There is consistent and reliable empirical evidence that women use violence toward their male partners. We know that there are two to four million women battered in the United States each year. At least half these women fight back and defend themselves, and about 700 times last year, women killed their husbands or partners. In the majority of cases, the women act in response to physical or psychological provocation or threats. Most use violence as a defensive reaction to violence.
Some women initiate violence because they know, or believe, that they are about to be attacked.
A smaller number of women, having been beaten and brutalized for months or years, seek vengeance against a brutal partner. Research shows that nearly 90 percent of battering victims are women and only about ten percent are men. The most brutal, terrorizing and continuing pattern of harmful intimate violence is carried out primarily by men. Indeed, men are hit by their wives, they are injured, and some are killed. Men who beat their wives, who use emotional abuse and blackmail to control their wives, and are then hit or even harmed, cannot be considered battered men.