Domestic violence is female!

Ever since “The Enemy in My Bed” with Julia Roberts, the topic of domestic violence has been on everyone’s lips. There is now a veritable flood of television films that focus on the woman being hunted down by her brutal husband. As a result, more and more initiatives and groups such as “Men Against Male Violence” are emerging, which attempt to track down the aggressive instincts of the masculine gender and render them harmless.

In fact, physical violence in relationships is predominantly committed by women, not men. A total of 95 scientific research reports, 79 empirical studies and 16 comparative analyzes in criminological, sociological, psychological and medical journals from the USA, Canada, England, Denmark, New Zealand and South Africa show that violence in relationships is predominantly committed equally by both partners or came mainly from the woman. The studies agree so clearly in their findings that experts no longer have the slightest doubt about these conditions. The fact that neither the public nor politicians have yet taken note of these scientific results is probably one of the biggest scandals in the gender debate of all.

The discovery of female perpetrators of domestic violence began in 1980. At that time, Murray Straus, Richard Gelles and Suzanne Steinmetz published a comparative study on this topic in the USA. To date, all three were considered experts in the field of marital violence, especially in feminist circles. In all of their previous studies, Straus and his colleagues had assumed that beaten husbands were a rare occurrence and, when they did, that they were not particularly seriously injured. In 1980, the research team re-examined all the studies they could find - about thirty at that point - for a more thorough examination. They came to the surprising conclusion that a total of 11.6 percent of women but 12 percent of men said they had been hit, slapped, kicked, bitten, had objects thrown at them or were otherwise attacked. (Some studies that defined the term "physical violence" more broadly even found that 25 percent of men were attacked compared to 16.5 percent of women.) So for every 1.8 million female victims, there were two million male victims. If a woman was attacked every 17.5 seconds, then a man was attacked every 15.7 seconds. This hiding of relevant information, says Murray Straus, "raises some vexing questions about scientific ethics." After further, even more thorough examination of the data, Straus and his colleagues made their results more precise: in a quarter of the cases, violence came from the man alone, in a quarter only from the woman, and in half of all the cases, violence was committed against each other in no particular order.

The representatives of the women's movement were suddenly no longer so happy with their former idols. The basic feminist assumption was in danger of being shaken. Many domestic violence researchers now set out to prove that the study by Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz was a hoax - but they found that their own results confirmed their findings. Some studies found even clearer results: for example, American high school students were four times as likely as male students to be the only perpetrators of violence against the opposite sex (5.7%: 1.4%). A study in New Zealand found that women and men committed minor violence against the opposite sex at a ratio of 36 to 22 percent, and serious violence at a ratio of 19 to 6 percent. Straus also interviewed women who had sought refuge in women's shelters. Here, too, he found that about half of them had attacked their partner on their own initiative.

From now on, Straus was ignored and attacked by the same feminist literature that had previously consistently quoted him. He was also exposed to personal attacks and slander. For example, the chairwoman of the Canadian Association Against Violence Against Women, Pat Marshall, spread a rumor that Straus was mistreating his own wife - only after repeated requests did she apologize to him. However, even more violent action was taken against Suzanne Steinmetz, the woman in Straus' troupe: she received bomb threats and her children were declared targets by fanatics. Apparently unaware of any contradictions in their actions, supporters of feminist ideologies resorted to violence , to enforce their view that women were far less violent than men.

Studies from other countries soon confirmed the results of Straus' research group, for example from Canada: 18 percent of men and 23 percent of women there were violent towards their partners, 10 percent of men and 13 percent of women used serious violence. There too The sociologists who compiled these statistics initially only passed on the figures about female victims to the press, and it was often only later that other scientists accidentally stumbled upon the actual numerical ratios in the tangible variant of the gender war.

Do these figures also apply to Germany? Probably yes. A study carried out by the criminological research institute in Lower Saxony speaks of an almost equal number of female and male violent perpetrators in arguments in a relationship. This study was commissioned by the Federal Government's Women's Ministry - which, however, only published the results secretly. Violence expert Luise Mandau suspects that they were too explosive for him and did not fit into his political concept. At the same time that the results of the study were available, another campaign on "violence against women" was launched, in which hundreds of pages of brochures castigated the "patriarchal violence" of men. Focus magazine then conducted its own survey and came to an even clearer result: in both the old and new federal states, the number of men victims of moderate to severe intimate partner violence was several percent higher than that of women.

According to US statistics, violence perpetrated by men has continued to decline since 1975, but violence perpetrated by women has increased. While the causes of domestic violence can no longer be objectively discussed, the experts' forecasts are becoming increasingly bleak. A team of authors determined for the journal Social Work that even among teenagers in romantic relationships, girls reacted violently more often than boys. "There are as many violent women as men," explains Erin Pizzey, the founder of the world's first modern women's shelter. "But there's a lot more money in hating men, especially in the United States - millions of dollars. It's not a good idea politically to threaten the big budget for women's shelters by saying that not all women are there exclusively Either way, the activists there are not there to help women cope with what has happened to them. They are there to justify their budgets, their conferences, their trips abroad and their Statements against men."

The one-sided propagation of “domestic violence” as a male problem continues unabated at both the social and state levels. Since "according to estimates, one in three women is affected by domestic violence," Women's Minister Christine Bergmann, in collaboration with Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin, would like to expel "violent men" from their own homes. On December 1, 1999, the German federal government adopted a corresponding action plan. A similar model already exists in Austria. How many of these suddenly homeless men simply fought back, how many other men no longer dare to defend themselves because of such a one-sided law, remains to be seen. In the future, things should also be handled quickly and very one-sidedly in court: the Berlin Intervention Project against Domestic Violence (BIG) demands simplified procedures against men and improved protection options for women. In Switzerland there was recently even discussion about a "violence tax" for men - all men and only men would have to pay this tax. Why? "It must be noted that belonging to the male gender is the most relevant common perpetrator criterion." The Alliance Greens proposed the same concept to the Bavarian state parliament, and the magazine Emma calls for it for the whole of Germany: "In the USA, male violence is the most common cause of injury for women who had to be admitted to hospital outpatients." Long since refuted, cheerfully continued - German readers are misinformed.

But not just the German ones. Over the next four years, the EU wants to spend 20 million euros on projects to outlaw violence - violence against women, of course. In 1993, the United Nations adopted the following declaration: "Any gender-based violent act that causes or is likely to cause harm or suffering of a physical, sexual or mental nature to a woman, including the threat of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty in public or private life." , is defined as a human rights violation. This explanation also refers exclusively to the female gender. There is no mention of men.