The New Zealand Medical Journal 118(1226), 25 November 2005

This article is a response to Janice Giles' article "'Woman Bites Dog' - Making Sense of Media and Research Reports That Claim Women and Men are Equally Violent" (2005). In her response to Giles' criticism of the use of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) in a number of well publicised studies of intimate relationship violence, Goodyear-Smith defends its use as a measure of "strategies to resolve interpersonal conflict and the use of aggressive acts occurring within relationships", but states that other tools are available for measuring the outcomes of violent acts. While Goodyear-Smith accepts that intimate partner violence causes more harm to women than men (including 90% of domestic homicides between 1978 and 1987), she argues that most studies show females initiate physical violence at least as often as men and that female to male violence does deserve the higher media profile it appears to command. However, nowhere does Goodyear-Smith respond to Giles' statements about the high-end male to female intimate partner violence known as 'battering', and the controlling behaviours that are commonly associated with it, that at the time gained only occasional media coverage.