The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and will appear in print this summer.
Existing research into race- and age-specific estimates of violence against women often lacks a detailed analysis of trends over time, Liu said. Additionally, many studies rely on police-reported data about race and ethnicity, which is often at the interpretation of the officer, as opposed to more reliable hospital data, which is typically reported by the patient. Indigenous women and multiracial women are often omitted from those police-reported analyses entirely or grouped into larger categories, like "other."
