Sorry for the AI dump but without links it seemed the best way to assess this.
My prompt: I have been told this:
And yet the largest DV metastudy to date found that despite men causing more death and serious injury (as you'd expect given the size/strength disparity) women actually perpetrate more DV. This wasn't a study of 50 high school students, it was conducted by over 100 academics from 20 universities in UK/US/Canada working alongside DV organisations and experts.
Find the original research and assess whether this is a fair summary
Resonse:
The claim appears to refer to the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge (PASK) project, especially a 2012 systematic review by Sarah Desmarais and colleagues. The numbers quoted about women perpetrating more physical IPV are real, but the statement you've been given compresses several different findings into a stronger conclusion than the research warrants.
What the research actually was
PASK was a very large evidence-synthesis project initiated by the journal Partner Abuse. The original project involved 42 scholars plus about 70 research assistants at 20 universities/research institutions, who considered roughly 12,000 studies and summarized more than 1,700 peer-reviewed studies across 17 review papers. So the description of a large, multi-university research effort is substantially correct—although "over 100 academics" counts research assistants as well as scholars, and I haven't found support for the claim that all were academics or that DV organisations were co-investigators.
The project itself is here:
[Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK)](domesticviolenceresearch.org/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
The particularly relevant original paper is:
Desmarais, Reeves, Nicholls, Telford & Fiebert (2012), "Prevalence of Physical Violence in Intimate Relationships, Part 2: Rates of Male and Female Perpetration", Partner Abuse, 3(2), 170–198, DOI 10.1891/1946-6560.3.2.170.
That review covered 111 studies. Crucially, 95 (85.6%) were US studies, and 81 (73%) used a Conflict Tactics Scale-type measure.
Did it find that women perpetrate more DV?
For the particular thing it measured—self-reported acts of physical intimate-partner violence—yes, slightly.
The pooled estimates were:
Measure Women Men
Reported perpetrating physical IPV 28.3% 21.6%
The authors describe this as pooled prevalence being "slightly greater" for female than male perpetration. They also found enormous variation between individual studies: roughly 2.4–68.9% for women and 1.0–61.6% for men, reflecting very different populations, definitions and time periods.
So saying:
> "The review found a higher prevalence of reported physical IPV perpetration among women than men."
is accurate.
Saying:
> "Women perpetrate more domestic violence."
is considerably more problematic.
Why that distinction matters
The underlying measure generally counts acts of physical aggression, rather than treating every incident according to its severity, motivation, context or consequences.
For example, Conflict Tactics Scale-type research asks about behaviours such as pushing, slapping, kicking, punching or using an object. That methodology is deliberately useful for detecting violence that may never reach police, shelters or hospitals—but simply counting acts doesn't by itself tell you whether violence involved coercive control, fear, self-defence, repeated battering, injury, sexual violence, etc.
This methodological issue is important enough that an earlier major meta-analysis by John Archer reached a remarkably similar result: women were slightly more likely to commit physical aggression, but men were more likely to cause injury. Archer also found that results shifted according to the population being studied, with younger dating samples producing results further in the female-perpetration direction.
And the PASK research itself does not conclude that every dimension of DV is female-dominated. For example, its review of consequences found that both sexes suffer significant consequences but that physical and psychological consequences were generally greater for female victims.
Sexual violence and stalking are also substantially gender-asymmetric in the opposite direction. PASK's own summaries report substantially more female victimisation in those categories.
What about "men causing more death and serious injury"?
The broad point is correct, but "as you'd expect given the size/strength disparity" is an explanation added by whoever wrote the statement, rather than the central finding of the prevalence review.
There is strong evidence that female victims suffer greater physical consequences. A review of research on women's violence notes that surveys often find broadly similar rates of physical aggression while women are considerably more likely to be injured, need medical attention, and incur more serious injury costs.
Archer's meta-analysis quantified the distinction particularly neatly:
Women were slightly more likely to use physical aggression (effect size d = −.05), but men were more likely to cause injury (d = .15); 62% of injured partners were women.
Current US national surveillance also shows much greater female victimisation when severity is taken into account. The CDC's 2023/24 NISVS estimates lifetime physical IPV victimisation at 22.5% of women versus 13.7% of men, and severe physical IPV at 18.2% versus 8.6% respectively.
Those CDC numbers aren't directly comparable with the PASK perpetration figures—the populations, questions and methodology differ—but they illustrate why "who commits more DV?" doesn't have a single answer independent of how DV is defined.
There's another important PASK finding: bidirectional violence
This is probably the most frequently lost part of this debate.
A separate PASK review examined 48 studies specifically looking at whether IPV was unilateral or reciprocal/bidirectional.
A substantial proportion of physical IPV occurs in relationships in which both partners use violence, rather than fitting neatly into "male perpetrator/female victim" or "female perpetrator/male victim" categories. That makes comparisons of individual male and female perpetration rates surprisingly easy to misinterpret: the female perpetrators and male perpetrators being counted aren't necessarily attacking entirely different groups of people.
So a finding that, say, 28% of women and 22% of men report having committed a violent act doesn't imply that 28% of relationships contain violent women attacking nonviolent men.
One more caveat: it isn't really a single "metastudy"
Calling PASK "the largest DV metastudy" is colloquial rather than technically precise.
It is better described as a large coordinated state-of-knowledge project consisting of multiple systematic/comprehensive reviews. The 28.3% versus 21.6% result comes specifically from the Desmarais et al. review of 111 studies. The estimates were unweighted pooled prevalence estimates, rather than a conventional meta-analysis weighting studies statistically by sample size/precision.
That's an important methodological qualification. A study of 400 people and one of 20,000 don't simply contribute evidence in the same way in a conventional meta-analysis.
My assessment of the statement you were given
I'd break it down like this:
Claim What the evidence says
"largest DV metastudy to date" Broadly based on something real, but imprecise. PASK describes itself as the largest published IPV research database; it's a programme of reviews, not one giant meta-analysis.
"over 100 academics" Misleading wording. Original PASK = 42 scholars + ~70 research assistants.
"20 universities in UK/US/Canada" Broadly correct regarding the original project's institutions/geography.
"women actually perpetrate more DV" Too broad. The relevant review found higher pooled self-reported prevalence of physical IPV acts by women: 28.3% vs 21.6%.
"men cause more serious injury" Supported. Serious consequences of physical IPV disproportionately fall on women.
"because of size/strength disparity" Plausible and discussed in the literature, but it shouldn't be presented as what this prevalence study demonstrated.
Overall implication that DV is predominantly committed by women Not supported. The literature shows approximate gender symmetry or modest female excess for some measures of physical acts, alongside substantially greater female victimisation for serious physical violence, injury, sexual IPV and stalking.
So there is a genuine and important research finding underneath the claim. It isn't an internet myth: large reviews really have found women reporting as much or somewhat more use of physical aggression against intimate partners than men.
But the defensible conclusion is closer to:
> Large reviews of survey research have found that women report perpetrating individual acts of physical IPV at rates similar to, and in some analyses somewhat higher than, men. However, this does not mean women perpetrate "more domestic violence" overall: sex differences depend strongly on how IPV is defined and measured, and women experience substantially more serious injury and severe physical and sexual victimisation. Much IPV is also bidirectional.
That preserves what is genuinely surprising about the PASK finding without turning a fairly specific prevalence result into a much broader claim that the research doesn't establish.
One potentially useful next step would be to look closely at the 111-study Desmarais review itself—particularly how the 28.3%/21.6% figures were constructed and what happens when student/dating samples, severity and representative population samples are separated out. That's where I'd look if you want to know whether the headline difference is genuinely robust or partly an artefact of the studies included.