Nightly News   |  December 14, 2011

CDC: 1 in 4 women violently attacked

One in four women say they were violently attacked by their intimate partners, according to a government survey released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One in five women said they had been sexually assaulted. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.

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This content comes from a Full-Text Transcript of the program.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor: We got some startling new numbers from the CDC today based on a new survey of domestic violence. One in four women in this country reported being violently attacked by a husband or boyfriend, a number researchers even called astounding. One in five women said they'd been sexually assaulted. Some experts were skeptical of the 1.3 million sexual assaults reported in this study, saying the number is far higher than the Department of Justice 's own estimate, just under 190,000 rapes last year.