There is a widespread and deep assumption that domestic violence means men beating up women. The reality is that violence by women against men is about as common as the other way around. And although men may do more physical damage, the system is more likely to punish men than women, no matter who was the perpetrator.

http://www.nationalpost.com/story-printer.html?id=a41532d6-d4df-46a2-a784-f6499938f3b0

“In a just world, Englishwoman Erin Pizzey, who founded the world’s first shelter for battered wives in 1971, would be a sought-after speaker on the subject of domestic violence. In the real world, however, Pizzey’s name is a byword for politically incorrect apostasy.

Pizzey’s crime? A humanist, she challenged the belief system dictated by radical feminists, who colonized her shelter and made her presence untenable. Their ideological mantra, still alive and kicking, insists that men are the default perpetrators in domestic violence (also known as “intimate partner violence,” or IPV, in the jargon) while women are invariably innocent victims who inflict violence only in self-defence. But Pizzey knew from her own experience (her wealthy, socially elite parents were mutually abusive, and her mother violent to Erin), and from what the women in her shelter told her, that most partner violence is reciprocal.”