Systematic reviews and meta-analyses on domestic violence suggest that women are just as likely (if not more) to perpetrate Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) as men are and the literature is also solid on the fact that domestic violence is not part of a patriarchal system that subordinates women. Despite this, there remain very few domestic violence shelters for men
- Archer 2000
- Meta-analysis done by the journal Psychological Bulletin found that women are more likely to commit an act of physical aggression against an intimate partner
- Women were slightly more likely (d = -.05) than men to use one or more act of physical aggression and to use such acts more frequently. Men were more likely (d = . 15) to inflict an injury, and overall, 62% of those injured by a partner were women
- Hamel 2012
- Study collecting meta-analyses of 1,700 studies by The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) confirmed that women are more likely to perpetrate domestic violence than men and that victimization between the sexes is similar
- “Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)...Among school and college samples, percentage of bidirectional violence was 51.9%; 16.2% was MFPV and 31.9% was FMPV”
- More than one in four women (28.3%) and one in five men (21.6%) reported perpetrating physical violence in an intimate relationship
- “Male and female IPV perpetrated from similar motives – primarily to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.”
- Fiebert 2014
- A huge collection of 343 scholarly investigations (270 empirical studies and 73 literature reviews) shows that women are as physically aggressive as men (or more) in their relationships with their spouses or opposite-sex partners
- Aggregate sample size exceeded 440,850 people
- Davis 2010
- When you aggregate domestic-violence related suicides and homicides caused by intimate partners, men die of domestic violence related deaths more than women
- “When domestic violence related suicides are combined with domestic violence homicides, the total numbers of domestic violence related deaths are higher for males than females.”
- Williams et al. 2005
- “Studies of undergraduate college students found that men sustained higher levels of moderate violence than women with severe violence being rare for both women and men (Katz, Kuffel, & Coblentz, 2002) and 29% of males and 35% of females reported perpetrating physical aggression; 12.5% of the males and 4.5% of the females reported receiving severe physical aggression; 14% of females reported that they were the sole perpetrators of aggression — injuries were sustained by 8.4% of males and 5% of females (Hines & Saudino, 2002). These rates, which suggest gender symmetry in the perpetration of relationship violence, are not unique and Fiebert (2004) has amassed a bibliography of 159 peer-reviewed publications finding equal or greater aggression by females than males. The total collected sample is greater than 109,000. An earlier version was published in 1997 (Fiebert, 1997).”
- Carney et al. 2007
- “As our discussion demonstrates, female perpetrated abuse in intimate relationships is at least as common as male abuse, often extends to the same degree of severity, can result in serious negative outcomes for male and female victims, and seems to reflect a common set of background causes. Contrary to early socio-political explanations, which proposed that women's use of aggression reflected primarily, or solely, self-defense strategies in response to male initiated abuse, women are known to commit unilateral abuse.”
- Hamel et al. 2007
- A review of the literature on sex differences in controlling behavior found: “When comparing men's and women's use of controlling behaviors, research using nonselected samples has found that there are no differences in their overall use...The research reviewed suggests that there are no consistent sex differences in the use of controlling behavior and that even in samples selected for high rates of male aggression, women sometimes also report using comparative frequencies of controlling behavior.”
- Straus et al. 2006
- “With these limitations in mind, the results of this study suggest important conclusions about two widely held beliefs: that partner violence is an almost uniquely male crime, and that when men hit their partners it is primarily to dominate women, whereas partner violence by women is an act of self defense or an act of desperation in response to male dominance and brutality. These beliefs were not supported by the results of this study. Instead, we found, as have many other studies, about equal rates of assaulting a dating partner by male and female students. Our investigation of risk factors also produced results that contradict the male dominance/female self-defense belief. The relationship to minor assaults of all 21 of the risk factors, including score on the Dominance scale, was parallel for men and women. For severe assaults, of the 12 risk factors found to be associated, we found no significant difference between men and women in nine of them, again including Dominance. Or putting it the other way around, 75% of the risk factors that were found to be associated with severely assaulting a dating partner were parallel for men and women. It may be more than a coincidence that our review of previous research also found that about 75% of the variables related to partner violence were related for both men and women...In short, partner violence is more a gender-inclusive family system problem than a problem of a patriarchal social system that enforces male dominance by violence.”
- Domestic violence between men and women therefore tends to happen for the same reasons as opposed to fundamentally different reasons as is oftentimes claimed by feminists
- Brown 2004
- Researcher in 2004 finds that going by several key criteria known to establish the “battered woman” defense, abused men fit the profile better than abused women which is important to consider since many people who murder their spouses are often trapped in abusive relationships themselves and their murder is thus seen as either being retaliatory or in self-defense
- “All of the evidence indicates that abused men fit the theory of the "battered woman" better than abused women do.”
- Straus 2011
- Meta-analytic review of 91 empirical studies finds that women commit higher levels of severe or ‘clinical level’[3] domestic assaults: “The median percentage of men who severely assaulted a partner was 5.1%, compared to a median of 7.1% for severe assaults by the women in these studies. The median percentage that the rate of severe assaults by women was of the rate of severe assaults by men is 145%, which indicates that almost half again more women than men severely attacked a partner.”
- Straus et al. 1989
- Analysis of two surveys consisting of 5,768 couples finds that large numbers of non-abusive men are severely assaulted by their female partners, namely that women are over 2.7 times as likely to perpetrate severe aggression against non-violent men than men are to perpetrate severe aggression against non-violent women
- In terms of dating violence, the disparity is even larger with women being 125 times as likely to perpetrate severe aggression against a non-violent male partner than men are to perpetrate severe aggression against non-violent female partners
