Facts

• At least three million (and as many as 10 million) children witness domestic violence incidents each year in the U.S., and approximately nine million adolescents have witnessed serious violence during their lifetimes.
• Approximately 16,000 people die annually due to homicide in the U.S. and the number of emergency room visits for assaults is two million.
• In 2010, in incidents of murder for which the relationships of murder victims and offenders were known, 53% were killed by someone they knew (acquaintance, neighbor, friend, boyfriend, etc.).
• By a conservative estimate, approximately 3,000 children annually experience a parent, ex–spouse, or partner killing another (uxoricide).
• Roughly 64% of uxoricides occurred with the child in the home and 43% of the children either witnessed the murder or found the body.
• The 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. is suicide with a total of 38,364 in 2010 that is the equivalent of one person every 15 minutes and more than 700,000 emergency room visits are due to self-inflicted injuries.
• There were 7,446 murder-suicide events captured for the United States between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2009. A total of 15,748 individuals died and 1,314 were injured in those events.
• The number of unintentional injury deaths in 2010 was more than 120,000, and the number of emergency visits for unintentional injuries was 29.3 million.
• Approximately 2.3 million active duty, National Guard, and Reserve service members have deployed since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and almost 60% of U.S. service members have family responsibilities, resulting in two million U.S. children exposed to at least one parental wartime deployment in the past 10 years.
• In 2012, there were approximately 400,000 American “AIDS orphans,” or any child who has lost a parent to HIV or who has a parent sick with the disease.
• One in every 28 children in America – or more than 2.7 million children – has a parent behind bars. Among African–American children, one in nine, or 11.4%, has a parent in jail.
• In September 2011, there were an estimated 400,540 children in foster care, and more than a quarter (27%) were in relative homes, and nearly half (47%) were in nonrelative foster family homes.
• In 2011, of the 73.7 million children under the age of 18, 28% (20.6 million) lived with one parent, and 4% of children lived with no parent. Approximately more than half of the children living with no parents were living with grandparents.

*Information was compiled from a variety of government, university, and non–profit sources.