Violence and Alcohol Statistics

Alcohol and Violence

• Alcohol availability is closely related to violent assaults. Communities and neighborhoods that have more bars and liquor stores per capita experience more assaults. ¹

• Alcohol use is frequently associated with violence between intimate partners. Two-thirds of victims of intimate partner violence reported that alcohol was involved in the incident. ²

• In one study of interpersonal violence, men had been drinking in an estimated 45 percent of cases and women had been drinking in 20 percent of cases.³

• Women whose partners abused alcohol were 3.6 times more likely than other women to be assaulted by their partners. ⁴

• In 1997, 40 percent of convicted rape and sexual assault offenders said that they were drinking at the time of their crime. ⁵

• In 2002, more than 70,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 were victims of alcohol-related sexual assault in the U.S. ⁶

• In those violent incidents recorded by the police in which alcohol was a factor, about nine percent of the offenders and nearly 14 percent of the victims were under age 21. ⁷

• Twenty-eight percent of suicides by children ages nine to 15 were attributable to alcohol. ⁸

• An estimated 480,000 children are mistreated each year by a caretaker with alcohol problems. ⁹

³ Roizen, J. Issues in the epidemiology of alcohol and violence. In: Martin, S.E., editor. Alcohol and Interpersonal Violence: Fostering multidisciplinary perspectives. Bethesda (MD): National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; 1993. p. 3-36. NIAAA Research Monograph No. 24.

⁴ "Risk factors for injury to women from domestic violence". Demetrios N. Kyriacou, Deirdre Anglin, Ellen Taliaferro, Susan Stone, Toni Tubb, Judith A. Linden, Robert Muelleman, Erik Barton, and Jess F. Kraus. The New England Journal of Medicine 341:1892-98. December 16, 1999.

⁵ Greenfield, L., and Henneberg, M. "Alcohol, crime, and the criminal justice system." Alcohol & Crime: Research and Practice for Prevention, Alcohol Policy XII Conference: Washington, DC, 11-14 June 2000.

⁶Hingson, R., Heeren, T., et al. (2002). "Magnitude of alcohol-related mortality and morbidity among U.S. college students ages 18-24." Journal of Studies on Alcohol 63(2): 136-144.

⁹ Children of Alcoholics Foundation, Inc. 1996. Collaboration, coordination and cooperation: helping children affected by parental addiction and family violence. New York: Children of Alcoholics Foundation.

Drinking by college students contributes to 500,000 injuries annually.

- National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, April 9, 2002, Task Force on College Drinking