More than one in five adults have been abused or physically assaulted by their partner, including a quarter of all women, and almost three million were abused in their childhood, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
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In findings that show how widespread the problem of family and sexual violence is in the community, the ABS reported that 2.7 million women and 1.5 million men have experienced violence or abuse from their partner.
The rates or violence and abuse directed at women was much greater than at men.
Seventeen per cent of women reported being physically attacked by their partner, three times the rate among men, while 23 per cent experienced emotional abuse (men, 14 per cent) and 16 per cent were subject to economic abuse (men, 7.8 per cent).
In a particularly disturbing finding in light of the significant financial strain currently being felt by many households, the ABS said that stress about money was associated with violence and abuse directed by a partner toward women.
"Women living in households with one or more cash flow problems were more likely to have experienced partner violence or abuse in the previous two years than those in households that didn't have cash flow problems," ABS head of crime and justice statistics Will Milne said.
The ABS' personal safety survey also found that 2.7 million adults had suffered abuse during their childhood, most commonly from someone they knew.
Almost 2 million were abused by an adult family member and nearly 380,000 were abused by an adult in an institutional setting.
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The ABS survey found that almost 800,000 women who had experienced violence from a partner while living together were pregnant at some point in their relationship, including 42 per cent who were attacked during their pregnancy and 17 per cent who experienced partner violence for the first time while pregnant.
The results follow estimates that 28 women have been killed by a current or former male partner so far this year.
While rates of intimate partner homicide fluctuate from year to year, there has been a steady decline in the overall trend in the past decade.
But indigenous women experience much higher rates of partner violence than the broader population, including eight times the rate of homicide.
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