Maine ranked No. 9 for the rate of women killed by men in 2013, according to a report released today. All of the victims knew their killers.
The Violence Policy Center, which advocates for gun control, analyzed Federal Bureau of Investigation data from 2013, the most recent year available, to determine the rate of homicides involving just one female homicide victim and one male perpetrator.
In Maine, 10 female victims fit this category that year. For every 100,000 females, 1.47 were killed by a male offender.
The state’s small population creates a risk of greater swings in the data, however. It takes just a few homicides to move the state up or down the rankings. For instance, Maine ranked 22nd in 2012, 23rd in 2011 and 31st in 2010.
But the severity of the issue remains.
Every year, about half of assaults reported to police are for domestic violence, and roughly half of homicides are domestic-violence related. The statistics have not changed for years. Women are far more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner.
Here are some findings on Maine from the report:
— All of the victims (10 out of 10) were killed by a male they knew.
— Six out of the 10 homicide victims were wives, common-law wives, ex-wives or girlfriends of their killers.
— Four out of the 10 women were killed with firearms. Two were killed with knives or other cutting instruments, and four were killed by bodily force.
Here are the top 10 states — with Tennessee and Oklahoma tied at sixth — which all had female homicide victimization rates higher than the national average: