The Silence Around Domestic Violence in Black Homes Is Killing 4 Women Per Day

Four women per day. That is the approximate number of American women killed by intimate partners, and Black women die at a rate that is two and a half times higher than white women. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has documented this disparity for decades. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey has confirmed it across multiple waves of data. The body count is public, and it is growing, and the community that should be most outraged by it has developed an elaborate apparatus of silence that functions, in practice, as complicity. Not because Black people do not care about Black women. They do. But because the conversation about domestic violence in Black America runs headlong into a set of cultural and political tripwires that have made silence seem safer than speech, and the women who die in that silence pay the price for everyone else’s comfort.

Let us begin with the numbers, because numbers do not flinch. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, conducted by the CDC, found that approximately 43.7 percent of Black women have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetimes — physical violence, rape, or stalking by an intimate partner. The rate for white women was 34.6 percent. For Hispanic women, 37.1 percent. Black women lead a category that no one should want to lead, by a margin that is too large to be explained by reporting differences, survey methodology, or any of the other statistical objections that are routinely deployed to minimize uncomfortable findings.

The Architecture of Silence

The silence around domestic violence in Black communities is not passive. It is constructed. It is maintained by a set of interlocking beliefs that, taken individually, are each understandable and, taken together, form a permission structure for the abuse and murder of Black women. The first belief is that airing the community’s problems in public provides ammunition to racists. This belief is not unfounded — the history of Black pathologization by white institutions is long and well-documented, and the fear that honest discussion of domestic violence will be weaponized against the community is legitimate. But the practical consequence of this belief is that a woman with a broken jaw must weigh her safety against the community’s image, and the community has made clear which one it values more.

The second belief is that calling the police on a Black man is an act of racial betrayal. Again, this belief has roots in reality. The history of police violence against Black men, of false arrests, of shootings during welfare checks, of encounters that begin with a domestic violence call and end with the man dead on his own living room floor, has made the act of dialing 911 a potential death sentence for the person you are calling about. A Black woman who calls the police to stop her partner from beating her must calculate the probability that the police will kill him, and this calculation is not theoretical. It is the lived experience of communities where police presence has been as dangerous as the violence it was summoned to address.

The third belief is religious: the conviction that suffering is redemptive, that a good woman endures, that prayer and faith will change a violent man, and that separation is a failure of spiritual commitment. This belief operates with particular force in Black churches, where domestic violence is addressed, when it is addressed at all, with counseling that emphasizes forgiveness and reconciliation rather than safety and separation. The woman who leaves is not celebrated for her courage. She is questioned about her faith.

The Data on Lethality

Jacquelyn Campbell, a nursing researcher at Johns Hopkins University, developed the Danger Assessment tool that is now used in domestic violence programs nationwide to predict lethality — the probability that an abusive relationship will end in homicide. Her research identified a set of risk factors that are present in the vast majority of intimate partner homicides: strangulation, access to firearms, separation (the most dangerous moment in an abusive relationship), escalating frequency of violence, threats to kill, and the abuser’s controlling behavior. Campbell’s work found that the risk of homicide increased dramatically in the weeks immediately following a woman’s attempt to leave, which means that the standard advice to “just leave” is not merely simplistic — it is, without proper safety planning, potentially lethal.

For Black women, the lethality risk is compounded by the very factors that make seeking help so difficult. Fewer culturally competent shelter beds are available in majority-Black communities. The shelter system, designed primarily by white women for white women during the domestic violence movement of the 1970s and 1980s, has historically struggled to serve Black women, whose experiences of violence are inseparable from their experiences of racism, economic marginalization, and community pressure. A shelter that does not understand why a Black woman might be reluctant to involve police, or why she might feel that leaving her partner means losing her community, is a shelter that cannot effectively serve her.

The Economic Trap

Intimate partner violence is, at its core, a crime of control, and economic control is its most effective instrument. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has documented that women in households with annual incomes below $7,500 are seven times more likely to experience intimate partner violence than women in households earning above $75,000. Poverty does not cause violence, but it makes escape nearly impossible. A woman who has no independent income, no savings, no credit history in her own name, and no family members with the resources to absorb her and her children is a woman who is trapped by economics as effectively as by the lock on the door.

For Black women, the economic trap is tighter. The gender-race wage gap means that Black women earn approximately 63 cents for every dollar earned by white men. Black women have less accumulated wealth, fewer family resources to draw upon, and less access to the kinds of professional networks that can provide emergency employment. The intersection of racial and gender economic disadvantage does not merely increase vulnerability to violence. It creates a prison whose walls are made of poverty and whose guards are the absence of alternatives.

Children Who Watch

The CDC estimates that approximately 15.5 million children in the United States live in households where intimate partner violence has occurred in the past year. For Black children, the exposure rate is disproportionately high, consistent with the higher rates of IPV in Black households. The effects of witnessing domestic violence on children are not speculative. They are among the most extensively documented phenomena in developmental psychology.

Children who witness intimate partner violence exhibit higher rates of anxiety, depression, aggression, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. They perform worse academically. They are more likely to experience behavioral problems in school. And they are significantly more likely to become involved in violent relationships themselves as adults — either as perpetrators or as victims. The intergenerational transmission of violence is not destiny, and many children who witness violence do not repeat it, but the statistical elevation of risk is substantial and consistent across studies.

This is the cycle that the community’s silence perpetuates. Every child who watches a father beat a mother and sees the community respond with silence is learning that violence is normal, that silence is expected, and that women’s safety is subordinate to the community’s need to present a unified front against external criticism. The child does not understand the political calculus. The child understands only what was modeled: that this is how relationships work. And the cycle turns again.

R. Kelly, Chris Brown, and the Community’s Complicity

If you want to understand the depth of the community’s silence, examine its response to celebrity abusers. R. Kelly’s predation on Black girls was an open secret for two decades. Aaliyah was fifteen when he married her. The video of him urinating on a fourteen-year-old girl was publicly known. And for twenty years, his albums sold, his concerts filled, and the Black community — including its institutions, its media, its churches — looked away. It was not until a white journalist, Jim DeRogatis, pursued the story with the tenacity that Black media would not, and not until a documentary series created by a white production company forced the conversation into the mainstream, that the community’s silence became untenable.

Chris Brown beat Rihanna badly enough that the photographs looked like a crime scene, because they were a crime scene. His career barely paused. Black Twitter defended him. Black radio continued to play his music. Black women — including young Black women who saw themselves in Rihanna — continued to buy his albums and attend his concerts. The message received by every Black woman watching was unmistakable: your body is less important than his talent. Your safety is less important than his career. Your pain is a temporary inconvenience to the consumption of entertainment.

These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a cultural value system that ranks the protection of Black men — including Black men who abuse Black women — above the protection of Black women. The ranking is not spoken. It does not need to be. It is communicated through action and inaction, through what is discussed and what is suppressed, through who is defended and who is told to be quiet.

What Actually Works

The solutions to domestic violence in Black communities must be designed for Black communities, by people who understand the specific barriers that prevent Black women from seeking help and Black men from being held accountable. The mainstream domestic violence movement has made significant progress over the past fifty years, but its interventions were designed for a different population, and the translation has been incomplete.

Community-based intervention programs that operate outside the criminal justice system have shown promise. The Institute for Domestic Violence in the African American Community at the University of Minnesota has developed culturally specific models that address the intersection of racism and violence, that acknowledge the legitimate fear of police involvement, and that provide pathways to safety that do not require a woman to choose between her safety and her partner’s freedom. These programs work with men as well as women, addressing the roots of violent behavior rather than simply punishing its expression.

Economic independence programs are equally critical. When a woman has her own income, her own savings, and her own housing options, the economic trap that keeps her in a violent relationship loses its power. Programs that combine job training, financial literacy, and emergency housing for domestic violence survivors have shown measurable reductions in return-to-abuser rates. The Independence Project in New York, which provides comprehensive economic empowerment services to survivors, has documented that women who achieve economic self-sufficiency are 80 percent less likely to return to abusive partners.

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
— Alice Walker

Breaking the Silence

The silence will not break itself. It must be broken by people within the community who are willing to absorb the criticism that comes with speaking plainly about a problem that the community has agreed, through decades of practice, not to discuss. It must be broken by Black men who are willing to hold other Black men accountable, who are willing to say that violence against Black women is not a private matter and not a cultural norm but a crisis that is destroying the community from within. It must be broken by Black churches that are willing to prioritize safety over reconciliation, that are willing to tell a woman that God does not require her to endure beatings as a test of faith. It must be broken by Black media that is willing to cover domestic violence with the same urgency it brings to police violence, because the data shows that Black women are more likely to be killed by a partner than by a police officer, and the hierarchy of outrage should reflect the hierarchy of risk.

Four women per day. That number will not change because we march. It will not change because we post. It will change when the Black community decides that the lives of Black women are worth more than the comfort of silence, when we build the shelters and the economic pathways and the community accountability structures that give women real options, and when we stop treating domestic violence as dirty laundry and start treating it as what it is: the leading cause of injury to Black women between the ages of 15 and 44, a crisis that dwarfs many of the issues that dominate public discourse, and a wound that the community has chosen to hide rather than heal. The hiding is killing people. Four per day. The silence is not protecting the community. It is burying its women.