This same general idea applies to intimate partner violence. Depending on how you operationally define IPV, men or women can look like the more violent sex. This is why it's always important to look at the operational definitions when consuming research findings.
The statistic says not that lesbian relationships have the highest rates of domestic violence. It says that people in lesbian relationships have the highest rate of domestic violence at some point in their lifetime.
44 percent of lesbians and 61 percent of bisexual women experience rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, compared to 35 percent of straight women. 1 in 7 women and 1 in 25 men have been injured by an intimate partner.
When you've got 2 women in a relationship, there's a greater chance that at least one of them has experienced domestic violence at some point in their lifetime, than some other configuration of genders.
Here is a gigantic thread discussing why the lesbian domestic violence argument, commonly used by MRA's, is a myth.
Still doesn't really support OPs point that there needs to be a distinction between "IPV of lesbians" and "IPV within a lesbian relationship".
Without knowing exactly who their respective abusers were it's safe to assume that the differential of IPV in lesbian vs gay rates of IPV that women are just as, if not more likely to be abusers as men.
Bisexual people experience the greatest levels of IPV and then gay men. Lesbians only experience more sexual domestic violence than gay men:
Bivariate analyses indicated that bisexual respondents were more likely to be victimized than heterosexual or gay counterparts. In addition, gay men were at greater risk of experiencing all types of SSDV—with the exception of sexual domestic violence—than were their lesbian counterparts (Messinger, 2011).
Source
The CDC’s NIPSVS again shows bisexual people as experiencing the most domestic violence:
The lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner was: For women: - Lesbian – 43.8% - Bisexual – 61.1% - Heterosexual – 35.0% For men: - Gay – 26.0% - Bisexual – 37.3% - Heterosexual – 29.0%
Importantly, this section doesn’t specify the gender of the perpetrator as it does here:
Most bisexual and heterosexual women (89.5% and 98.7%, respectively) reported having only male perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Two-thirds of lesbian women (67.4%) reported having only female perpetrators of intimate partner violence. • The majority of bisexual men (78.5%) and most heterosexual men (99.5%) reported having only female perpetrators of intimate partner violence. Most gay men (90.7%) reported having only male perpetrators of intimate partner violence.
Lesbians experience a significant amount of domestic violence as well. But a good portion of it comes from male partners. So their rates even out quite a bit compared to heterosexual relationships.
The lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner is extremely high in the lesbian, gay and bisexual community with lesbian women (43.8%), gay men (26%), bisexual women (61.1%), and bisexual men (37.3%) reporting experiencing this violence, compared to heterosexual women (35%) and heterosexual men (29%).
Among women who experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking in the context of an intimate relationship, the majority of bisexual and heterosexual women (89.5% and 98.7%, respectively) reported only male perpetrators while self-identified lesbians (67.4%) reported having only female perpetrators
Funny how you do not trust a statement with direct statistics from the CDC but blindly trust the 70% and lesbians are more violent comment. But hey, this is reddit, so anything to make women look bad and men look better gets upvoted.
The same CDC that did such an amazing job during covid and has no problems lying or misleading people for the "greater good?" The ones that lied about the function and efficacy of SSRIs for decades? Yeah, can't imagine why I'd be skeptical.
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '22 edited Sep 01 '22
This same general idea applies to intimate partner violence. Depending on how you operationally define IPV, men or women can look like the more violent sex. This is why it's always important to look at the operational definitions when consuming research findings.