Domestic violence and gender - An XY collection

There is a persistent debate, in both community and academic circles, regarding domestic violence and gender, and in particular, whether women's domestic violence against men is as common as men's domestic violence against women. The following articles are useful contributions to this debate. While they acknowledge women's domestic violence, they show that the claim of gender symmetry in domestic violence is not supported by the evidence.

The evidence is that:

  • The problem of domestic / family / intimate partner violence is largely a problem of violence by men, against women and children.
  • Comparing men’s violence against female partners and ex-partners and women’s violence against male partners and ex-partners, men’s violence:
    • Is far more common
    • Has much worse impacts
    • Is far less likely to be in self-defence
  • If we only ‘count violent acts’, men appear to be 1 in 3 or 4 of victims of intimate partner violence. But as soon as we look at impact, meaning, context, and history, we find profound gender contrasts, demonstrating that men are a far smaller proportion of victims.

See below for key articles on domestic violence and gender, in full text. The articles by Allen, Braaf and Meyering (2013), and Meyer and Frost (2019) are good places to start. For a really short piece, see Flood's 2-page summary of his 2012 seminar. The articles include:

Also see the following:

For statistics and data on domestic and partner violence in Australia, see e.g.;

Update: Advocates of claims regarding gender symmetry in domestic violence, and critics of feminist perspectives, include people such as Dutton and Straus. Recent critiques of Dutton's and Straus's work are made for example by DeKeseredy, Gondolf, Johnson, and Stark, and samples of their work are now available below.