A 'False' Claim of Abuse Is Not Necessarily a Lie
The parent who makes an allegation with insufficient evidence or a mistaken but good-faith allegation should not be lumped together with the malicious parent who deliberately fabricates an allegation. (womensenews.org)

Women's Credibility Doubted in Many Family Courts
The mother, who is required by law to report abuse, finds herself virtually in the dock--quizzed, examined, doubted--treated, she feels, as though she were a perjurer, as though her only objectives were to selfishly punish her daughter and ex-partner. She is disbelieved by judges, lawyers, child protective services and experts, categorized as an angry, unbalanced woman trying to bring another innocent man down with malicious fabricated allegations. (womensenews.org)

Biases Court Systems Hurts Mothers
That statement would have once shocked me, but no more. Nor am I surprised when I read that a family court judge has awarded custody of a 3-year-old girl to the father who has violently beaten her mother. I do not even lift an eyebrow when a 2-year-old boy, who comes home from unsupervised visitation with his dad, has a diaper filled with his own rectal blood and that same child is later turned over to his father on a full-time basis. And when a mother is thrown into jail, denied the right to ever see her children again, because she brought up the issue of child abuse in a family court, I'm sickened, but not shocked. (womensenews.org)

Battered Husband Syndrome & the CTS Conflict Tactics Scale

CTS may give a false impression that a woman may be as abusive as a man (DV Facts & Myths)

"There are three major flaws in Straus' work. The first is that he used a set of questions that cannot discriminate between intent and effect [16]. This socalled Conflict Tactics Scale (or CTS) equates a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs [17]. It labels a mother as violent if she defends her daughter from the father's sexual molestation. It combines categories such as "hitting" and "trying to hit" despite the important difference between them [18]. Because it looks at only one year, this study equates a single slap by a woman to a man's 15 year history of domestic terrorism. Even Steinmetz herself says the CTS studies ignore the difference between a slap that stings and a punch that causes permanent injury [19]. Indeed, after analyzing the results of the U.S. National Crime Surveys, sociologist Martin Schwartz concluded that 92% of those seeking medical care from a private physician for injuries received in a spousal assault are women [20]. The NCS study shows that one man is hospitalized for injuries received in a spousal assault for every 46 women hospitalized [21]..." (NOMAS.org)

The Battered Husband Controversy (quoted from: http://www.zip.com.au/~korman/dv/controversy)
Are men deciding not to report their wives' violence, out of chivalry or embarrassment? The evidence we have doesn't support this assumption. For example, Schwartz (1987), analysing nine years' worth of US National Crime Survey data, found that 67.2% of men and 56.8% of wives called the police after an assault by their spouse. Rouse et al (1988) also found that men were more likely to call the police, and Kincaid (1982) found that men were more likely to press charges and less likely to drop them. (zip.com.au/~korman/dv/controversy)

Battered Wives Often Recant or Assume Blame, by Lakshmy Parameswaran, WomensEnews.org
"Men who batter women can be reputable. They can be good ball players, carpenters, lawyers and executives. They can even be good friends and leaders. This is precisely why women, inexplicably to outsiders, stay with them. The women start thinking that, since the men have a "good" reputation, it must be their fault when they are abusive at home.

This is not to say that women don't ever provoke their men or retaliate against them. Few women are angels who suffer in silence. Mabely Lugo may indeed have a tendency to exaggerate as she herself admitted in court. The fact remains, however, that when the police arrived, she was found sitting in her van crying with a bump and bruises, while he had gone inside the stadium to do his job--play ball. It's an all-too typical scenario."

"In 1995, Texas joined other states in abolishing spousal privilege in cases involving spousal violence. This eliminated the right of victims to refuse to testify against their abusive spouses. I was a family-violence counselor then and I was happy to see this amendment of the spousal-privilege statute because it affirmed family violence as a crime against the state and removed the opportunity for perpetrators and their lawyers to pressure the victims against testifying. When a victim asserts herself--by leaving the perpetrator or by testifying against him--she is placing herself in grave danger. With the new law, a wife could now testify and say truthfully that she had no choice.

While the prosecution can build a case without the victim's cooperation, a victim's testimony adds strength, for she may be the only witness to the crime. [...] Of the misdemeanor family violence cases, only 1 out of 9 or 10 victims testified for the prosecution in our county in 2002. The rest either didn't show or testified for the defense," says Stuti Patel, assistant district attorney for Fort Bend County." (By Lakshmy Parameswaran, WomensEnews.org)

Physical Health

Uganda: Domestic Violence & HIV/aids (77-page report)
Abuse of women by poor, frustrated, angry men has been a factor in making HIV as widespread as it is. Once HIV begins to spread in the general, heterosexual population, all such relationships become much riskier. In other words, violence against women might have been the spark that set off the blaze. Furthermore, as more people learn about how to protect themselves from HIV, those who remain most vulnerable to infection will likely be those who suffer most from injustice, anger, and abuse.122"
(Human Rights Watch, molecular biologist Helen Epstein)

Mental Health

Taming Stress
[...] stress is exacerbated if there is no outlet for frustration, no sense of control, no social support and no impression that something better will follow. Thus, a rat will be less likely to develop an ulcer in response to a series of electric shocks if it can gnaw on a bar of wood throughout, because it has an outlet for frustration. A baboon will secrete fewer stress hormones in response to frequent fighting if the aggression results in a rise, rather than a fall, in the dominance hierarchy; he has a perception that life is improving. [...] And as the shocks continue and the rat finds each attempt at coping useless, a transition occurs. The stress response becomes more dominated by high glucocorticoid levels than by epinephrine and the sympathetic nervous system--which are largely in control of the immediate fight-or-flight reaction. The brain chemistry begins to resemble that of depression as key neurotransmitters become depleted and the animal ceases trying to cope. It has learned to be helpless, passive and involuted. If anxiety is a crackling, menacing brushfire, depression is a suffocating heavy blanket thrown on top of it. (Scientific American)