Mel Phillips is a prominent UK journalist. The article is behind a paywall. I assume fair use/copyright/netiquette allows its posting here. If not, then the mods are welcome to move it or implement any alternate solution they deem fit. – OP The Times www.the times.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4710456.ece The scandal of women’s violence towards men

Feminists ignore the fact that aggression in the home is a female, as well as a male, problem.

Tackling domestic violence is the government’s signature commitment to the women’s agenda. There’s just one problem with this. It’s not a women’s issue. This week, Sharon Edwards was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing her husband David to death with a kitchen knife. She had previously been convicted of attacking an ex-boyfriend and had been repeatedly violent to her husband. Even though it’s an extreme case, it reflects a reality that’s rarely acknowledged. Women are at least as violent towards men as men are towards women, maybe even more so. Data from the British Crime Survey suggests that men make up about 40 per cent of domestic violence victims. This is likely to be a significant under-estimate. Men are usually too humiliated and embarrassed at being assaulted by a woman to acknowledge their predicament to themselves, let alone anyone else. David Edwards covered up his wife’s violence, even using make-up at their wedding to conceal his black eye and bruised lip.

Evidence of “gender symmetry” in domestic violence stretches back four decades. During that time, an academic war has been waged by feminists who accuse those who produce such findings of upholding patriarchal oppression.

Battle commenced with the US National Family Violence Survey in 1975. This found a rate of assault by male partners of 12 per cent and by women of 11.6 per cent. Severe assaults, such as kicking, punching, choking or attacks with objects ran at 3.8 per cent among men and 4.6 per cent among women. In 2000 a meta-analysis by the British psychologist John Archer revealed that more than 200 studies had found most partner violence was mutual. Research also showed that women carried out only a small proportion of such violence in self-defence. Most were motivated by coercion, anger or a desire to punish their partner for misbehaviour.

Although in most violent households both partners are violent, studies from 1975 to 2009 consistently show that where only one partner is violent it is more often the woman than the man. Last year, the University of Cumbria found women were “significantly” more likely than men to be both verbally and physically aggressive.

This is not in any way to downplay attacks on women by men. In violent households many more women than men are badly hurt, murdered or raped. But that’s a consequence of male strength and how some men use sexual violence as a weapon, rather than evidence of greater male aggression.

In fact, given men’s superior strength it’s noteworthy that so many women initiate violence against them. The fact is that many men hold back. Professor Archer has noted that, among female college students, 29 per cent admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. Of those women, half said they had no fear of retaliation. In other words, far from assuming that men are violent, women (sometimes wrongly) take men’s non-aggression for granted. There was a time when husband-on-wife violence was socially acceptable.

Fortunately, in the last century that came to an end. Unfortunately, that didn’t usher in a new age of domestic harmony. According to Archer, the change in the sexual power balance made men seem dispensable. Equality for women produced greater female aggression with a much diminished perceived risk of retaliation. Reaction to all this research, however, has been vicious. Murray Straus, the American sociology professor who helped to pioneer public awareness of female violence, says this mountain of evidence has been ignored or actively concealed. Grant funding has been denied to researchers who don’t start from the premise that domestic violence is a gender issue. Academics reporting gender symmetry have had appointments blocked and contracts not renewed, been vilified as fraudsters and excluded from public platforms.

It’s pretty obvious why. There is an unchallengeable world-view that women are victims of male power and dominance. And men themselves, embarrassed by the gender imbalance in public life and male-led terrorism and warfare around the world, meekly go along with it.

The result is not, as it should be, an attempt to tackle all domestic violence. It is injustice. When politicians and prosecutors lament that not enough men are being convicted of rape, everyone is supposed to nod along. Because everyone knows men are always guilty, aren’t they?

That’s why the women and equalities minister, Nicky Morgan, announced this week another £80 million to protect women and girls from violence. It’s why a report last year by the Crown Prosecution Service devoted 90 pages to the proposition that they were the victims of men, updating it after criticism with a mere claim that 16 per cent of domestic abuse victims were male.

It’s all part of the “cross-government narrative” on violence against females introduced in 2011 by the coalition. You can read about this on the Home Office website, which states that in 2012-13 around 1.2 million women suffered domestic abuse. “We are determined to support victims”, it intones, and “to make sure perpetrators are brought to justice.”

But there’s a word missing before “victims” and another one before “perpetrators”. You can fill in the blanks yourself.