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• The Truth About Domestic Violence

  The most recent large-scale study of domestic violence was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2007. (Differences
  in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With
  Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence) The researchers
  analyzed data concerning 11,370 respondents. According to the researchers, “[H]alf of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In non-reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the
  cases.” (This study is illustrated in the diagram below from the Psychiatric
  News, 8/3/07).

  A quarter of the women surveyed admitted perpetrating violence, and when the
  violence involved both parties, women were more likely to have been the first
  to strike.

  Such findings are consistent with decades of domestic violence research. The
  National Institute of Mental Health funded and oversaw two of the largest
  studies of domestic violence ever conducted, both of which found equal rates of
  abuse between husbands and wives.

  Martin Fiebert, a professor at California
  State Long
  Beach University,
  maintains an online bibliography summarizing 219 scholarly investigations, with
  an aggregate sample size exceeding 220,000, which concludes “women are as
  physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with
  their spouses or male partners.”

  A meta-analytic review of 552 domestic violence studies published in the
  Psychological Bulletin found that 38% of the physical injuries in heterosexual
  domestic assaults are suffered by men.

  Dr. Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling of the University of South Alabama
  says that as she and other researchers grappled with this research, “Every time
  we tried to say that women’s intimate partner abuse is different than men’s,
  the evidence did not support it.”

  According to Dr. Donald Dutton, author of Rethinking Domestic Violence,
  research shows that domestic violence is actually more common in lesbian
  relationships than in heterosexual relationships. For example, one study of
  1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships found
  that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous
  relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.

  Domestic violence treatment providers justify their exclusion of male
  victims by citing crime and/or crime survey statistics which show that most
  reports of domestic violence are by women. Dr. Dutton explains:

  “Domestic violence ‘research’ has been misleading, in that data has been
  extracted from crime reports and/or crime victim surveys, in which men
  under-report more than women, and have been publicized as indicating domestic
  violence is a gender issue, (male=perpetrator / female=victims.)

  “In fact, when larger surveys with representative samples are examined,
  perpetration of domestic violence is slightly more common for females…”