Over the past decades, violence against women has been recognized as a serious and pervasive problem. Random-sample survey showed that more than 25% of American women are violently victimized at some time during their lives. This victimization includes physical assaults, attempted or completed sexual assaults as well as stalking. Nearly 2 % of American women are violently victimized in a 12-month period Although men are more likely than women to be the victim of a violent crime (89 % of males currently 12 yrs or older compared with 73 % of females 12 yrs or older), women`s fear of crime is greater than that of men`s .Fifty four percent of the violent victimization reported by women is perpetrated by someone they know (i.e., an intimate partner, another relative, a friend or an acquaintance) compared with 45 % perpetrated by strangers. For men, the numbers are nearly identical but reversed (44 % of the violent victimizations are perpetrated by strangers .Despite the extent and seriousness of women`s violent victimization (which is primarily an intimate-partner violence) , it has only been within the past 30yrs that violence against women has been recognized as a social problem. In fact, it was not until 1989 that the US department of justice began including it in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The major source of official data on criminal victimization in the US estimates the incidence of rape and violence perpetrated by intimates and other family members .What accounts for this over sight? Certainly, it is not the case that violence against women is a "new" problem. Indeed, social scientists have documented that the physical and sexual abuse of women by intimates has occurred for centuries. But as Wright Mills pointed out in 1959, a problem does not become a social problem until it is no longer seen as a "personal trouble" and instead is viewed as a public issue. Until the 1970s, wife abuse was viewed as a private matter, a problem of a few dysfunctional couples. And sexual assault was a crime committed by mentally unstable men or men who were provoked by women who led them on, dressed provocatively or consented to sex and then changed their minds afterward. Terms such as "wife rape" and "date rape" didn`t even exist.