Rascunho

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The facts on DV are simple; among them are these: (1) women are as likely as men to commit domestic violence; (2) women are about twice as likely as men to be injured by domestic violence; (3) women are about twice as likely as men to report being a victim of DV; (4) women are somewhat more likely than men to initiate domestic violence, i.e. they're not just responding to what the man did and (5) the strongest predictor of whether a woman will become a victim in a DV incident is that she started it (moral: ladies, if you don't want to get hit, don't hit).

Over 270 separate studies done by dozens of different researchers since 1975 have concluded exactly those things and many more. As recently as October, 2008, a study of dating violence among students at the University of Florida found that the young women were slightly more likely to have engaged in dating violence than were the young men. In 2007, an 11,000-person study by the Centers for Disease Control again found that,

Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5).

A meta analysis of data performed in 2004 found that,

a woman’s perpetration of violence was the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence.