Abuse Is Not Gender Specific
Why Scientific Evidence-Based Policy Must Replace Gendered Assumptions About Men and Women
ABUSE IS NOT GENDER SPECIFIC
Why Scientific Evidence-Based Policy Must Replace Gendered Assumptions About Men and Women
An Editorial by Joani Kloth-Zanard, MFT, GAL, ADA Advocate
Executive Director & Founder, PAS Intervention (PASI)
The prevailing public narrative around family violence, child abuse, and intimate partner harm frames these behaviors as overwhelmingly male-perpetrated phenomena. This assumption has shaped decades of federal legislation, funding allocation, shelter infrastructure, and judicial training. It has also left millions of victims unprotected, millions of perpetrators unaddressed, and an entire body of federal data functionally ignored. The evidence is unequivocal: abuse is a human behavior, not a gendered one, and any law or policy that fails to account for this reality is structurally incapable of protecting all children and families.
The Federal Data on Child Maltreatment: Women as the Majority of Perpetrators
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publishes the Child Maltreatment report annually through its Children’s Bureau, drawing from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS)—the most comprehensive federal dataset on child abuse in the country. The findings have been consistent for years, and they directly contradict the gendered framing that dominates legislative discourse.
In the most recent report, Child Maltreatment 2024, covering Federal Fiscal Year 2024, HHS reported that 51.9% of all perpetrators of child abuse and neglect were female, compared to 47.0% male. This is not a statistical anomaly. The 2022 report documented the figure at 51.1% female. The 2023 data recorded approximately 215,443 female perpetrators of child abuse compared to 197,690 male perpetrators. Year after year, women constitute the majority of individuals substantiated by Child Protective Services for maltreating children.
Eighty-nine percent of child abuse victims were mistreated by one or both parents in 2022. The majority of perpetrators—69.4% in the 2024 data—fell between 25 and 44 years old. More than 81% of child fatalities involved one or more parents acting alone, together, or with others. These are not strangers. These are caregivers. And the data confirm that more than half of them are women.
Child Fatalities: The Most Devastating Category
The statistics on child fatalities are where the gendered assumptions collapse most visibly. An estimated 1,773 children died from abuse and neglect in the United States in 2024, following a devastating peak of 1,990 deaths in 2022. Nearly two-thirds of child fatality victims were younger than three years old. Close to half were under one year of age.
In specific fatality categories tracked by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services for Fiscal Year 2024—one of the most detailed state-level analyses available—the patterns are stark:
• Intentional physical abuse fatalities: Mother identified as primary perpetrator in 41.6% of cases
• Drowning-related fatalities: Mother was primary perpetrator in 64.7% of cases
• Unsafe sleep fatalities: Primary perpetrator was generally the mother
• Vehicle-related fatalities: 44.4% occurred in mother’s care
• Medical neglect fatalities: Mother was primary perpetrator in 40% of cases
In the research literature, the pattern is even more pronounced in the youngest age group. Published research confirms that in cases of neonaticide—the killing of an infant within the first 24 hours of life—mothers account for nearly all identified perpetrators. This finding has been documented across multiple countries and decades of peer-reviewed study.
Intimate Partner Violence: The Data They Don’t Discuss
The gendered framing of abuse extends beyond child maltreatment to intimate partner violence (IPV), where the assumption that men are perpetrators and women are victims has shaped virtually every federal program since the passage of the original Violence Against Women Act. Yet the CDC’s own data tell a far more complex story.
The CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), the most comprehensive nationally representative study on these topics in the United States, has consistently found that men report experiencing intimate partner violence at rates that are comparable to—or in some categories higher than—women. According to the NISVS, 32.9% of women and 28.1% of men have reported experiencing some form of physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetimes.
Woman-on-Woman Violence: The Hidden Crisis
Perhaps the most systematically underreported dimension of the abuse landscape is violence perpetrated by women against other women. The CDC’s NISVS data, disaggregated by sexual orientation for the first time in 2010, revealed what many in the domestic violence field had long known but rarely discussed publicly.
Lesbian women reported a lifetime prevalence of intimate partner violence of 43.8%—higher than the 35% reported by heterosexual women. Of the lesbian women who experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner, two-thirds (67.4%) reported having exclusively female perpetrators. Bisexual women reported even higher rates at 61.1%, though the majority of their perpetrators were male.
Nearly one in three lesbian women (29.4%) reported experiencing at least one form of severe physical violence by an intimate partner—including being hurt by pulling hair, hit with something hard, kicked, slammed against something, choked or suffocated, beaten, or burned. More than one-third (36.3%) reported being slapped, pushed, or shoved by an intimate partner.
These figures represent hundreds of thousands of women victimized by other women—a population that existing shelter infrastructure, legal frameworks, and funding mechanisms are poorly equipped to serve. Women who are battered by female partners may find their abuser assumed to be a helpful friend or sister even in emergency medical settings, invisible to the systems designed to protect them.
Women Who Abuse and Kill Men: The Invisible Victims
If woman-on-woman violence is underreported, violence perpetrated by women against men is arguably the most invisible category of abuse in the American policy landscape. The data, however, are neither ambiguous nor marginal.
The CDC’s own page on male victimization states the finding plainly: women were mostly the perpetrators of intimate partner violence against men. According to NISVS data, 97% of men who experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner reported having only female perpetrators. That figure is not a rounding artifact. It reflects the overwhelming reality that when men are abused by intimate partners, the perpetrator is almost always a woman.
The scale of male victimization is substantial. The CDC’s 2023/2024 NISVS data brief reported that 34.0% of women and 17.0% of men experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. That 17% translates to approximately 20.7 million American men who have been victimized by an intimate partner. An earlier NISVS wave reported a prevalence of approximately 26% for men, though the CDC cautions against direct comparison between survey waves due to changes in methodology and survey items. The NISVS 2015 data brief found that one in ten men—approximately 11.8 million—experienced IPV-related impacts such as fear, concern for safety, injury, or need for medical care.
A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis encompassing over 58,000 male participants across studies published between 2010 and 2022 found that 20% of men experienced physical violence from a partner, 44% experienced psychological violence, and 7% experienced sexual violence. These are not rare events. They represent a population-level public health problem that existing policy frameworks were not designed to address.
The consequences extend to lethal violence. Bureau of Justice Statistics data indicate that approximately 6% of male murder victims—roughly 1,078 men in 2021—were killed by an intimate partner. Other analyses place the figure higher: peer-reviewed research using the National Violent Death Reporting System estimates that intimate partners kill approximately 10% of all male homicide victims in the United States. The BJS long-term homicide trend analysis, covering 1976 through 2005, documents that 9.6% of all homicides nationwide involved a female offender and a male victim.
These numbers are not footnotes. The same BJS long-term data show that female offenders account for 12% of all homicides (9.6% against male victims plus 2.4% against female victims)—and in four out of five of those cases, the victim is a man. Yet no federal report equivalent to the Violence Policy Center’s annual When Men Murder Womenexists to track, analyze, or publicize when women murder men.
Male victims of female-perpetrated abuse face uniquely punishing barriers to help-seeking. Research published in 2020 found that men who sought help from domestic violence service providers were frequently under-acknowledged, mistreated, and penalized for coming forward. In many documented cases, domestic violence service providers, law enforcement, and legal entities failed or refused to act, arrest, charge, or seek penalties for female perpetrators of abuse against male victims. Societal norms around masculinity discourage disclosure; men who report being abused by women are often disbelieved, ridiculed, or assumed to be the actual aggressor—sometimes leading to their own arrest under mandatory arrest policies that default to the larger or male party.
The infrastructure gap is staggering. While the United States maintains thousands of domestic violence shelters and service programs funded under VAWA and state equivalents, very few are designed to serve male victims of female-perpetrated violence. The programs that do exist for male victims operate with minimal funding and limited capacity, and research documents that many service providers have failed or refused to assist men presenting as victims of female partners. This is not an oversight—it is the structural consequence of legislation built on a gendered model of abuse that the federal government’s own data contradict.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Data
The Bureau of Justice Statistics long-term homicide trend analysis, based on FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports from 1976 through 2005, documents that 2.4% of all homicides in the United States involved a female offender and female victim. While this percentage appears small against total homicide numbers, it represents a persistent and measurable reality. More recent FBI data confirm the ongoing pattern: female offenders constituted approximately 10.6% of all arrested murderers in 2022, according to FBI Uniform Crime Report data—a figure that has remained relatively stable between 8.8% and 11.5% over recent years. In 2023, there were 1,898 female murder offenders documented in the United States.
Many of these female-perpetrated homicides are domestic in nature. Research consistently shows that when women kill, the victims are disproportionately family members, children, and intimate partners rather than strangers. When the full picture is assembled—the historical BJS data showing female-on-female homicides at 2.4% and female-on-male at 9.6%, combined with the child fatality data showing mothers as the majority perpetrators in key categories—the scope of female-perpetrated lethal violence is far larger than the public narrative acknowledges.
Why This Matters for Legislation
None of this data diminishes the reality of male-perpetrated violence. Men commit the majority of homicides (for all genders), the majority of sexual assaults, and a significant share of intimate partner violence. Those facts are well-documented and must continue to inform policy. But the insistence on framing abuse as an exclusively or predominantly male behavior produces three specific policy failures.
First, it leaves children unprotected. When legislative frameworks and judicial training programs are built on the assumption that risk flows primarily from fathers and male partners, child welfare systems develop structural blind spots for maternal abuse, maternal neglect, and female-perpetrated violence. More than half of all substantiated child abuse perpetrators are women. Policies that ignore this fact cannot protect all children.
Second, it denies services to victims of female-perpetrated abuse. Women abused by other women, men abused by female partners, and children abused by mothers or female caregivers encounter systems that were not designed to recognize their experiences. Shelter networks funded under gendered violence frameworks may lack the capacity—or in some cases the willingness—to serve these populations. Twenty million men have experienced intimate partner violence, and the vast majority of their abusers were women. Yet the system built to address domestic violence was not built for them.
Third, it corrupts the evidentiary basis for custody and family court proceedings. When courts operate from the presumption that abuse risk is gendered, they introduce systematic bias into determinations that should be governed by individual behavioral evidence. This is particularly dangerous in cases involving allegations of parental alienation, where the gendered assumption can be weaponized to dismiss legitimate safety concerns or, conversely, to manufacture false ones.
The Path Forward: Gender-Inclusive, Evidence-Based Policy
Effective policy must be organized around behavior, not identity. The federal data are clear: abuse is perpetrated by people of every gender, in every relationship configuration, against victims of every age and demographic. Legislation addressing family violence, child protection, and custody procedures must be written to recognize that risk factors are behavioral, not demographic—and that every child and every victim deserve equal protection under the law. This means:
• Child fatality review protocols must analyze perpetrator data without gendered presumptions, ensuring that mothers and female caregivers receive the same level of risk assessment as fathers and male caregivers.
• Intimate partner violence funding and programming must be structured to serve all victims regardless of the gender of their abuser, including women victimized by other women and men victimized by female partners.
• Custody evaluation standards must assess individual parental behavior and documented risk factors rather than relying on demographic proxies for dangerousness.
• Legislative language in federal family violence statutes must be gender-neutral in its identification of perpetrators and gender-inclusive in its protection of victims.
• Federal data collection and reporting must include dedicated analysis of female-perpetrated violence against men, equivalent in rigor and visibility to existing analyses of male-perpetrated violence against women.
The data exist. The patterns are documented. The question is whether legislators and policymakers will follow the evidence—or continue to write laws based on assumptions that the federal government’s own research disproves year after year.
Sources and References
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. Child Maltreatment 2024. Children’s Bureau, NCANDS.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Child Maltreatment 2022. Children’s Bureau, NCANDS.
Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. Fiscal Year 2024 Child Maltreatment Fatalities and Near Fatalities Annual Report. February 2025.
National Children’s Alliance. National Statistics on Child Abuse. 2024.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation. Walters, M.L., Chen, J., & Breiding, M.J. (2013).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NISVS: 2016/2017 Report on Victimization by Sexual Identity.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NISVS 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief. (2025).
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Violence, and Stalking Among Men. CDC Injury Center.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NISVS 2015 Data Brief: Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Female Murder Victims and Victim-Offender Relationship, 2021.
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Homicide Trends in the U.S. FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Report, 2022–2023.
Statista. Child Abuse Perpetrators by Sex, U.S. 2023. November 2025.
Resnick, P.J. Child Murder by Mothers: Patterns and Prevention. World Psychiatry. PMC.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ASPE. Male Perpetrators of Child Maltreatment: Findings from NCANDS. 2004.
Landa-Blanco, M. & Mejía Sánchez, R. (2025). Breaking the Cycle: Addressing Barriers to Help-Seeking and Mental Health Impacts for Male Victims of IPV. Frontiers in Public Health.
Domestic Violence Services Network. Male Victims of Domestic Violence: Distinct Challenges & Barriers to Disclosure and Support. September 2024.
Fridel, E.E. & Fox, J.A. (2019). Examining IPV-Related Fatalities: Past Lessons and Future Directions. Journal of Family Violence.
Joani Kloth-Zanard is the Executive Director and Founder of PAS Intervention (PASI), a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit operating over 50 chapters worldwide. She holds credentials as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Guardian ad Litem, and ADA Advocate, has authored two books and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles on parental alienation and psychological abuse, and serves on the boards of the Parental Alienation Consortium, ICSP, and PASG.
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