Approximately 40 States, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands list
in their statutes specific acts that constitute domestic violence.6
Most common among these are sexual assault, assault or
battery, causing physical harm or serious injury, threatening
or placing a victim in fear of harm, harassment, stalking,
trespassing, damage to property, kidnapping, and unlawful
restraint. Approximately 11 States and Puerto Rico include child
abuse in their civil definitions of domestic violence.7
The civil
definitions in Colorado include violence or threatened violence
against an animal that is owned by a victim of domestic violence,
and injuring or killing an animal as a means of