Domestic violence statistics.

I've spend a bit of my free time to research into the subject of domestic violence. 

I think it's quite a useful thing to do, as I can get a better understanding of how important (or not) this particular issue is to the society nowadays. It also helped me to create a rough image of my target audience and how many people would find the topic of domestic violence interesting or at least be able to understand it.

- '1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have been victims of [some form of] physical violence by an intimate partner within their lifetime.' - that gives us the idea, that we might get a broad audience of people, who would find the theme illustrated in our thriller, in one way or another, close to them; however, I think younger people, like teenagers, who might not have yet experienced any long-term relationships wouldn't be interested in seeing our film, as they wouldn't associate themselves with main characters. On the other hand, teenagers may associate the story with their parents, if they've experienced domestic violence from the older members of their families.

- 'On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.' - that statistic backs up the information from above - domestic violence IS an important issue in our society, so we would probably have a big target audience of people, who have ever experienced, seen or been told about domestic aggression. However, if somebody is really struggling through the domestic abuse from his partner, they wouldn't necessarily go to the cinema (or they might not even be allowed to), on the other hand, they might think it's just too much - experiencing abuse at home, but also seeing it on the screen during their leisure time.

 - 'Women between the ages of 18-24 are most commonly abused by an intimate partner' - that's a really interesting one! In one of my previous blogs I've predicted that our target audience will be 'female, aged 18-24', and now, after the short research I see that this type of people suffer from domestic abuse most, which is good (only) in terms of finding the right audience for our product.

- 'Domestic victimisation is correlated with a higher rate of depression and suicidal behaviour.' - also similar, to what I've already found out in the process of pre-production: domestic abuse and mental disorders really go along with each other, both for the victim, which may suffer from something like anxiety or PTSD, and the abuser, who probably has some sort of anger issues.