Violent Women? The Challenge of Women's Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships to Feminist Analyses of Partner Violence

The aim of this paper is to describe the academic discussion on gender symmetry, emphasizing the responses of feminist researchers to the questions raised by reports of women's violence against men in intimate relationships. The article serves as an introduction to an academic debate that has been lively in the United States and, to some extent, in Great Britain, but hitherto not in the Nordic countries. The author argues that the discussion on gender symmetry shows that the domestic violence field is ready for multi-faceted analyses of gender and violence that make it evident that all violence is gendered.