Exinjuria.wordpress.com:

The Home Office is also responsible for disseminating the common claim that 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence in their lifetimes.  This statistic cost the British tax-payer £3.5 million when it was commissioned from the Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway College, Betsy Stanko.  Her study was based on 49 partially completed postal responses and a survey of 129 self-selected women from GPs’ surgeries in the far-from-typical London Borough of Hackney, the former haunt of Jack the Ripper.  It is a mass of guesswork and estimates (Stanko, Crisp, Hale, & Lucraft, 1998), but coincidentally close to more reliable figures: over a life time 23.1% of women and 19.3% of men will experience an incidence of domestic violence (Desmarais, Reeves, Nicholls, Telford, & Fiebert, 2012a).  This means that three quarters of women will never experience a single incident of domestic violence in their lives.  Furthermore, because the Home Office includes a wide range of non-violent activity under the catch-all heading ‘intimate violence’, only a quarter of reported incidents actually involve physical force (Smith, Osborne, Lau, & Britton, 2012).  If we factor in the Home Office statistic that 7% of women experience violence every year (Ibid.) we must conclude that it is the same group of women who are the victims.  If we really wanted to help these women we would ask what it was that made them more susceptible to violence.

Another familiar claim is that two women each week are murdered by a current or former male partner.  The true number is about six women each month; nowhere is the corresponding statistic mentioned: that three men each month are murdered by current or former female partners (Povey, Coleman, Kaiza, & Roe, 2009).  Or there’s the popular claim that domestic violence is the leading cause of ill health (or even death) in women, which is quoted by the Home Office, the Home Affairs Select Committee, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Ministry of Justice and others, demonstrating the typical dispersal pattern of a rogue statistic.  This figure also is false: homicide is not even in the top ten leading causes of death.  The Home Office, an early source of the bogus figure, defends it as merely ‘illustrative’, while others maintain that while the figure isn’t true, it should not be challenged, because domestic violence is such an important issue.

In 2001 the Prime Minister’s wife, Cherie Blair, presented an award to Kiranjit Ahluwalia at the Asian Women Awards ceremony for the laudable achievement of pouring petrol – bought for the purpose – onto her husband Deepak while he slept and setting fire to him.  He took six days to die.  Her defence, that she had only intended to cause pain, failed: she had assaulted him several times previously and was convicted of murder.  After re-education by the Southall Black Sisters she claimed on appeal that she had lived in fear of him, and had killed him because he was about to leave her.  Deepak was not available to confirm either claim.

In the most disgusting display of politicised misandry Cherie Blair hailed Ahluwalia as a ‘true role model for the next generation’ (BBC, 2001); once again the Government incited violence against men merely accused of a gender crime – it is unlikely we’ll see many men similarly fêted for killing their wives: Ahluwalia was courted by the media, signed a book deal and was even the subject of a film.  This madness became embodied in legislation in the form of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, launched by women’s minister Harriet Harman, which introduced the twin measures of allowing a woman accused of murdering her husband the defences that she was the victim of ‘serious wrong’ or feared she would be the victim of violence, and removed the defence – most often used by men – of provocation.  The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, declared, ‘I don’t think this is a sensible way for us to proceed’ (BBC, 2010b).

One effect of the law, by specifically excluding infidelity from the category of serious wrong and thereby trivialising it, was further to undermine marriage; as with ‘no-fault’ divorce, fault now lay with the betrayed party, and morality was turned on its head.  It was far from gender-neutral: women could kill in cold blood and with calculation, but if they claimed they ‘feared’ violence the charge would be reduced to manslaughter.  Thus cold-blooded killing was no longer murder, while killing in the heat of the moment during a temporary loss of control was.  This separated intent from the grievousness of a crime; it was not just an attack on men, it was a neo-Marxist assault on the moral underpinnings of society and its laws.  In 2012 Lord Judge defied the new law, allowing the appeal of a man who had killed his serially unfaithful wife: excluding infidelity from cases in which it was integral risked ‘injustice’ (R v Clinton, 2012).

Challenging the feminist paradigm requires courage; academics who have queried the accepted wisdom, such as Murray Straus, Suzanne Steinmetz and Richard Gelles, have been threatened with violence, including death and bomb threats, against themselves or their families; universities and government departments have been intimidated to deny them tenure and funding; conferences have withdrawn invitations; fellow academics have used their work without attribution; libraries have refused to stock their books (Gelles, 1999).  Here are their findings:

Domestic violence is not exclusive to men.  Rates of female violence are actually slightly higher than for males at 28.3% compared with 21.6% (Desmarais, Reeves, Nicholls, Telford, & Fiebert, 2012b), particularly among women under the age of 30 (Kessler, Molnar, Feurer, & Appelbaum, 2001).  A meta-analysis of no fewer than 286 studies demonstrates ‘that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners.  The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 371,600’ (Fiebert, 2012).  The studies included demonstrate consistently that women are more likely than men to initiate both mild and severe violence.  Slowly the justice system is beginning to catch up; figures obtained from the Crown Prosecution Service in June 2011 showed that almost 3,965 women were successfully prosecuted in the previous year, compared with 806 women in 2004/5 (Cavill & Fursman, 2011); by 2012 the British Crime Survey acknowledged that more married men suffered from partner abuse than married women (Office for National Statistics, 2013).

The strongest predictor of a woman being the victim of intimate violence is her own perpetration of violence (Whitaker, Haileyesus, Swahn, & Saltzman, 2007).  Research shows that women are at greatest risk of violence from an intimate partner when they themselves initiate violence (Capaldi, 2009).  Government victim surveys in the UK (Walby & Allen, 2004), the US (Bensley, Macdonald, Van Eenwyk, Simmons, & Ruggles, 2000) and Canada (Statistics Canada, 2000) consistently reverse these findings due to a variety of factors: methodological bias, presentation to respondents as surveys on violence towards women (Archer, 2000), reliance on police figures (Malloy, McCloskey, Grigsby, & Gardner, 2003), male under-reporting (Stets & Straus, 1992b) and lower female arrest rates (Brown, 2004).  Relying on their own inaccurate figures, governments incorporate the feminist paradigm of domestic violence into their thinking and thence into public policy.

Some studies have presented a profoundly different insight into domestic violence.  A meta-analysis of 50 studies found 59.7% of violence to be reciprocal or bi-directional (Langhinrichsen-Rohling, Misra, Selwyn, & Rohling, 2012).  A study using a large sample of 18,761 respondents showed that in 70% of those cases in which violence was not reciprocal the perpetrator of the violence was the woman.  Reciprocal violence was more often associated with injury regardless of gender (Whitaker, Haileyesus, Swahn, & Saltzman, 2007).

There are correlations between domestic violence and major depression, being on welfare, and having a partner who uses drugs heavily, sells drugs, has a history of violence toward others, has an arrest record, or is unemployed (Williams, Van Dorn, Hawkins, Abbott, & Catalano, 2001).  Living in an area of higher violence and drug use also increase a person’s likelihood of perpetration.  Researchers concluded ‘that it may be possible to prevent some forms of domestic violence by acting early to address youth violence.  Our research suggests the earlier we begin prevention programs, the better, because youth violence appears to be a precursor to other problems including domestic violence’ (Ibid.).

The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge project (PASK) was ‘grounded in the premises that everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not to their own facts; that these facts should be available to everyone, and that domestic violence intervention and policy ought to be based upon these facts rather than ideology and special interests’.  It found correlations with younger age, childhood exposure to parental violence, unemployment and low income and membership of ethnic minorities.  There was a weak correlation with alcohol use and a stronger one with drugs.  Risk was lowest for married couples and greatest for separated women (Capaldi, Knoble, Shortt, & Kim, 2012).”

So much for the Indian rape crisis, which this blog was one of the first (and one of the very few) to debunk, amidst all the global caterwauling on the Internet:

DNAIndia.com had this report in 2014:

The Delhi Commission of Women (DCW) has come out with startling statistics showing that 53.2% of the rape cases filed between April 2013 and July 2014 in the capital were found ‘false’.

The report says that between April 2013 and July 2014, of the 2,753 complaints of rape, only 1,287 cases were found to be true, and the remaining 1,464 cases were found to be false.

The report further revealed that between June 2013 and December 2013, the number of cases found to be untrue were 525. And in between, January 2014 and July 2014, the number of false rape cases were 900.

The Delhi Commission of Women further said it was investigating individual complaints of rape to ensure the victims get justice. However, it added that in many cases, the complainant turned hostile, and that revenge emerged to be the most common reason for filing a false complaint.”