Challenge conventional wisdom with empirical evidence about what really happens in families, and researchers and prevention scientists interested in the problem of domestic violence risk becoming the butt of aggression, if not violence, themselves.

Sociologist Murray Straus, for example, who has devoted three decades of his life to analyzing and preventing violence in families, has been shouted off platforms several times and has received many death threats.

As clinical psychologist Miriam Ehrensaft explained at the start of the Society of Prevention Research conference in Washington DC yesterday, the continuing tension reflects the fraught history of a difficult and dangerous condition.

A quarter of a century ago partner violence was largely unstudied. Policy making in the intervening years has been driven by women with personal experience of abusive relationships.

Their great achievement has been to win recognition for "battered women syndrome" and variations on terminology used to describe women who have been traumatized, trapped and socially isolated by the intimidation and violence of the men they live with.

As a result, society’s response has been based on interventions that separate abusing men from their victims. In some US States, therapy for couples in families where there has been domestic violence is banned as unethical; in one State it is illegal.

The symbol of the worldwide acknowledgment of the problem is the ubiquitous domestic violence shelter, but its widespread existence points to a deeper difficulty.

As Miriam Ehrensaft put it, of the nine per cent of women in the New Zealand Dunedin longitudinal study who experienced severe maltreatment at the hands of their partners, just three per cent showed up in a domestic violence shelter. “What happens to the other six per cent?” she asked.

Her question points to the reason scientists such as Murray Straus and others among yesterday’s presenters have so provoked the wrath of the domestic violence lobby.

It comes down to the empirical evidence. When Straus developed a measure of inter-parental aggression and violence – the widely used “Conflict Tactics Scale” – he found that women were as likely as men to be the perpetrators of aggression and violence. If anything, women were slightly more likely to initiate unhelpful conflict resolution tactics.

There was a “but,” however, which New York psychologist Daniel O'Leary explained yesterday. The Conflict Tactics Scale measured aggression in the context of an argument. It covered serious actions such as pushing, shoving and beating. It considered any such action that had taken place in the previous 12 months.

Put in those terms, inter-parental violence occurred in about 12% of couple relationships. O'Leary joked that when he presented the data abroad, his audience often retorted “Well, that’s because you’re from New York”. But it turned out the results were pretty consistent across the world.

The rates were elevated for young couples; about three in ten young couple relationships involved violence. About half of this aggression was mutual. In about a quarter of cases, it was mainly the man being aggressive to the woman. In the remaining quarter it was the reverse – the man was the victim.

The consequences of violence against women were more severe, O’Leary said. Women’s injuries were more likely to require medical attention; men were much more likely to murder their wives than wives to murder their husbands. Four hundred men were murdered by their women partners each year in the US; the reverse figure was 1,200.

Replication of the evidence was beginning to produce promising prevention opportunities. Children brought up in abusive contexts were an obvious target since they were much more likely to be abusive in adult relationships.

Another intervention target was the period when adolescents were beginning to form relationships. Aggression at this stage was a reliable predictor of future harmful conflict resolution techniques.

As O'Leary put it “If you’re engaged to somebody who has hit you twice, then you oughta ditch ‘em. They’re almost certainly going to hit you again”.

Other possibilities are associated with the context in which families and adolescents relate – also a theme of this year’s conference.

Next week Prevention Action will report on the struggles and successes of programs being designed, implemented and evaluated in this area.

See: Straus M, Gelles R and Steinmetz S (1981) Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group