Pia Zadora faces charges of domestic battery. Why?

Singer-actress Pia Zadora has been arrested on suspicion of domestic battery and coercion after a disturbance at her Las Vegas home.

The 61-year-old Zadora was booked Saturday into a detention center and released after posting $4,000 bail.

She was arrested about 11 a.m., some six hours after police responded to a disturbance call at her home.

Police declined to release the name of the victim and other details, saying further information would be released Monday.

Zadora has been married to her third husband, Las Vegas police detective Michael Jeffries, since 2005. The couple met after Zadora contacted police to report a stalking incident.

After working as a child actress on Broadway, she appeared in various movies. When her film career failed to take off, she became a singer of popular standards.

As The Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this year, the rate of violence or abuse between husband and wife – or any two intimate partners – has been on the wane in America, falling by a stunning 64 percent between 1994 and 2010.

"That finding, from a recent report by the US Department of Justice on intimate partner violence (IPV), parallels the overall drop in violent crime during that period. Many in the field cite a broad shift in attitudes that began in the 1980s and '90s, crediting public awareness campaigns, national legislation protecting victims, and subsequent training of police and prosecutors to recognize intimate partner violence as a crime, rather than as a private matter.

“There has been an enormous shift in public awareness about domestic violence – the message [to victims] being you are not alone and you can report what is happening to you to law enforcement,” says law professor Suzanne Goldberg, director of Columbia University's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. The message to perpetrators, meanwhile, is that violence against an intimate partner “is not a badge of manhood,” she adds."

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.