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I've heard incredibly conflicting takes on this. I once heard that lesbian relationships reported the highest rates of domestic violence compared to gay or straight relationships. But then I heard someone else say that this statistic had been widely misrepresented: it was that lesbians were most likely to report having experienced domestic violence, without disambiguating the sex of the aggressor i.e. many lesbians reported having been victims of domestic violence at the hands of a male aggressor. If it's really the former situation, do you have any stats?
How does a lesbian get into a situation where she's domestically abused by a man? Is that even common? I'm pretty sure lesbian couples don't usually invite any men to live under the same roof with them. Or?
#3 is difficult to take seriously, to be honest. #1 are scenarios that (hopefully) are specifically not ones taking place in the context of a romantic cohabiting relationship, which the original article is about.
Agreed, calling yourself a lesbian when you date men as well as women (maybe only date men) is stupid. Nonetheless, if the lesbian demographic includes many women who've been in (or currently are in) romantic relationships with men, that could potentially bias survey results in such a way to give a misleading impression of how common women-on-women domestic abuse is. The person conducting the survey might well assume that a person who identifies as a lesbian and claims to have experienced domestic abuse at the hands of a romantic partner has been victimised by a woman - indeed, this is a completely reasonable assumption given the standard definitions of the words "lesbian" and "woman". But just because that assumption is reasonable, doesn't mean there aren't people using those words in a nonstandard way which will bias the results. (Blood donor clinics and other medical practitioners already do this to route around the men who will give very different answers to the questions "are you gay?" and "have you had anal sex with a man in the past year?")
What you'd ideally want to do is design surveys in such a way that the results can't possibly be misinterpreted, like:
Q: In the past five years, have you been in one or more romantic relationships with:
Q: In the past five years, have you experienced domestic abuse by
Of course, inevitably you would get people failing to report domestic abuse because the perpetrator was non-binary, or inflated numbers for female perpetrators of domestic violence because some respondents were victimised by trans women and interpreted male/female to mean "gender" rather than "sex". It's turtles all the way down.
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