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 online last month 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."
The new study, which looked at hospital and mortality data in California, provides a lens into those groups. It also offers new evidence for political and policy discussions about assaults on women, Liu said, and what appropriate interventions need to address.
"Community violence is a product of structural racism," Liu said, adding that she was concerned about the findings but not necessarily surprised. While some communities invest in programs and policies to curb violence, such opportunities are often lacking for marginalized groups. "Structural racism is part of both our history and our present, and we see that in this study."
Researchers analyzed 763,000 assault injuries in California that resulted in hospitalization or death from 2005-2022. Black women accounted for 22% of injuries, despite comprising just 6.5% of the state's female population. They consistently had at least two-to-three times the rate of assault injuries compared with all other racial and ethnic groups.
Liu and her colleagues said the data should not be interpreted as evidence that intervention programs don't work. Instead, it suggests that inconsistent approaches to addressing violence mask their ability to drive it down on a larger scale.
Jennifer Ahern, a professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and senior author of the research, pointed to community-based programs that are working to make a dent in violence. The current study looked at aggregate data for trends, meaning it might mask significant progress made at the local level, she said.
It's all the more reason for systemic solutions that address things like redlining and historic underinvestment, she said.
"I think there is hope in the sense that there are people really engaged in trying to come up with creative solutions to these problems," Ahern said. "But like many social problems, they're just very entrenched."
The new study adds to a body of research from Liu and Ahern that looks at detailed data about health disparities in California. Last year, the team wrote in a JAMA Pediatrics research letter that nearly 73% of California adolescents with treated self-harm injuries between 2005-2021 were girls. They also noted an approximately 75% increase in reports of multiracial teens treated for self-harm since 2016.
"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," Liu said. "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."
