In the victimization survey, what we do is we ask about very specific acts of violence, and so for anyone who says yes, then we follow up with a series of questions to get at the nature of the violence and the extent of the violence. One of the questions we ask is whether the police ever found out about the incident. So we ask the woman or man if the police found out. If the police did find out, we also then ask if they reported the violence or someone else reported the violence.
So if you've got in your sample x number of people reporting violence, the subpopulation of that is who reported to the police and who didn't. Now, the 37% or 36% or so who do report spousal violence is actually in keeping now with the overall rate of violent crime. So if you look at violent crime that's committed by others, non-spousal, the rate of reporting is also around 34%. So in fact when we saw that huge increase between 1993 and 1999 in reporting, probably what was contributing to it was all the work that was going on at the community level--better police training, pro charging, encouraging people to report the violence.
The question is, now that it has levelled off between 1999 and 2004 and it's consistent with other violent crime, is this the plateau now? Have we reached the plateau? Will we see a further increase in reporting?