Domestic Violence is NOT gendered: what does this mean for children?

A brief look at a ground-breaking study

The mainstream narrative around domestic violence is that men commit it, women (and children) suffer. Men are perpetrators, women are victims, children are witnesses.

But this narrative is just not correct. Women are just as likely to commit DV as men. There is a large amount of research that demonstrates this, and the various manipulations and cover-ups that have to be performed to maintain the facade are being called out ever louder.

A quick example of this can be seen in a post last week from TheTinMen, pointing out that half of DV is violence going both ways, while one-way violence is far more likely to be women-on-man than man-on-woman. Previously, TheTinMen referenced the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge which has accumulated 1700 studies world-wide on DV. Meta-analysis of these studies showed that over the lifetime:

23% of women and 19.3% of men experienced abuse

28.3% of women and 21.6% of men perpetrated abuse

There are many ways to examine and assess the prevalence of DV, such as interviewing men in gaol, or women in refuges. But these do not tell us how prevalent DV is in the community.

One reliable methodology for examining prevalence was used by the famous Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a 21 year longitudinal birth cohort study starting in 1972 that followed over a thousand ordinary people throughout their lives and interviewed both them and their partners to see how many were involved in domestic violence.

The study showed higher levels of both perpetration by women and victimisation for men.

Note that the other columns represent the 1985 National Family Violence Survey (NFVS;n=397) and the 1983 National Youth Survey (NYS; n=477). In all these surveys, the numbers for female perpetration, and male victimisation, were higher.

These results were replicated in a similar longitudinal study (mentioned HERE) in Christchurch in 1977, that followed over a thousand people until age 25. Similar numbers of men and women reported violent acts against their partners - 6.7 per cent of men and 5.5 per cent of women said they had carried out minor assaults such as pushing or shoving, and 2.8 per cent of men and 3.2 per cent of women reported severe assaults such as punching, kicking or beating up their partners.

The methodology used was inherently reliable, as subjects of the longitudinal study would bring their partners along, with both members of couples being interviewed separately and asked a variety of questions to catalogue both abusive and positive behaviours. The study found that couples agreed on both the fact that abuse took place and the extent of that abuse.

Bettina Arndt, who HERE wrote a very informative article on this issue some years back, records one of the author’s surprised comments at these outcomes:

“We asked the girls questions like “Have you hit your partner? Have you thrown your partner across the room? Have you used a knife on your partner?” I thought we were wasting our time asking these questions but they said yes, and they said yes in just the same numbers as the boys did.”

The burning question is, why do feminists and the mainstream media ignore this research and claim that men are ‘overwhelmingly’ the perpetrators of domestic violence? Why not tell the truth, that the latest ABS survey (2021-22) shows in most of its numbers that violence against women is falling?

These declining numbers are even more pronounced when you go back and manually compare them with data from the 1996 Women’s Safety Survey.

Most feminist commentators and researchers tend to focus on areas in which women suffer more, as they do indeed experience higher rates of violence by many metrics, including higher impact and more severe violence, and often for different motives.

The greater damage inflicted by male DV is hardly surprising. Given the same level of intent, a stronger and larger person will inflict more damage. 

If you are looking at DV from a female perspective, it is reasonable to focus on calling out and ending the most severe forms of violence which do so much damage. From a female perspective, the solution is simply to remove the male: and this is the response that we have adopted. Unfortunately, this response is extended to all areas of potential danger – it is not restricted to cases of serious violence or even potential serious violence. It encompasses minimal violence or threats of violence; of exactly the same type the research indicates is perpetrated primarily by women.

But even more importantly, from a child’s perspective, they are now alone with a woman who, in this case of mutual or symmetric DV, is in reality just as much a perpetrator of abuse.

And her target for any abuse has now been removed.

In many cases she will seek a new target, and that target will often be her own children.

And the father, whose mere presence as a witness may have been enough to restrain her worst urges, will be gone.

She will now be living as a single mother, with all the additional social and financial pressures, stresses and complications that this brings, and again with no-one to take her frustrations out on except the children.

And where she had been likely to come off second-best in a confrontation with the father due to simple biology, now it is the children who are more likely to suffer, particularly the smaller children that research shows women have a tendency to target.

From a female perspective it makes sense to remove the man and to treat the ‘woman-and-children’ as some sort of peculiar combined victim-class - because the child will not be a threat to the woman – but from a child-centred perspective, removing the man increases the chance the child will be harmed, either by the mother, or by a step-father she may bring into the family, with research showing that stepfathers are far more dangerous to children than biological fathers.

From a child’s perspective we will often make the world a much more dangerous place by removing its father.

To keep children safe, we must accept what studies such as Dunedin are telling us - women can be as abusive as men.