Violence against women is one of the world's most pervasive and serious problems. Worldwide, the United Nations estimates, between 20 and 50 per cent of women have experienced violence at the hands of an intimate partner or family member.
In recent years, however, activists have attempted to divert attention from this serious problem by arguing that domestic violence is a 50-50 proposition, that women are as likely to hit men as men are to hit women.
These proponents of "gender symmetry" believe that women and men are victimised in roughly equal numbers. Thus, they argue, somewhat angrily, policy-oriented efforts for women have been misplaced.
Despite perhaps several thousand empirical studies that report the preponderance of domestic violence to be perpetrated by males against females, these activists point to about 100 empirical studies or reports that suggest rates of domestic violence are equivalent.
As an empirically trained social scientist, I was recently invited by the Equality Committee of the Department of Education and Science to review these 100 studies that find "gender symmetry" both substantively and methodologically.
Interestingly, virtually all the empirical studies that find gender symmetry use the same measure, the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS). These studies ask married people how many times in the past 12 months they used any of several conflict "tactics" (pushing, shoving, hitting, slapping and the like) during an argument with their spouse.
By contrast, the major studies that find asymmetry in the incidence of domestic violence are based on nationally representative samples of crime victimisation surveys. The United States Department of Justice finds that of one million cases reported each year, female victims outnumber male victims by about five to one.
All large-scale nationally representative surveys find that the overwhelming preponderance of domestic violence is committed by men against women.
Why such a dramatic difference between these two types of studies? They ask different questions of different people. CTS studies asks married couples only, which excludes younger, unmarried people, among whom rates of violence tend to be higher (rates tail off as we age).
They ask only about violence that is used to resolve a conflict (ignoring violence that is used to terrorise, or that is used to protect others, like one's children).
They therefore ignore the context of the violence, its purpose and the motivation of the person. These studies lump together violence, so that a single slap may be equated with several intensive assaults.
A recent study in Ireland by Dr Kieran McKeown is a good illustration of this problem. First, this study asks if the person had ever used force on their partner for any reason.
What's more, the study was not conducted with a nationally representative sample, but only of people in marital therapy.
One can never generalise from clinical samples to the rest of the population. What we know for certain from this study is that of all people seeking marital counselling who have ever used force, half are men and half are women.
Even Dr McKeown is more circumspect than those who would use his study to discredit the remarkably credible work done by social scientists over the past 30 years. In an article in these pages on June 14th, the researchers cautioned that their results "do not tell us anything about the severity of the violence involved, the context, the reasons, or initiation of the violence or the extent of injuries resulting from it".
These are crucial, essential questions. Who initiated the violence? How severe were the injuries? How often did the violence occur?
When these questions are examined, a far clearer picture emerges. To take but one example, gender symmetry tends to be clustered at the lower end of the continuum of severity.
Women are six to seven times more likely to require medical care for their injuries than are men.
And remember, studies that find gender symmetry only ask people in intact marriages. The data on ex-spouse violence, however, are dramatically asymmetrical, as ex-husbands are far more likely to attack, stalk and even kill their ex-wives in greatly disproportionate numbers.
Nor do they include sexual assaults, even though rape constitutes about one-fifth of all spousal assaults.
Even Dr Murray Straus, creator of the Conflict Tactics Scale, recognises what many of those who claim to advocate the cause of men do not. "Because of the greater physical, financial, and emotional injury suffered by women, they are the predominant victims," he wrote in 1997.
"Consequently, the first priority in services for victims in prevention and control must continue to be directed toward assaults by husbands."
Of course, this is not to say that women do not commit some of the violence against men. And we should, as a concerned public, be concerned about it.
After all, compassion is not a zero-sum game - reasonable people would naturally want to extend compassion, support and intervention to all victims of violence. What's more, we need to take women's acts of violence seriously because, as Straus notes, they "put women in danger of much more severe retaliation by men."
Despite the dramatic differences in frequency, severity, and purpose of the violence, we should be compassionate towards all victims of domestic violence. Men who are punched, slapped, kicked, bitten or otherwise assaulted by their wives or partners are no less deserving of such compassion, understanding, or intervention than are women. They do not have to compose half the victims to get attention.
But just as surely, compassion - and adequate public awareness and intervention strategies - must explore the full range of domestic violence, the different rates of injury, types of violence, sexual assault, and violence by an ex-spouse.
The evidence is overwhelming that gender asymmetry in domestic violence remains in full effect.
Men are more violent than women - both inside the home and in the public sphere. The home is not a refuge from violence, nor is it the one place where the dramatic gender difference in violence is magically reversed. (After all, men commit about 90 per cent of all violence outside the home.)
As concerned citizens, we need to be concerned about all victims of violence. And we must be aware that the perpetrators of that violence - both in public and in private, at home or on the street, and whether the victim is male or female - are predominantly men.
Michael Kimmel is professor of sociology at the State University of New York, and author or editor of 10 books about men and masculinity, including Manhood in America and The Gendered Society (OUP, 2000).
Today, he will speak on What About 'What About the Boys?' at the launch at 2p.m. in the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, of the Department of Education and Science's equality programme. Tomorrow, he will address a meeting in University College Dublin, on the subject of The Politics of Masculinity and the Masculinity of Politics at 5 p.m. in room €114 John Henry Newman (arts block).