CDC — About Intimate Partner Violence

What the study found

The CDC's National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), summarised on the agency's "About Intimate Partner Violence" page, reports large differences between women and men in sexual and severe intimate-partner violence. Over their lifetimes, nearly 1 in 4 women (22.5%) have experienced physical violence versus about 1 in 7 men (13.7%), and about 1 in 5 women (19.7%) have experienced contact sexual violence versus nearly 1 in 23 men (4.4%); overall, more than 1 in 3 women and more than 1 in 6 men have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner. ^[1]

about 1 in 5 [women] experienced contact sexual violence (19.7%)

^[1]

Why it matters here

This national dataset is one of the anchors behind the manosphere debate over whether women commit half of domestic violence. The claim that intimate-partner violence is roughly symmetrical holds up best when only discrete physical acts are counted; the CDC's survey instead measures a broader range of harms — including contact sexual violence, severe physical violence, and stalking — and finds these fall far more heavily on women than men. Cited alongside act-counting studies, it is used to show that partner violence is not exclusively male-perpetrated, yet is not "50/50" in its most serious forms.