Both of you quoted lethal statistics, which are hardly representative of the majority of domestic violence. In fact, a lot of these studies conflict in data. Fo

Both of you quoted lethal statistics, which are hardly representative of the majority of domestic violence. In fact, a lot of these studies conflict in data. For example, this study from 2007 suggest that 24% of relationships include some form of violence, and 70% of non-reciprocal violence was committed by women (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17395835 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17395835). Even the term "violence" has different meaning in studies, causing further ambiguity among the studies. It's often twisted to support a premise. Bottom line, statistics might not represent what you think they do, and just because someone drops different numbers doesn't mean they're malicious. Assuming malicious intent is actually a key behavior in many relationships with IPV, which signals that it's not healthy behavior. It's also a form of fear-mongering, which prevents rational dialogue. More to the point, there was a far more recent review of studies and literature regarding domestic violence just 2 years ago (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10741752.htm?PID=4003003 http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10741752.htm?PID=4...). They mention some of the wide disparity in statistics supplied by different studies (http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/pages/12_page_findings.htm http://domesticviolenceresearch.org/pages/12_page_findings.h...), showing that, for example, different studies have shown both men and women to be perpetrators of IPV between 1-69%, with the majority falling different ways depending on the study and the researchers involved. More interesting is the fact that their review of these other studies showed that, overall, men and women (both straight and LBGT) have similar perpetration rates. There are some outlying differences in a few classifications (e.g. stalking has fairly similar perpetration rates in aggregate, but males tend to gravitate toward physical stalking). What we see is that the narrative that any one side has significantly more violent tendencies has very little supporting evidence. People who claim otherwise are usually in the middle of some sort of confirmation bias. Often this is based on pre-existing belief or on anecdotal experiences. In essence, just like we're all equal, we've got a roughly equal distribution of violent abusers regardless of genital configuration. The fact that regardless of sex or sexual preference, the same percentage of people still abuse the people they "love" the most should be a miraculous starting point for a dialogue about equality, needs, relationship education, and violence prevention in general. However, it usually degenerates into finger-pointing like the above because people just can't accept that it's a human problem and not a gender problem.