POVERTY, DRUGS LINKED TO VIOLENCE AGAINST U.S WOMEN

BOSTON (Reuters) - Two studies on violence against women found that
alcohol, drugs and unemployment contribute dramatically to the likelihood
that a woman will be beaten.

And while the authors of one study report that the attacker is most likely
to be a former husband, estranged husband or ex-boyfriend, the researchers
behind a second study say more than half the inner-city women who are
beaten are attacked by neighbors, family members or other women.

The studies, published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine,
compared the cases of 661 victims of violence treated in emergency rooms to
the cases of 1,179 girls and women who came to medical facility for other
problems.

The first, involving eight medical centers and led by Dr. Demetrios
Kyriacou of the Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, Calif., found
that the risk of being injured from a domestic violence incident was:

- - 3.6 times higher if the male partner abused alcohol;

- - 3.5 times greater if he used illegal drugs;

- - 3.1 times higher if he didn't have a steady job;

The researchers also found that women involved with men who were high
school dropouts were 2.5 times more likely to be the victims of domestic
violence.

The second study was based on the cases of 405 adolescents and women in a
poor Philadelphia neighborhood. It found that the male partners of the
injured women were more than three times more likely to have used cocaine
and more than four times more likely to have an arrest record than the male
partners of women in the control group.

One-third of the women who were attacked tested positive for cocaine.

In the Philadelphia study, "53 percent of violent injuries to the women had
been perpetuated by persons other than their partners," according to the
research team, led by Dr. Jeane Ann Grisso of the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Dr. Martha Minow of Harvard Law School said in an accompanying editorial
the studies's results "are not surprising."

But they do focus attention, she wrote, on the problem of violence against
women at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule on the
constitutionality of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which gave women
the right to file civil rights lawsuits against men who sexually attack them.

The law was passed because too many states and municipalities treat cases
of domestic violence and assaults on women less seriously than they do
attacks against men, Minow said.

More than one in five women will be injured by domestic violence at some
point in their lives. The rate of serious injury is nearly one in 10.