In the most serious cases of domestic violence men dominate. Women are much more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner, regardless of who started the fight. Among the persons killed by an intimate partner, about three quarters are female, and about a quarter are male: in 1999, in the US, 1,218 women and 424 men were killed by an intimate partner, regardless of which partner started the violence and of the gender of the partner. In the US, in 2005, 1181 females and 329 males were killed by their intimate partners.
The U.S. Center for Disease Control in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Association found that of heterosexual relationships involving violence, 50.3% involve non-reciprocal violence, and of that 50.3%, women were the instigators 70.7% of the time, although “physical injury was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal.” Linda Kelly states in her thesis, Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Abuse: How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State in the Florida State University Law Review that domestic violence is equally the province of women.
In a UNICEF survey, the percentage of women aged 15–49 who thought that a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances.
In a U.S. survey of 5,238 adults regarding the attitudinal acceptance of intimate partner violence, participants were more accepting of women hitting men, and were consistently more likely to tolerate the violence if they were first asked about women hitting men rather than the reverse.
Sexism 