Female violence has tripled in the last decade

[PlantainMountain]

I read this statistic in an article about Caroline Flack earlier today and thought there must be some caveat, but it's seemingly true.

Women now commit almost a third of domestic assaults and charities estimate the true figure to be much higher due to the stigma men face in coming forward - this is backed up by other studies which show that the number of assaults against men always comes out higher when interviewing women rather than men (i.e. more women apparently admit to having assaulted their partner than men admit to having been assaulted).

I'm a bit shocked by this and surprised it's not been mentioned on here.

I’ve emailed The Sunday Telegraph to ask them to share the info :-)

"Women now commit almost a third of domestic assaults and charities estimate the true figure to be much higher due to the stigma men face in coming forward - this is backed up by other studies which show that the number of assaults against men always comes out higher when interviewing women rather than men (i.e. more women apparently admit to having assaulted their partner than men admit to having been assaulted).

I'm a bit shocked by this and surprised it's not been mentioned on here."

Thank you for bringing this to the attention of Mumsnet "Feminist Women's Rights Board".

"I'm not sure I'd take the word of a feminist activist over DV charities and the police without verifying the facts tbh."

Sorry - did you get lost on the internet? Were you looking for a "Sexist Men's Rights" forum? Somewhere devoid of pesky women referencing research by feminist activists??

Thank you again though - yet another OP prompting so much informed discussion, links to research, clarification of weaselly factoids, etc. Brilliant!

Since the govt started recording 'female' by choice instead of fact, who knows what those statistics actually mean. They aren't true, who knows how much they are true, it's impossible to make any real sense or use of them for society, so it's now a waste of time, money and resources bothering to even record them.

But some of the people perpetrating those violent crimes got to feel validated in their personal choices on the day, so yay.

The article that OP links makes several assumptions;

1. that all of the incidents are male female in adult heterosexual relationships.
   In fact, domestic abuse is recorded as any incident between any family member, including adult child.

2. that each incident relates to a unique relationship.
   In fact that victims often record multiple incidents by a single perpetrator.

The article that OP links states that;
''Attacks by women on family members jumped three-fold from 27,762 in 2009 to 92,409 in 2018, with a ninth of all incidents being recorded in West Yorkshire alone.''

West Yorkshire Police Freedom Of Information request 5648-18;
''Force policy is that an individual is recorded in the gender in which they present.''
www.westyorkshire.police.uk/sites/default/files/foi/2019-01/foi_5648-18_transgender_crimes_december_2018.pdf

Women that stay with their husband after he transitions will find any incident of abuse or violence by him has been recorded as being carried out by a woman.

Can you see the problems with the article now?

Yeah, there’s also a bit of a leap from ‘domestic abuse recorded as by female against a family member’ to ‘male victims of domestic violence’ which the Sunday Times author herself makes on her own Twitter comments. She thanks the Mankind CEO for his help as well, who are a credible organisation supporting male victims, but there is an agenda there all the same.

I believe a significant proportion of male DV victims will be in homosexual relationships as well.

All so muddled - but we shouldn’t be trying to fit statistics to what we ‘want’ them to mean.

Anecdotal I know but in my family all the DV has been by women: my SIL beating my nephew who wants to set up a support group for children like him (he's 21 now). Also my grandmother would hit and beat my mother and my aunt. It affected my aunt so badly she never to have kids bec she was terrified of ending up hitting her own kids.
My Dad was a Bobby in London 60s and 70s and said it was roughly a 50/50 split of DV being Male/female doing it. He said the men would never press charges bec they were too ashamed. This was in the days when the victim had to press charges & the police couldn't on their own.
I don't talk about this amoungst feminist friends bec I'm immediately shot down. Women do it too.

Nobody says they don’t. The question here is the article posted which is both inaccurate and misleading.

What should be dismissed is people attempting to draw equivalence between incidents of violence as committed by men and women in the home. Statistically there is no comparison. In harm terms, no comparison.

There is some appetite by people to say that as women gain more agency over their lives, they have become more violent. That is not true - and it represents an agenda which likes to say that the harm inflicted is the same. It is not.

In part, I believe some of this is the idea that equality between the sexes in principle must mean that women are the same as men in all behaviours. This is simplistic thinking that is sexist and self serving to doing very little about a far bigger problem in terms of harm and criminal offending for violent men.

This is exactly what I mean though.....the second I mention that in my experience women are at it as much as men, I get shot down/told it's not so bad. Well, talking to my nephew and how it ruined his childhood and still affects him, I doubt it.

So would the men on this thread support a 5% tax on shaving gear to pay for DV shelters for men?

@fidgetspinner555

Well then you should take your anecdotal points elsewhere. According to you, any other point is you being shot down.

As you say, these incidents are in the past and tell us little really except that this is your experience (or it is what you have been told). Why if this is known in your family did no one do anything? What is your nephew doing now? How has the family supported him? Why did it persist?

In other words - what use is your example? What does it tell us?

Everyone has difficult times. Some people are attacked in their own homes. Drawing a conclusion from that alone is flawed. People like to challenge that here and think more widely.

Anecdotally I do actually know two women who have hit their partners and both of them are taking therapy as a result. Men who hit their partners seldom go for therapy.

And - this is important - even if they are physically violent they are capable of less harm (adult women are weaker than almost all adult men). Biological reality and all that.

Exactly this.

I appreciate that assault is wrong: women on men and men on women. But there's a level of proportionality in everything. At the top level, crime is crime right? Well technically, yeah, but ..... me nicking next door's milk off the doorstep cos I fancy a milky coffee after a night on the tiles is in no way comparable to me going out and murdering a random stranger.

There are lies. There are damned lies. And there are ….. statistics

We all know what's going on here.

LexMitior: Well then you should take your anecdotal points elsewhere

Thanks for proving my point. Again.
Women are burying their heads in the sand about this. Any dissent is not tolerated. Reminds me of TRAs....

Coyoacan I know a man who went for therapy after hitting his wife once.

@fidgetspinner555

But you don’t have a point beyond “women do it too”. Because I asked, and there’s no response. You shut down your own non response.

So - what happened in your family? Is violence generally tolerated?

I think we all have anecdotes that prove ‘evidence’ wrong

There are always outliers obviously

But one sparrow does not a summer make

(I know its not just one...)

Still can't say 'swallow' on FWR, though.

Do you know...as i was typing sparrow i thought ‘im sure this isn’t the right bird’

His partner (ex competitive kickboxer) attacked him in the street and people were laughing and filming it

Yes, and my boyfriend slapped me to the ground in the street once and no one intervened.

I was pinned up against the wall of a market building during the day by a random man once and no one intervened.

Thank you for the link. I have googled one of the cases cited by its author and the sentence this killer received is truly shocking. He only got seven years.
www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-21894015

The level of sentencing in that case seems to be consistent with the case of Sally Challen.

If women were really responsible for 1/3 of domestic violence attacks (the daily mail is too general to know if they are just looking at a survey or accusations) then you would expect 1/3 of domestic homicides to be women on men - this is not the case, so you have to consider what is different and what is being missed. I suspect it is the gradient of "seriousness and context," that is going unrecorded.

What are these reports - does a single hit carry the same weight as a women reporting a decade of continuous abuse? I suspect it does, I very much doubt that every incidence of abuse over ten years would be logged as a separate incident. That is a problem with looking at these figures in a combined way without context.

I suspect that, when accused of domestic violence or a one off attack on their partners during a fight, a lot of men accuse their partners (perhaps legitimately) in return. It is plausible that the kind of domestic violence where a volatile couple escalate things when drunk etc is equivalent between partners - with the man being stronger and the woman coming off worse from equivalent behaviour. My best friend works in A&E and when women present with such injuries, downplaying the fight, it is not uncommon for the same bloke (not a mark on him) to be yelling about how she slapped him and he'll have her done for assault, never see her kids again etc. It would be interesting to see if these reports, from the husband and wife, would look similar on paper - although neither can be proud of their behaviour we shouldn't group this in with sustained patterns of abuse.

The more terrifying and dangerous type of domestic abuse, where a woman is isolated by her children and financial situation and essentially powerless (due to the structures and social conditioning of our current society), is the one that leads to serious injury and murder. We know this differs dramatically between the sexes, as the murder rates are objective, not subjective.

The former, fight type assaults are probably over represented as people feel empowered to report. The latter are underrepresented as it takes so much strength to even get away. More women in the first group is skewing these results.

Oh come on. No volunteers to fund men's services with a specific tax for men?
Come on, I thought you believed in equality of the sexes? Women have forked out countless millions of £££'s in donations and a woman only tax.

If women were really responsible for 1/3 of domestic violence attacks (the daily mail is too general to know if they are just looking at a survey or accusations) then you would expect 1/3 of domestic homicides to be women on men

Would you?
I don't think that follow at all.
As others have said, men are bigger, stronger and more able to kill a woman.

woman only tax

Which tax is that? Should I confess to HMRC that I haven't been paying it or keep quiet?

Which tax is that

Tampon

Tampon

Thank you, sorry for the sarcasm, that is ridiculous, I thought they'd dropped it but didn't realise it was still 5%. Perhaps that can change post-Brexit.