Everyone knows domestic violence is a terrible thing. Everyone also knows that it’s mostly men beating women. Everyone is wrong.

Over at RealClear Investigations, psychology professor and author Christopher J. Ferguson calls it “the last taboo.” What’s taboo? The idea that women initiate or engage in domestic violence as much as, or in some cases even more, than men do. Ferguson cited a 2021 study of more than 35,000 teens in British Columbia, Canada, that found physical abuse by girls against boys in dating relationships was much higher than physical abuse by boys against adolescent girls.

Of course, Ferguson acknowledges that a single study doesn’t prove anything about the universe of domestic violence. But we do have some evidence that girls or women can be violent, and in some cases, such as the study above, as or more violent than men and boys in certain contexts.

We have a hard time discussing the fact that women are not always only victims when it comes to domestic abuse, or that they can be co-abusers along with the men. Our cultural emotional embargo against seeing women as perpetrators instead of victims is strong, and it’s probably due in part to the “women are wonderful” effect. We’re more likely to attribute positive character traits to women, and negative ones to men, quite aside from what reality shows.

Early Research and Feminism

Feminism has had a “shushing” effect on conversations about women’s bad behavior. All of American society, including conservative populations, has been infected by feminist ideology for decades. The idea that women might be capable of the same level of evil that men are is verboten. Researchers and commentators get the message that we don’t talk about that.

Early domestic violence campaigner Erin Pizzey found this out the hard way in the 1970s. When she started a domestic violence shelter, Pizzey quickly discovered that domestic violence was not always a situation where a woman was trapped with a physically abusive man. Instead, her work convinced her that the majority of women she encountered were what she called “violence-prone.”

She defined violence-prone people (including women) as those who, “for deep psychological reasons of her own, seeks out a violent relationship or a series of violent relationships, with no intention of leaving.” Her paper “A Comparative Study of Battered Women and Violence-Prone Women” found that among her surveyed subjects, only 38 percent of the women met her definition of a “battered woman” (an innocent victim who would escape if she had the means). The majority, 62 percent, were “violence-prone” women. For her trouble, the feminist “community” defamed Pizzey and threatened her. She ended up homeless with a ruined reputation.

Pizzey was working on this issue in the 1970s, half a century ago. It’s not that we don’t know that women can be abusive and violent, or that we’re just now discovering that fact. Anyone with honest eyes can see it, but facts take a backseat to feelings when it comes to what leftists call “gendered violence.”

Other Research

More recent research has indicated that women may be as prone to using physical violence against male partners as the other way around. “A Review of Research on Women’s Use of Violence With Male Intimate Partners,” for example, found that “women and men perpetrate equivalent levels of physical and psychological aggression,” though the authors say that women’s violence is more likely to be motivated “by self-defense and fear.”

Another study examined domestic violence among 11,370 U.S. individuals between 18 and 28 years old. It found that half of all violently abusive relationships were “reciprocally violent.”  In “non-reciprocally violent” scenarios, women initiated the abuse more than 70 percent of the time. As you would expect, though, the violence men inflict on women is more likely to cause serious physical injury or death.

Then there is the issue of abuse against children. What statistics we have about child abuse indicate that it’s equally perpetrated by women and men. According to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 51 percent of child abusers are women. Nothing excuses child abuse, but it’s an open question whether this 50-50 rate of child abuse perpetrated by men and women is at least partially explained by the fact that women are much more frequently caring for and around children (especially in our modern society where almost one-quarter of children live in single-mother households).

Transing Kids

It is also worth asking ourselves what we mean when we think of child abuse or violence against children. It doesn’t always take the form of a physical beating. Consider Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy (now saddled with the clunky new clinical term Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another), when perpetrators either falsely claim that a child is sick in order to get attention, or create illness in a child in order to get kudos for being a sainted parent. More than 97 percent of these cases involve a female perpetrator, and it’s nearly always mom.

In the 2020s, this syndrome is all around us and it’s celebrated on breakfast television and social media. We call this clinical presentation “trans kids.” It could not be more obvious that the mental and physical abuse we call “transitioning children” is classic Munchausen’s by Proxy, yet state this out loud and watch the screaming harpies descend.

We don’t even need human harpies anymore: Google’s AI summary of the topic assures us that:

There is no evidence that parents are inducing gender dysphoria in their transgender children as a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. This accusation is a politically and culturally motivated claim that misrepresents gender-affirming care as a form of child abuse.

It seems like an AI version of “don’t believe your lying eyes.”

For all the recent talk of listening to “lived experience,” there are many who don’t want to listen when someone’s lived experience contradicts long-held notions of what constitutes abuse and who is responsible for it. But for researchers interested in digging into the complete story of domestic abuse as it plays out among women and men and the children they raise, there is an abundance to explore.