Females

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Females

An increasing number of women are being arrested for domestic assaults, and the response to this news shows just how pervasive sexist attitudes still are in our culture.

But this time the sexism is coming from feminists and their allies, who insist that most women arrested must have acted in self-defense. This sentimental insistence on female innocence does no service to women, who should be treated as human beings with a capacity for aggression and held equally accountable for their actions.

In many states, women now account for a quarter to a third of all domestic violence arrests, up from less than 10 percent a decade ago. The new statistics reflect a reality documented in research: women are perpetrators as well as victims of family violence.

A review of 70 studies of domestic violence in which both men and women were interviewed was published in 1998 by Martin Fiebert, a psychologist at California State University at Long Beach.

Usually the violence was reciprocal, the research found, with women not only fighting back but initiating attacks; when only one partner was abusive, it was at least as often the woman as the man.

And while differences in strength put women at higher risk of serious injury or death, men are hardly invulnerable. According to an article to be published next year in Psychological Bulletin, analyzing data from dozens of studies, men incur a third of injuries in domestic combat.

Shouldn't the growth in female arrests, then, be seen as representing a fairer, more realistic attitude toward gender and aggression? Not according to feminist and other advocacy groups whose ideology equates battering with male oppression of women.

They cry "backlash" and claim that women are being penalized for defending themselves.

Assertions that female abusers are really victims can be based on rather tortured logic.

A 1991 paper by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin classified a woman as "abused" if she said that her partner had been the first to use violence in their relationship, even if she was usually the aggressor later on. Women's advocates also point out that most female offenders are arrested for minor, non-injurious acts like pushing, grabbing or hair-pulling.

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