The cost of domestic

violence is astonishing
By Bjorn Lomborg and Michelle A. Williams

February 22

Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Michelle A. Williams is dean of the
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Mass shootings such as last week’s in Florida have prompted law enforcement and the media to look
for patterns, and here’s one that has emerged: A disturbing number of perpetrators have previously
been accused of domestic abuse. Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control-advocacy group, analyzed
FBI data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2016 and found that in 54 percent of cases, the victims
included the shooter’s current or former spouse or intimate partner, or another family member —
and 16 percent of attackers between 2009 and 2015 had previously been charged with domestic
violence.

Not every perpetrator of domestic violence goes on to commit more serious crimes. But the link is
just another way that society has underestimated the scale and effects of such abuse. That is why we
are planning a major study to map out the size of the problem and discover the best policies to
reduce it.

There is already a huge body of research showing the lasting effects of domestic violence on victims:
Survivors are more likely than others to be affected by mental-health problems, as well as a host of
chronic illnesses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in the United States
about 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have experienced severe physical violence from a partner in
their lifetimes. This includes being hit with a fist or a hard object, beaten or slammed against
something.

Research for the Copenhagen Consensus Center by James Fearon of Stanford University and Anke
Hoeffler of Oxford University estimates that, in one year, approximately 300 million women age 15
to 64 are assaulted by an intimate partner: That’s every ninth woman in the world, every year.

This is based on international surveys in which women are asked if they were assaulted in the past
year. It is likely that these numbers underestimate reality. They show that in sub-Saharan Africa, 28
percent of women were assaulted in the past year. At 4 percent, the figure is lower for rich
countries, but it still indicates that more than 4 million women were assaulted in the United States in
the past 12 months.

By comparison, terrorism claimed fewer than 1,000 lives in 2015 in Western countries and around
30,000 deaths globally that year. The total cost from conflict (deaths from wars and terrorism,
refugee-related costs and economic damage) adds up to about 0.2 percent of global gross domestic
product each year, according to Fearon and Hoeffler. Intimate-partner violence costs the world
about 25 times more: around 5.2 percent of global GDP. For every battlefield death, nine people are
killed by interpersonal violence. One child is murdered for every two combatants who die.
The costs to society are vast — and poorly understood. In a 2010 study, economists calculated that
the average cost of a single sexual assault in the United States amounted to $240,776 — from the
victim’s pain and suffering, medical bills, lost productivity, judicial system expenses and the lost
productivity from the incarcerated offender. One aggravated assault costs society about $107,020,
with $95,023 from pain and suffering, plus the burden of increased risk of homicide.

On the basis of this lower figure alone, the total cost to the United States of the almost 5 million
domestic violence cases per year is about $460 billion. In other words, if we could find a way to
reduce these incidents by half, the benefits would be the same as making the country at least $230
billion better off every year. That’s nearly 10 times the entire annual Justice Department budget.

The global costs are also huge. Using the same methodology, Fearon and Hoeffler calculate that the
annual cost of domestic violence internationally totals an astonishing $4.3 trillion. If we could cut
that in half, the benefits would be 15 times the $142 billion the world spends annually on global aid
programs.

Yet we know relatively little about how to halt abuse. Many behavioral campaigns rely on messages
condemning violence. These may have helped to bring the issue to our attention, but promoting fear
and shame does not appear to change the behavior of abusers.

Small-scale studies have shown promising signs in some areas: In Britain, bars whose staffs were
trained to reduce the consumption of alcohol by already intoxicated customers was found to
decrease violence by patrons by 10 percent, compared with bars without such training. This policy
was shown to have benefits worth 17 times the very low cost of implementation. In the state of
Washington, an initiative in which social service and welfare officers made early responses to at-risk
homes was found to have benefits to society of about 14 times the program’s costs.

But it is clear there is no silver bullet. That is why we are undertaking research to find out more —
and ultimately to identify cost-effective solutions. Given the huge toll, domestic violence deserves
much more of the world’s attention and resources.