A report out Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said homicide is now the fifth-leading cause of death for women ages 18 to 44. In 2015 alone, 3,519 women and girls were killed. More than half of the killings were perpetrated by current or former boyfriends, husbands, or other intimate partners. Women who are racial and ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected.

The CDC earlier this year launched an effort to stop such deaths by trying to focus on when the relationships begin to go wrong. It starts with the recognition of what public health officials and researchers call intimate-partner violence and police might refer to as domestic violence.

Calling it a ‘‘serious preventable public health problem that affects millions of Americans,’’ the CDC emphasizes that it can happen across a life span from when people start dating in their teens to old age. According to data from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, nearly 1 in 4 adult women and about 1 in 7 men in the United States report having experienced some kind of severe physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner.

washington post