One of the most persistent myths in modern family-law discourse is that domestic violence is a gendered phenomenon—primarily something men do to women. This belief is not only inaccurate, it has had serious downstream consequences for children, particularly through the denial and dismissal of parental alienation. I am an advocate in Canada. I have a national education and support group. I have a plan to change Canada’s federal Divorce Act to recognize parental alienation child abuse as a form of coercive control.

The same ideological framework that insists domestic violence must be male-perpetrated is also the framework most responsible for claiming that parental alienation is merely a legal “defense” used by abusive fathers. That claim collapses under even minimal exposure to the scientific literature.

To understand how we got here, we need to start with history—not ideology.

Erin Pizzey and the Origin of the Non-Gendered Reality

In the early 1970s, Erin Pizzey opened the world’s first domestic violence refuge in Chiswick, England. She was not an academic theorist—she was on the ground, working directly with families in crisis.

After taking in approximately 100 women, Pizzey made an observation that would later make her a pariah within second-wave feminist circles:

Roughly half of the women were as violent as their male partners.

Roughly half of the women were as violent as their male partners.

She observed women who assaulted their partners, abused their children, and harmed other residents’ children within the shelter. Pizzey herself was a survivor of severe maternal abuse, beaten badly by her own mother—a lived experience that shaped her refusal to reduce violence to a simple male-perpetrator narrative.

Pizzey concluded what decades of research would later confirm:
domestic violence is not gendered—it is relational, reciprocal, and rooted in dysfunctional dynamics, not........

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