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Firstly, thank you. Secondly, I see people are coming off Reddit to find me now. I stopped doing this because I'm now supremely busy (and dealing with the absolute state of gender research and discourse was like trying to stem a river of diarrhoea with my hands for no good reason), but since you went to the trouble of actually getting here I'll try to respond.
Regarding the two studies you linked from India, you're correct that the sample size is small, but in my opinion an even bigger issue is that the "modified CTS" (from what I see, these studies are actually using questionnaires based off the modified CTS) is being utilised here in two separate studies conducted a year apart, one which only studies men and one which only studies women. I'd be very careful with this. Since they were conducted in two different sessions these studies can feature subtly different questions, interviewing norms, and methodologies, and the "methods and materials" section of the study is very high level and does not provide a whole lot of methodological detail other than really high-level coverage of basics; they may very well have adapted their approach over time. Without detailed methodological information, it's possible that the questions administered or the approach taken to the respondents in both studies may have been subtly different. Timing is also itself a problem - different survey waves mean different historical contexts, and there may be real changes in prevalence or in willingness to disclose over time. This confounds any attempt to compare between the two studies.
From a cursory read of the studies it does appear that there were differences in the questionnaire administered; e.g. economic violence was assessed in the female study, while it was excluded in the male study, and it's hard to know how differences like that would affect respondent behaviour within the study. As an example of how this can work, it's possible for there to be a priming and framing effect wherein a longer module with a broader list of behaviours signals a wider definition of violence, and can change what respondents recognise and count as abusive, including in other domains like physical violence. In general it's always better to source either a meta-analysis featuring a very large curated swath of studies that harmonises definitions, assesses study quality, and models between-study heterogeneity, or to use a singular study where the explicit goal is to provide comparative data for the sexes, instead of picking out two different studies conducted at two different times and then trying to compare figures from these to come to an overall conclusion.
There have, however, been studies conducted with the goal of providing a large slate of comparative data that surveys men and women in many different countries; a pretty early example of this is the International Dating Violence Study, with results summarised here. They asked students regarding their domestic violence perpetration, and if an incident was reported they asked about bidirectionality. The results from India show that approximately equal proportions of men and women perpetrated minor violence on their partners, and a higher proportion of women perpetrated severe violence compared to men. Of those relationships with violence, 8.3% featured male perpetration only, 16.6% featured female perpetration only, and 75% was bidirectional. You'll note that if you look at the Middle Eastern countries on that list there's also gender symmetry. This isn't the only one either; there are many studies like that around, showing the same patterns.
Oh, this is Johnson. To be quite frank, this is probably one of the single worst domestic violence researchers I have ever come across; his entire body of academic work on domestic violence has entirely been him trying to create two different categories of domestic violence: "Common couple violence" and "intimate terrorism", with the first occurring out of routine frustration and the latter being perpetrated out of a desire for control. He claims that the former is largely gender symmetrical and the latter is mostly male-perpetrated, and around the '00s and '10s he basically tried to launder a false idea of gender asymmetry into academia. When he first attempted to prove this claim he literally used samples that included either known female victims of male violence or samples drawn from crime surveys of women’s victimisation using only women's reports. When this was actually tested by other researchers using non-selected general population samples, it was repeatedly found again, and again, and again, and again that intimate terrorism as per his own typology was either gender symmetrical or majority female-perpetrated. Johnson of course does not want to acknowledge all this research as it delegitimises his ideology and his "contribution" to the field.
In this study, in order to try and save face he claims that asking people about their experiences with "ex-spouses" is much more of a better measure than asking them about their current relationships, and says that in survey data he finds more intimate terrorist ex-husbands compared to intimate terrorist ex-wives. But his data source for this study is the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS), which isn't the best source to draw from, to say the least. As this blogger notes; "The study was never intended to measure domestic violence in both genders. It was developed by feminist researchers for the purpose of exclusively surveying women [7]. Indeed, for the first three months of the study, only female respondents were interviewed [8]. The CDC later decided to add a male sample as well. However, the male respondents were not treated equally in this survey. While all female respondents were assigned female interviewers, only half of the male respondents were assigned a male interviewer [9]. A further bias, or a consequence of the above mentioned biases, was the much higher refusal rate among men in the survey (45% vs 36%) [10]. Because of these methodological and statistical biases, the findings of this study are far from the last word on the subject." Given the issues with the survey and its methodology, such research operating off the NVAWS is definitely not to be taken as definitive proof of, well, anything. Yet the state of the academy is such that this is the kind of research people are touting as "evidence" for their pet theories.
Honestly, dissidents are dispersed all over the internet and many of the old guard that were critical of SocJus academia have dispersed now. And given my inactivity lately on gender issues, I'm probably not the best person to ask for up-to-date, centralised sources which actually go in-depth on the problems with progressive academia. It also increasingly seems to me like the popularity of the old identity politics hobbyhorses of the 2010s have largely waned in popular discourse as well, and the focus has shifted to new things like AI and the Iran War and so on. While feminism/women's studies is still an extremely powerful lobby and still produces a lot of crap academic work, in popular-discourse circles these kinds of topics seem to have gotten increasingly stale.
Or maybe I'm just less terminally online. Hard to say.
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