Most people don’t know it, and others refuse to admit it, but in America, until about fifty years ago, men and women killed their partners at nearly equal rates. That was until the mid seventies, when the rate of men being killed by their partners suddenly dropped (by around 60%), whilst women’s slowly increased, before seeing a much slower, delayed decline in the nineties. And now, today, a large disparity has opened up, with three times more women being killed by a partner than men are. Many researchers have attempted to explain this, with varying levels of success; but one theory presented a surprising, albeit unpopular idea to explain this gap, that challenges our very core understanding of partner violence. Because – what also happened in the mid seventies, was shelters for abused women arrived in America, at the exact same time that the intimate partner homicide rate against men suddenly plummeted… And so the antithetical theory suggested that women’s shelters gave abused women an opportunity to flee, escaping abusive households, rather than staying within the cycle of escalating violence, where the woman might have otherwise killed her partner. Controversial, certainly, but the data tracks. So… did shelters for women end up actually saving men? And more pertinent, could the complete lack of refuge for men in America be having the opposite effect, with an even larger detrimental impact on women? What do you think? ~ Gender Differences in Patterns and Trends in U.S. Homicide, 1976–2015 https://tinyurl.com/2s3emfv5 Bilennial Report, Refuges https://tinyurl.com/2pt4s34d

2025-12-01