Why society tolerates women assaulting mates.

Twenty years ago, family violence researcher Murray Straus was "excommunicated as a feminist" by those disagreeing with his finding that women physically assaulted their husbands just as often as men assaulted their wives. Since then, there have been more than 100 other studies that looked into this question by asking people about conflicts in their marriage or their dating or cohabiting relationships. According to Straus, co-director of the University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory, Durham, "every one of these `couple conflict' studies have found about equal rates of partner assault." So, the controversy sparkled by Straus largely died out.

However, it has bee revived by a 1997 study sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control which found that men physically assaulted their female partners at three times the rate women engaged in such behavior. In addition, two other major sources of data--police records and the National Crime Victimization Survey--have found that men commit almost all partner assaults.

"I think the studies finding that men predominate are wrong," Straus maintains, "and I can explain what went wrong in those studies. If they are wrong, it is even more important to explain why, at home, women are so violent, whereas outside the family, women are much less violent than men." He believes that the main reason some studies find lower rates of assault by females is because they are studios of "crime."

"The difficulty with a `crime survey' is the most people consider being slapped or kicked by their partner wrong or horrible, but not a `crime' in the legal sense. So, many just don't think of telling a crime survey interviewer about it." As a result, crime studies find only a fraction of the number or...