Women Are Aggressors in Household Violence Too

Article here. Excerpt:

'We now know that women-on-women aggression is far from rare and that women are often the initiators of male-female aggression. Surveys of U.S. households have found rates of wife-to-husband violence "remarkably similar" to those of husband-to-wife violence. And an early cross-cultural survey did not find that men were significantly more aggressive than women.

Aggression, as opposed to anger, conveys an intent to hurt or harm and can be expressed physically, verbally or by withdrawing. There is general agreement that men exhibit higher levels of physical aggression than women, but the differences are small to moderate. After a thorough review of the literature on who initiates violence in couples, Murray Straus, of the University of New Hampshire, reports: "It is painful to have to recognize the high rate of domestic assaults by women. All six major studies which have investigated this topic found that women initiate violence in a large proportion of the cases."'