Nearly half of murdered women are killed by their partners, as the legal system fails abuse victims
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One of the greatest dangers women face is the men they love and live with and have children with. A Washington Post analysis finds that 46 percent of women killed in 47 U.S. cities over the past decade were killed by their partners. In more than a third oNearly half of murdered women are killed by their partners, as the legal system fails abuse victims
One of the greatest dangers women face is the men they love and live with and have children with. A Washington Post analysis finds that 46 percent of women killed in 47 U.S. cities over the past decade were killed by their partners. In more than a third of cases, the threat was already publicly known through things like restraining orders or prior convictions. And these are brutal, personal killings: Nearly a quarter of the 2,051 women killed by intimate partners were stabbed, compared with fewer than 10 percent of all other homicides. Eighteen percent of women who were killed by partners were attacked with a blunt object or no weapon, compared with 8 percent of other homicide victims. While a gun was used in 80 percent of all other deaths, just over half of all women killed as a result of domestic violence were attacked with a gun. Violent choking is almost entirely confined to fatal domestic attacks on women — while fewer than 1 percent of all homicides result from strangulation, 6 percent of women killed by intimate partners die in this manner, The Post found. The legal system doesn’t just fail to protect women—all too often it victimizes them further, as the case of Minerva Cisneros, of Forth Worth, Texas, shows. Cisneros had shown up at a hospital while eight months pregnant in the wake of a beating that included strangulation—as noted, a major sign of danger to come. But she didn’t want to cooperate in an investigation, and the legal system terrorized her all over again: As the criminal case waited, records show that child protective services officials opened a separate inquiry into Cisneros, alleging that she had failed to protect her children from witnessing the abuse she suffered. She and Sigala were required to enter couples counseling, and she took a class on how to manage her husband’s violent behavior, said Allenna Bangs, a Tarrant County prosecutor. Family members and authorities said Cisneros became concerned that she could lose custody. Child protective services officials did not respond to a request for comment. Read more