When Catherine Dingle was fatally stabbed in front of horrified onlookers in Hilo in May 2010, she became the fifth woman in the first five months of that year to die as a result of domestic violence in Hawaii.

Her death, allegedly at the hands of her husband, underscored two disturbing trends.

Since 2004, the rate of men killing women locally has risen steadily, with Hawaii ranked eighth in the nation in the number per capita, according to a new study by a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that analyzed FBI supplemental homicide data for 2009, the latest year available. The Hawaii rate of 1.72 victims per 100,000 population was the highest recorded in the state since at least the late 1990s and marked the first time the islands cracked the top 10, the Violence Policy Center study showed.

Dingle’s killing also reflected a phenomenon that has perplexed advocates and others in the domestic violence community: Filipinos in Hawaii are dying as a result of domestic disputes at disproportionate rates — greater than any other ethnic group. Dingle was Filipino, as is her alleged murderer.

Between 2000 and 2007, the period for which the most recent data are available, Filipinos represented nearly a third of the 51 adult male and female domestic violence fatalities in the islands, even though that ethnic group made up only 14 percent of Hawaii’s adult population, according to a state panel reviewing the fatalities.

The 51 victims included male abusers who committed suicide or were killed, often by the abused woman.

No other ethnic group came close to comprising a third of the victims.

And the percentage is expected to rise because of at least five Filipino fatalities since 2008, including the Dingle murder. Another Hawaii island case involved a Filipino man who in December 2009 fatally shot his estranged Filipina girlfriend before taking his own life.

The over-representation of Filipinos was alarming enough that a group of Filipinas, prompted by the Dingle homicide, formed a grass-roots organization, Ating Bahay, or Our House, to address the problem. As a result of their efforts, a conference is being held Tuesday in Hilo to discuss what the Filipino community can do to help reduce domestic abuse within their ranks. Dingle’s death came only five months after the 2009 murder-suicide.

"We realized that the system wasn’t working for us," said Rose Bautista, a co-founder of Ating Bahay and Hawaii County’s immigration information specialist.

FILIPINO ACTIVISTS and victims’ advocates have long struggled with what many agree is a problem that seems to especially affect the Filipino immigrant community in Hawaii.

In 2002, the Domestic Violence Action Center started the Pilipina Rural Project, a program partly designed to address the over-representation of Filipinos in fatality cases. More recently, the center has embarked on a project to examine the effects of domestic violence on Filipino and Native Hawaiian women and girls along Oahu’s Leeward Coast.

Hawaiians are another ethnic group that state studies have shown are disproportionately affected by intimate-partner abuse.

Cornelia Soberano, a state social worker who co-founded the Maui Filipino Working Group, said domestic violence is a particular problem in the Filipino immigrant community, partly because of what is known as "utang na loob," or debt of gratitude.

Filipinas who come to the United States relying on the citizenship status of their husbands feel indebted to the men, even if the relationship turns bad, she said. Often, the women are unaware of what options they have or services that are available that would allow them to escape the abuse, Soberano, Bautista and other Filipino advocates said. Language barriers frequently contribute to the awareness problem.

Cultural factors, such as deep religious convictions, a reluctance to bring shame to the family, an unwillingness to subject children to a divorce and the notion that family problems must be solved privately, also tend to keep the women from leaving, they said.

"Filipino values that victims have tend to make them stay in abusive relationships," Soberano said.

Advocates also say the threat of deportation, even if not credible, will keep some immigrant women in bad relationships because they are unaware that U.S. law provides special protections allowing domestic violence victims to stay in the country legally.

For those and other reasons, advocates say, abused women often suffer in silence.

"They have been rendered voiceless," said Lillian Tavares, formerly a victims’ advocate for the Hawaii Police Department.

Dingle, 38, was among those who kept her marital problems mostly to herself, according to her cousin, Kurtis Gebin.

Dingle came to Hawaii about 20 years ago relying on her husband’s citizenship, and was reluctant to end the marriage because of her four young children, Gebin said. She also was reluctant to reach out for help, he added.

"If she would’ve confided in us, I think we could’ve avoided what happened," Gebin said. "I wish she would’ve confided in us."

Dingle was stabbed multiple times in May 2010 along a heavily traveled road on Hilo’s bayfront. Onlookers subdued the suspect until police arrived. The stabbing happened on the 17th birthday of one of the couple’s three sons.

Dingle’s husband, Steve, was charged with second-degree murder and is scheduled to go on trial in February.

The killing became the tipping point that prompted Bautista and the other women to form Ating Bahay.

"How could we as a community continue to stay on the sidelines and not do anything?" she said. "I just felt like something had to be done."

WITHIN DAYS, the group organized a Hilo rally in honor of Dingle that drew more than 200 people. At Christmas, a Filipino-style celebration was held to emphasize positive outlets for families as a way to prevent violence. In February, the women conducted a community forum to generate further discussion on intimate-partner violence.

Bautista said this week’s invitation-only conference is designed to develop domestic violence prevention strategies within the Filipino community and to engage and empower its members to become more active in solving the problem.

"We’re not going to rely on the system," she said.

According to the data from the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review team, 98 deaths — 54 men, 44 women — occurred as a result of domestic violence from 2000 through 2009. Among the 54 men, the vast majority, or 47, were abusers who were killed, often by their abused partner, or committed suicide, the review team said. Among the 44 women, only six were abusive; 30 were abuse victims.

The ethnicity data covered only 51 deaths through 2007 because information from cases in the remaining two years still must be added to the database, a team spokeswoman said. Of those 51, 16 were Filipino.

The tendency of Filipinos to be over-represented in domestic violence homicides is not unique to Hawaii.

In a February 2010 study by the Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence, the San Francisco-based organization found that Filipinos represented the largest ethnic group among victims in 160 cases it analyzed nationally based on newspaper clippings. The 160 cases from 2000 through 2005 involved 280 victims from Asian and Pacific islander families. Filipinos totaled 57 of the 280 fatalities, or 20 percent. American Indians represented the next largest group, at 16 percent.

From a statistical perspective, the number of Filipino fatalities in Hawaii is small enough that one should not draw any generalizations about what causes the over-representation, according to Neil Websdale, a Northern Arizona University criminal justice professor and director of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative.

Nor should anyone conclude that Filipinos, because of their culture, are predisposed to resorting to violence, he added.

"It’s not the culture itself," Websdale said.

If one were to analyze the individual fatalities, particularly among immigrants, Websdale said he suspects some killers likely had difficulty coping in their new community, felt emotionally isolated and silently suffered from acute shame and frustration for not being able to live up to societal expectations of being an adequate husband, father, provider and the like.

"When they fail to live up to this, it hits them very, very hard," Websdale said, and many abusers, unable to articulate their frustrations, deal with the shame by resorting to violence.

The rate of men killing women throughout Hawaii has more than doubled since 2004, when it was 0.63 per 100,000 population, according to the Violence Policy study.

The education foundation’s analysis focused only on incidents of a man killing a woman and noted that 11 such cases were recorded in Hawaii in 2009. The report was released to mark the beginning of October’s Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Joe Bloom, who has two decades of experience in the domestic violence treatment field, recalled that 2009 was notable in Hawaii for having a cluster of fatalities in a relatively short time.

"My hope (was) that the year was an enigma for DV deaths," Bloom said. "My fear is that relationship violence at all levels, then as now, continues to suffer from a severe case of apathy and indifference. We have a long way to go."