The reason people have such a skewed perspective on domestic violence is that they take complex relationship issues and whittle them down into oversimplified soundbyte narratives like "the man was abusing the woman" or "the woman was abusing the man".
Most domestic violence is actually reciprocal rather than unidirectional, and the public usually only sees the tail end of the breakdown.
Perhaps the most interesting quote from the above article is the following:
Quote:
As in many studies of IPV (intimate partner violence), the OYS found that much IPV is bidirectional (meaning both are violent), and in unidirectional abusive relationships, the women were more likely to be abusive than the men.
The study found that a young woman's IPV was just as predictive of her male partner's future IPV as the man's own past IPV. In other words, whereas we often think of men as the only abusers and also as serial abusers, the OYS found that a woman's violence against her man was as predictive of his violence to her as his own history of violence.
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Evidently, an individual tends to carry violence from relationship to relationship, bidirectional DV is more common than unidirectional, and DV is more often than not initiated by women. But this initiation often does not appear in statistics because it is not reported. Instead, the relationship problems prolong and escalate behind closed doors for a long time until eventually someone gets hurt. This is usually the woman due to the size difference. Clearly the buildup doesn't excuse the extent of the final incident, but it's still important to move away from the "he was beating her for
no reason" paradigm.
An explanation is not an excuse; however, these findings do sound particularly relevant to the original incident talked about in this thread.
And although these findings go against conventional wisdom about DV, it should still make some sense. After all, society unanimously condemns male-on-female violence, but feels relatively ambivalent about female-on-male violence, and often
glorifies it.
The saddest part is that these findings about DV are not new, they have simply been
suppressed all these years. Erin Pizzey, the woman who started the battered women's shelter movement in England in the '70s, did not offer many resources for men simply because she could not get the funding. By the time she finished her book
Prone to Violence on the cycle of violence and the true nature of DV, feminists had already decided on hijacking the narrative and
falsifying statistics, turning it into the hypersensitive unilateral myth that we hear today. Pizzey received
death threats and bomb threats until she finally fled the country, likely because she was merely an expert with a dissenting view.