Domestic Violence - The Lies Are Over!

[lumberjack_jeff]

4. Here's a more authoritative source

http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/35/1/33.1.full

Domestic violence is most commonly reciprocal
Daniel McQueen
+ Author Affiliations

Daniel McQueen is consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust, London, email: [e-mail]

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Morgan et al1 highlight the high incidence of being a victim of intimate partner violence among female psychiatric patients in the UK. This is in keeping with a historic approach that has conceptualised domestic violence as something that men do to women and has only sought evidence for violence by men against women.

Partly this may be because women are more likely to report intimate partner violence than men. One study found that in the same sample of couples 28% of the women, but only 19% of their male partners, reported that their relationships were violent, suggesting underreporting in a third of men.2

In recent years researchers have approached populations without preconceptions as to the direction of violence. Large epidemiological studies have demonstrated that domestic violence is most commonly reciprocal and that when only one partner is violent there is an excess of violent women. Whitaker et al,2 in a study of 14 000 young US couples aged 18-28 years, found that 24% of relationships had some violence and half of those were reciprocally violent. In 70% of the non-reciprocally violent relationships women were the perpetrators of violence. Reciprocal violence appears to be particularly dangerous, leading to the highest rate of injury (31.4%). This may be because reciprocal violence is more likely to escalate.