Thanks for adding some data to the mix. My assumptions were just that; arbitrary stabs in the dark to stake out some possible results is one subset of the problem space.
The lesbian figure you cite is interesting because it implies top / butch / dyke lesbians (not trying to be derogatory; I don’t know the political nuances of any of these terms) are 25% more violent than the male hetero populace at large. That’s eye opening, at least to me.
I only know a cop told me years ago that they hated going to a domestic dispute of gay couples more than straight because with gay couples, it was more likely to be someone really hurt.
I wonder if thats because gay couples might be slower to seek outside help when the issues and violence first arise and let it get bad? I do know that few shelters for victims of domestic violence are there for same sex situations or men in general.
I have heard the same the thing from police with respect to lesbian couples. They hate domestic disputes in general, but especially hate lesbian couple domestic disputes in that if there is a physical confrontation between two women the level of physical violence is often horrific and they won’t stop going after each other even when the police are between them…
I don’t think it implies any such thing. Since the information in the document is about the victims of intimate partner violence and sexual violence and not the perpetrators, we can’t conclude much of anything about the people responsible. It doesn’t say anything about how they dressed or what positions they favored in the bedroom. I don’t see that the survey even asked victims for the gender or sexual orientation of their assailants/stalkers. Plenty of lesbians have dated men or bisexual women at some point, so it’s not safe to assume that the past intimate partners of a woman who identifies as a lesbian were all lesbians too.
FYI, “dyke” is usually considered a slur.
Is it though? I just head a lesbian woman proudly refer to herself as a “Daddy Dyke” on some TV show I was watching the other day.
Gosh, I hadn’t heard. That changes everything. The term was instantly rendered totally inoffensive in any context the moment some woman on some TV show referred to herself that way.
Oh wait, it wasn’t.
Maybe it’s not so surprising. I hate to swing stereotypes around, but one of the features of the stereotypical “butch” lesbian is an agressive personality. The type of personality which tends to provoke confrontations.
Assuming that butch lesbians are to blame for intimate partner violence/stalking against lesbians when the CDC apparently didn’t even ask victims to provide information about the perpetrators looks an awful lot like swinging stereotypes around to me.
puddleglum neglected to mention that the CDC found that bisexual women are by far the group most likely to suffer intimate partner violence/stalking, with bisexual men also being at greater risk than straight or gay men. Again though, this tells us little about what sort of person is responsible for intimate partner violence/stalking, because the survey was asking about the characteristics of the victims.
I just found the full CDC report on this survey, and it turns out they did ask about the sex (but not, as far as I can tell, the sexual orientation or other traits) of the perpetrators of intimate partner violence/stalking. They don’t go into much detail about this, but the perpetrator was usually a man if the victim was a straight/bi woman (98.7%/89.5% reported only male perpetrators), and usually a woman if the victim was a straight/bi man (99.5%/78.5% reported only female perpetrators). Among lesbian victims, 67.4% reported only female perpetrators while 90.7% of gay men reported only male perpetrators. All of these figures can be found on p. 27 of the report (p. 33 of the PDF).
Since 67.4% of lesbian victims reported only female perpetrators then nearly a third of the lesbian victims must have reported being raped, assaulted, or stalked by a male intimate partner, although the report doesn’t say how many only reported male perpetrators and how many reported both male and female perpetrators. Again, the survey apparently did not ask lesbian victims whether the female perpetrators identified as gay, bi, or straight, or whether they were butch or femme.
Getting back to the OP’s original question, the full report also says that “There were no statistically significant differences between the prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking [by an intimate partner] when comparing lesbian women and heterosexual women” (p. 18) and “The differences between these groups of men [straight, bisexual, and gay] were not statistically significant” (p. 19). The difference between bisexual women and straight/lesbian women was statistically significant, with bisexual women being more likely than either to experience rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner.
Another problem is the lack of places for victims of gay domestic abuse to go for shelter.