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The question really is a more nuanced one, and that is with what populations, at what point in
time and talking about what kind of violence or aggression, that there is no general figure that
you can give for the parity or non-parity between perpetration of domestic violence or abuse.
What we're learning is that we need to be very careful about the populations that we're speaking
about and the type of violence that we're talking about. So, for instance, if we're talking
about college students and high school students and young adults, there is more parity between
men and women in terms of low-level physical violence — the kicking, scratching and biting kinds
of violence. But when you move into more serious kinds of violence, if you move into ***
violence — so let's say separation assault, stalking, *** assault, homicide — there's great
differences between perpetration between men and women. Men perpetrate at much higher rates of
those types of violence, and particularly in older samples, samples of couples that have been
married for a longer period of time and people who have children. So I think we just have to be
very, very careful about what we're talking about when we talk about men and women and
perpetration of different kinds of violence. What we're trying to do now is be much more
specific about who we're looking at, how we define it, what we use to measure it and what the
context of the relationship is. I think the relationship context in which this occurs is really,
really important. What happened before, what happened during and what happened after? And when
we look at what happened before, what's the context of the relationship? Does this abuse happen
in an ongoing relationship with a lot of control where one person is controlling all the money?
Whether the person works, whether they see anyone, who they see, what they wear, what they eat.
If that's where a push or a shove or a broken bone happens, that's a very different kind of
relationship than a relationship in which people don't resolve conflict very well. They get in
an argument, it gets out of control, one person shoves the other, the other one hits back.
That's a very different kind of relationship. So I think what we're beginning to learn is that
we really need to step back and look at the ongoing relationship, if there is one. Really
understand what that looks like, and also really assess both men and women in the dyad. It's
hard to make strong conclusions about a relationship unless you've talked to both people and you
really have a good sense of what the relationship has looked like over time, if there is in
fact a relationship that's existed over time. But we really have to understand that, and I think
that's where the research should go.