Shocking Incidents Spotlight Global Threat of Female-Perpetrated Violence

PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Mike Buchanan

Telephone: +44 7967 026163

Shocking Incidents Spotlight Global Threat of Female-Perpetrated Violence

March 25, 2024 – Kaylee Gain, 16, recently was brutally attacked by another teenage girl on a neighborhood street. The classmate slammed Gain’s head to the pavement multiple times, resulting in a fractured skull and brain bleeding. To date, Gain remains hospitalized and unconscious (1).

The attack on Kaylee Gain reveals how violence perpetrated by women has become increasingly lurid, shocking, and commonplace.

In the United Kingdom, last week Channel 5 aired the documentary, My Wife, My Abuser, which recounted the 20-year “reign of terror” that Sheree Spencer inflicted on her hapless husband, Richard. Her alcohol-fueled attacks had been recorded by a surveillance camera installed in the couple’s home. She was later convicted and jailed for four years. Judge Kate Rayfield described the case as “the worst incidents of controlling and coercive behaviour I have seen.” (2)

In the United States, Judge Sonya M. McKnight, 57, of Pennsylvania has been charged with shooting her boyfriend in the head after he tried to end their one-year relationship. The bullet entered the right side of McCoy’s face and exited the left side. He survived the incident, but is now blind in one eye (3).

In Australia, Anastasia Marshall, 29, has been charged with the murder of her former wife, Kyrstal Marshall. Anastasia has been charged with murder and setting the dead body on fire. On March 8 she appeared in court to request a bail release, but the crime was considered so severe that her bail was denied (4).

These three cases are not unusual. In his review of domestic violence studies around the world, professor Martin Fiebert concludes, “women are as physically aggressive as men (or more) in their relationships with their spouses or opposite-sex partners.” (5)

Other articles have documented the problem of mothers who kill their ex-husbands to gain child custody (6), and even attack other women to steal their unborn babies (7).

Women are the leading perpetrators of child homicides and abuse, as well:

Globally, women commit 72% of all infant homicides (8).
Mothers are far more likely to be the perpetrators of child abuse in the United States: Mother: 210,746 child victims; Father: 132,363 child victims (9).

Columnist Philippa Perry recently penned a column titled, “My Mother Refuses to Admit She was Abusive and Violent.” (10) The same could be said about the hundreds of violence-prevention programs around the world that inexplicably refuse to address the problem of female abusers.

The Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance – DAVIA — consists of 134 member organizations from 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. DAVIA seeks to ensure that domestic violence and abuse polices are science-based, family-affirming, and sex-inclusive. https://endtodv.org/davia/

Links:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/dec/31/ask-philippa-perry-my-mother-refuses-to-admit-she-was-abusive-and-violent