I noticed this story in Australia’s Daily Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Shocking figures have revealed that the number of women who have been charged with domestic violence-related assault has soared by 159 per cent over the past eight years.

The figures, from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, show 2336 women faced court on charges of domestic violence in 2007, mainly for bashing their husbands, compared with just 818 in 1999.

….The figures show that although the number of women prosecuted for general assault remained stable between 1999 and 2007, there was an increase of 11 per cent a year in the number of women prosecuted for domestic violence.

During the same period, domestic violence charges against men rose by 2.3 per cent a year.

I am at a loss to understand why this is. Does anyone have a theory about why this is happening? Leave a comment if you do.

I wrote before about the problem of domestic violence against males, on the first day I started my blog. It turns out that these Australian numbers are echoing the numbers in Canada and the UK that I cited in that post:

UK numbers:

In the event, the CASI method found relatively high levels of male victimisation, to the extent that men appear to be at equal risk to women of domestic assault (4.2% of both sexes reported an assault in the last year).

Canada numbers:

An estimated 7% of women and 6% of men in a current or previous spousal relationship encountered spousal violence during the five years up to and including 2004, according to a comprehensive new report on family violence.

Here is a related research paper on the problem of domestic violence against men, writen by Dr. Linda Kelly, a professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law.