Women and Violence

Although violence against women and violence by women are seemingly disparate topics, they are linked not only by the obvious (gender) but in other ways as well. For example, women are victimized by intimates and friends at a high rate and are also more likely to victimize those with whom they are intimate. In many cases, women's victimizers and victims may be different people, but sometimes they are one and the same. In domestic violence, for example, women's violence is retaliation against the violence that has been perpetrated upon them. Both violence against women and violence by women can be linked by a theory of aggression that accounts for the interaction between both the individual and societal antecedents of violence.