Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks(wbur.org)

    “Analyzing data gathered from 11,370 respondents, researchers found that “half of [violent relationships] were reciprocally violent. In non-reciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more that 70% of the cases.” Out of all the respondents, a quarter of the women admitted to perpetrating the domestic violence and, when the violence was reciprocal, women were often the ones to have been the first to strike.

    Reciprocal violence was more dangerous for the victim, both men and women, than was nonreciprocal violence. In fact, men in relationships with reciprocal violence were reportedly injured more often (25.2%) than were women in relationships with nonreciprocal violence (20.0%); this is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious.[2]

    Reciprocal partner violence does not appear to be only comprised of self-defensive acts of violence. Several studies have found that [in cases of reciprocal violence] men and women initiate violence against an intimate partner at approximately the same rate.

    Women are at least as likely as men to kill their children—more so if one counts killings of newborns—and account for more than half of child maltreatment perpetrators.[3][4]

    But, whatever explains the higher levels of male violence—biology, culture or both—the indisputable fact is that it’s directed primarily at other males: in 2010, men were the victims in almost four out of five homicides [6] and almost two-thirds of robberies and non-domestic aggravated assaults [7]. Family and intimate relationships—the one area feminists often identify as a key battleground in the war on women—are also an area in which women are most likely to be violent [8], and not just in response to male aggression but toward children, elders, female relatives or partners, and non-violent men, according to a study published in the Journal of Family Violence.

    For the most part, feminists’ reactions to reports of female violence toward men have ranged from dismissal to outright hostility. Straus [9] chronicles a troubling history of attempts to suppress research on the subject, including intimidation of heretical scholars of both sexes and tendentious interpretation of the data to portray women’s violence as defensive. In the early 1990s, when laws mandating arrest in domestic violence resulted in a spike of dual arrests and arrests of women, battered women’s advocates complained that the laws were “backfiring on victims,” claiming that women were being punished for lashing back at their abusers.