5.2a Violent Crime

Violent crimes involve violence against another, including murder, sexual assault, harassment, and abuse (child, elder, animal). The most common violent crime is aggravated assault. Aggravated assault occurs when a person causes serious bodily harm to another person (Gramlich, 2024). Figures 5.2 and 5.3 provide contact information to the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the National Sexual Assault Hotline for anyone in need of help.

Intimate Partner Violence

Intimate partner violence includes physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, psychological aggression, or a combination of these behaviors (Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, 2021) perpetrated by a current or former spouse or partner. Close to half of women (41%) and about a quarter of men (26%) have experienced intimate partner violence (Leemis et al., 2022). Sexual violence includes rape, sexual coercion, unwanted sexual contact, and sexual harassment in a public place. It is pervasive in the United States. More than half of women and close to a third of men have experienced sexual violence (Basile et al., 2022).

Firearm Violence

Firearm violence refers to any injury or death resulting from a wound from a handgun, rifle, or shotgun (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024a). Eighty-six percent of firearm deaths and 87% of injuries occur in men (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024a). Most of the homicide (79%) and more than half of suicide (53%) fatalities involve a firearm (Kegler et al., 2022).  

The United States experienced 194 mass shootings between 1966 and 2024 (The Violence Project, 2024). A mass shooting is any incident where “four or more people are shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs” (The Violence Project, 2024). Mass shootings are correlated with gender. Nearly all perpetrators of mass shootings are men (97.75%) (The Violence Project, 2024).

Moreover, mass shootings are also correlated with gender-based crimes, including intimate partner violence, stalking, and sexual assault (Issa, 2019). More than a third (35.2%) of perpetrators had a history of abusing a romantic partner, other family members, or both (The Violence Project, 2024). 

Photo 5.2

Most Mass Shooters are Men

Bias-motivated (or hate crimes) are any criminal offense “against a person or property motivated in whole or part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity” (U.S. Department of Justice, 2022). Most bias-motivated crimes since 2020 were anti-Black or African American (30%), followed by anti-Jewish (11%), anti-gay (men) (9%), anti-White (9%), and Anti-Hispanic or Latino (7%) (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025b) (see Figure 5.4).