Washington ? Criminal violence against intimate partners fell by nearly two-thirds in recent years and has reached a record low, according to preliminary government figures.

The declines were greatest for nonfatal attacks, which fell by about 65 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. Homicides among intimate partners dropped by roughly a third.

The figures are based on the annual National Crime Victimization Survey, which counts criminal abuse against spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends and former spouses, whether it’s been reported to police or not. The information, collected in thousands of confidential interviews, is the most widely used instrument for charting U.S. crime trends.

Because nonfatal attacks are hundreds of times more common than fatal ones, the overall drop in U.S. criminal abuse of intimate partners approaches two-thirds. That’s the lowest abuse rate since the crime survey began in 1973.

“It’s very good news,” said Frank Zimring, a criminologist at Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California-Berkeley.

“There’s no way to apportion the credit precisely,” Zimring added, but the decline began in 1994 as states and the federal government launched major efforts against intimate abuse.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, legislatures have passed at least 660 measures aimed at curbing domestic violence since then. In 1994, the federal Violence Against Women Act authorized massive new aid from Washington for shelters, treatment, new police initiatives and research. To date, that’s totaled $5.6 billion.

The effectiveness of the effort shows most clearly, analysts said, in a seemingly perverse trend: a sharp drop in the number and proportion of men killed by female partners. Thirty years ago, women and men were killed by intimates in nearly equal numbers. By 2004, however, 1,159 women were killed by intimates but only 385 men were. The imbalance persists in 2005 figures, due out next month, according to statistician Marianne Zawitz of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The disproportion in fatalities, while seemingly adverse to women, reflects a major gain, said Richard Gelles, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice: Abusive men are killed less often now because women can get free of them more easily.