Partner Violence as Female-specific in Aetiology

Abstract

Male-specific self-inhibition of violence towards women, corresponding to an evolutionarily highly conserved male-specific dedicated neural pathway, and a female-specific actual preference in a couple context for physically violent expression of aggression, prompted by oxytocin (the very hormone underpinning pair-bonding): these findings together indicate that a new theory of partner violence [PV] is required, with a female-specific aetiology. This anyway is apparent from the great disparity between the actual and predicted sex-differential in PV injury rates; the only plausible inference from which is overwhelming female compared to male perpetration. It is conceivable that what male-perpetrated PV there may be is by aberrant (psycho-pathological) individuals, with the remainder of male-on-female violence rather than being PV per se “ directed as such, with intent to cause harm “ is better understood as by displacement from male intra-sexual aggression. The basis of a female-specific PV aetiology is that pair-bonding is now known to have evolved in the female interest to maximise female fertility, and therefore at root women have a stronger interest in preventing partner defection “ manifesting in controlling behaviour which may become violent ” whereas at root men would have little to lose if not something to gain. Reviews and studies for decades have shown that PV is perpetrated at least as much by women; but now evident in data is that this is predominantly so “ in many and the most important respects by multiples. This new understanding of PV is a reversion to what in former times would have been the intuitive, popular view of the phenomenon, before the imposition of an extreme ideological conception of a supposed patriarchal [sic] terrorism [sic] of exclusively or
predominantly male perpetration. Though now comprehensively discredited, this persists, as it was created, through a need within the political-Left mindset to salve cognitive-dissonance regarding the failure of Marxist theory. In blaming the workers, envisaged as being all-male; they were replaced, as the supposed new disadvantaged and oppressed in need of liberation, by the generic category of all women. Consequently, it became imperative both to deny the extent and even the existence of PV that is female-on-male, whilst inflating levels of male-on-female PV and falsely ascribing to it a special perniciousness. Being in line with deep-seated pro-female and anti-male prejudice rooted in the biological imperative to control male access to sex, what would otherwise be seen as arcane political posturing, instead has appeared plausible.