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Possibly my greatest work. 🙏
I posted something similar before, so this is mainly for those who have never known this at all before.
Given that the mainstream narrative follows the feminist narrative when it comes to the history of domestic violence, I figured it would be important to actually highlight the history as accurately as possible. 🎯
It really kicked off in 1971—5 years before feminists jumped in (more on that later)—thanks to neutral research showing spousal violence as a family breakdown issue, not some patriarchy nonsense.
John E. O’Brien’s paper, ”Violence in Divorce-Prone Families“ (Journal of Marriage and the Family), looked at 150 people, mostly women, from a Portland counseling center for families in or recently out of divorce proceedings—mirroring the era’s (and today’s) roughly 70% of divorces started by women, who often sought help citing abuse as the last straw.
Open chats (no leading questions) found 15% mentioning physical violence as a big marriage problem: fights over kids or chores escalating into hits, tied to cycles from rough childhoods and tough backgrounds. John called it “a pattern of communication echoing the parents’ unresolved fights.”
Downsides? Small, lopsided sample leaned on women’s stories; self-reports at the time hid male victims even more than recent years and even bidirectional abuse was hidden due to stigma; and the divorce focus missed the bigger picture.
Still, John busted 1960s ideas that abuse was rare (1-2% max), private, or “earned” by nagging wives with strong evidence for the time of hidden family mess.
That same year, Erin Pizzey kicked things off for real. She started Chiswick Women's Aid—the world’s first DV shelter—in London, built from raw survivor talks, ZERO ideology attached.
By 1975, her study with John Gayford showed 62% of sheltered women were violence-prone too—early evidence of female violence.
Feminists didn’t show up until the mid-1970s, then flipped the script to make DV all about men controlling women. 😡
In 1974, Rosie’s Place in Boston (Kip Tiernan) and Women’s Advocates in St. Paul (Sharon Rice Vaughan), the latter widely recognized as the first United States shelter dedicated to domestic violence survivors, were founded independently of feminism. The former has a Wikipedia page, but it does not even refer to her as a feminist, while the latter lacks one despite its obvious historical significance! 🤯
Two years later, Del Martin, a prominent feminist and lesbian activist (she co-founded Daughters of Bilitis in 1955), put out “Battered Wives” in 1976—a book (updated 1981 with a foreword by Diana E. H. Russell that broadened its call to action) mixing stories and legal takes to call DV a patriarchal problem, pushing for shelters and federal efforts by the late 1970s.
However, her activist lean and lack of hard data made it much shakier than John and Erin’s work.
Later, the “The Future is Female” slogan—kicked off in the ‘70s by Labyris Books and hyped up in the 2010s by Hillary Clinton and the UN—doubled down on this one-sided view, brushing off men’s role and proving the unreliability.
Awareness grew, sure, but this shift ditched John and Erin’s neutral take for a strict “men are to blame” line, burying two-way data and sidelining doubters.
Erin’s Chiswick got taken over by Refuge in 1993, her voice erased after death threats for calling out women’s violence—her 2024 CBE is a very late acknowledgment.
Murray Straus stepped up in 1975 with the National Family Violence Survey, using his Conflict Tactics Scale to show 12.1% of men and 11.6% of women faced IPV, with 50-70% of cases going both ways in regular communities. His 2010 breakdown exposed their tricks: seven ways to dodge the truth, like picking lopsided studies, blocking papers, and smearing researchers as misogynists to keep the “men bad” story alive.
Donald Dutton backed this up in his 2006 book “Rethinking Domestic Violence”, saying abuse comes from personality issues like borderline traits—not gender—and pushing tailored therapy over lectures. He was, of course, not treated kindly for challenging Duluth’s core.
Duluth, launched in 1981, became the feminist go-to: its “power and control” idea blamed men only, ignoring women’s part. Studies show it barely cuts recidivism by 0-5% (Babcock et al., 2004; Gondolf, 2012). Meanwhile, custom cognitive therapies drop it 30-50% by tackling trauma or addiction (Murphy et al., 1997; Eckhardt et al., 2013).
Yet Duluth snags billions from the Violence Against Women Act. The Act was first introduced by Joe Biden in 1990 (which did not pass that year) and signed into law by Bill Clinton on September 13, 1994 (re-authorized in 2022). Even though Bill did not originate it, he still deserves the heat for making the erasure of male victims official. VAWA’s women-only push has rendered the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (1984)’s all-victim focus pretty much dead—leaving shelters swamped and abusers repeating.
Data from national surveys like the NISVS show 19-23% of both genders deal with lifetime IPV (23% women, 19% men, with men being less likely to report, obviously).
John, Erin, Murray, and Donald kicked this off with evidence-based approach, however flawed.
Feminists came late, twisted everything, stole credit, and stuck us with weak fixes. 😩
Without their meddling, we would have been focused on healing victims, not pushing one-sided narratives.
Let’s ensure that feminists don’t just get to steal credit. 💯
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