Lesbian domestic violence proves it’s not just a male problem. By Augusto Zimmermann.

As the studies of lesbian violence demonstrate, women are capable of being as violent as men in intimate relationships. Violence among same-sex couples is apparently two to three times more common than among married heterosexual couples. …

That violence comes out more frequently in lesbian relationships both as resistance and as aggression should put aside our preconceptions of gender socialisation and roles. …

Compelling stats:

For example, about a decade ago the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reported on the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, focusing for the first time on victimisation by sexual orientation.

It found a victimisation prevalence of 43.8 per cent for lesbians, making it the second most affected group after bisexual women (61.1 per cent), ahead of bisexual men (37.3 per cent), heterosexual women (35 per cent), heterosexual men (29 per cent) and homosexual men (26 per cent). …

It’s been known for decades:

Erin Pizzey set up the first refuge for battered women, in 1971. Her own experience is that women are just as capable of intimate partner abuse, in both the physical and emotional sense, as men. When she opened her refuge for battered women, 62 of the first 100 women to come through the door were as abusive as the men they had left. And when the feminists started demonizing fathers in the early 1970s, she felt morally obliged to state:

‘Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty. … We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women. This insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it’s our children who will suffer.’ …

Suffering in silence:

The official figures, however, grossly underestimate the number of female perpetrators of domestic violence. Male victims are reluctant to disclose when they have been abused by women. Culturally, it is still difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of the authorities. It does not fit the official narrative.

Frequently men do not conceptualise the physical violence they sustain from their female partners as a crime. As noted by one worker at the charity Abused Men in Scotland (AMIS):

‘The gender role men are given in society means they find it hard to understand and recognise what is happening to them and when they do it is very difficult for them to talk about it. Regularly they begin with: “I am not an abused man” but then go on to tell the most horrendous stories of domestic abuse. Once men go into that downward spiral of control they are robbed of everything – their home, their job, their self-determination.’ …

No government help for men, thanks to feminists:

Due to the prevailing narrative, men who sustain intimate partner abuse face numerous obstacles. They struggle to locate anti-DV services to assist them. Help lines or shelters are often targeted towards female victims only. The male victim suffers from a complete lack of support.

There is even the cruel assumption that every male victim is actually the perpetrator. To test the availability of support services to these victims of domestic violence, a Melbourne-based psychiatrist rang the ‘Men’s Referral Service’. This is how he reported his experience:

‘I rang them one two occasions in relation to male victims. Both times I was told that if I had dug deeper I would have discovered that the men were the perpetrators.’

The Australian media and government also often frame child abuse as a ‘fathers’ problem’. However, one the greatest risk factors in child abuse and neglect, found by virtually every such investigations, is that of children living in a female single-parent household.

Indeed, child abuse overwhelmingly occurs at households from which the biological father is absent.

Silence is violence. Feminists prevent this knowledge from being discussed or publicized.

Yet, people want to know. Published six years ago, this article is still one of the most popular ever on this blog: Rate of Domestic Violence Highest in Lesbian Relationships.