Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
First national USVEX survey puts lifetime physical violence at 52% of US adults
Researchers at Tulane's Newcomb Institute and UC San Diego asked a national sample of adults about violence across their whole lives. The eviction comparisons are the report's strongest numbers and the hardest to interpret causally.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Researchers from the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University and UC San Diego ran USVEX, described as the first comprehensive national survey asking US adults directly about violence across their lifespans.
- In the survey, 52% of US adults reported experiencing physical violence at some point in their lives and 49% reported sexual violence.
- Intimate partner violence was reported by 61% of women and 45% of men, and 19% of women reported potentially lethal incidents involving beating, burning, strangulation, a knife or a gun, against 3% of men.
- Adults evicted in the previous year were seven times as likely to report recent physical violence, three times as likely to report sexual violence and nearly five times as likely to report intimate partner violence.
- Among people experiencing homelessness, physical violence was five times as prevalent, sexual violence more than three times as prevalent and intimate partner violence four times as prevalent.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- capability Asking people directly gives prevention work a population baseline, which matters because counts of reported cases move with willingness to report as much as with the violence itself.
- constraint With eviction and recent violence measured in the same recent window, the data support screening where housing loss occurs but not a claim that preventing evictions would lower violence.
- decision A lifetime baseline this high puts housing agencies and behavioral health services inside the violence prevention budget alongside police and courts.
- exposure Eviction courts and shelters are where a screening dollar would find the most recent violence per person screened, and those settings are not usually staffed for it.
The eviction and homelessness comparisons carry the most policy weight, and both halves of them sit in the same recent window: eviction within the previous year, violence reported as recent [5]. The survey can show the two turning up in the same people without establishing which came first [5]. The account of the findings does not include the sample size, the wording of the violence items, or whether the hardship ratios are adjusted for age, income or region [17].
"For too long, our understanding of violence has depended largely on crime reports, leaving many experiences invisible," said Anita Raj, executive director of the Newcomb Institute at Tulane, who co-led the report [9][13]. USVEX asks people about their own experiences instead of counting incidents that were formally reported, so it picks up violence that never reached law enforcement or a service system [11].
A lifetime prevalence and an annual count of reported offences measure different things. The 52% figure is the share of adults saying something happened at any point in a life [1]; a reported-crime rate counts events recorded in one year. Subtracting one from the other does not yield an undercount, because the difference mixes non-reporting with how broadly the survey defined violence in the first place.
Inside the survey's own numbers, the sharpest disparity is on the potentially lethal items, where women's reported prevalence is roughly six times men's [15]. On intimate partner violence overall the gap between women and men is 16 percentage points [16].
Violence rose during adolescence and kept rising into young adulthood, when nearly a third of adults reported sexual violence, and the researchers name those stages as opportunities for prevention [7]. That curve is retrospective. It is built from what adults now recall, and are willing to disclose, about decades already past.
People reporting recent violence were significantly more likely to report depression or anxiety, suicidality and substance use [8]. One cross-section cannot separate distress that followed violence from distress that preceded it. Jakana Thomas, professor of political science at UC San Diego and a co-lead of the report, said violence prevention "must be part of a broader strategy that also addresses economic hardship, mental health and other forms of social inequality associated with violence" [10][14].
USVEX extends work the Newcomb Institute previously ran in California, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, and this is its first nationally representative round [12].
What to watch
- Publication of the full USVEX methodology: sample size, sampling frame, item wording, and whether the hardship ratios are adjusted.
- Whether USVEX is repeated on a fixed schedule, since a single cross-section cannot show whether exposure is rising or falling.
- Whether federal or state prevention funding starts citing self-reported prevalence alongside reported-crime counts.