We had an assignment where we were to write a short story about some form of self-justification. The story itself was not important to my experiment, other than the basic premise.

Basically, a cop was confronted with a domestic violence case, in which the perpetrator had a gun and would not drop it. The cop eventually had to shoot the perpetrator.

I was very careful to use gender-neutral terms, not mentioning the gender of either the victim or the perpetrator. But guess what?

Everyone who responded assumed that the perpetrator was male

I pointed out everyone's mistakes, and I got a big thumbs up from my teacher. Why is it that so many people assume that perpetrators of domestic violence are male?

EDIT: Here's the original text of my post in the class, since so many of you wanted to see it.

Kate is an entry level police officer fresh out of training. She spent 14 weeks in the police academy and 6 months on the job training with a senior police officer. She is very firm in the belief that she is out to fight crime and arrest people who cause harm to citizens in her jurisdiction.

During Kate's first month of being on her own in her patrol car, she responds to a domestic violence call late one night. She arrives at the scene with as much mental preparation as she thought she needed- she didn't expect the perpetrator to be wielding a handgun. The perpetrator refused to put the gun down after Kate demanded several times, and continued to point the barrel at both the victim and Kate. The perpetrator warned that if Kate took another step, they would shoot the victim in the head. The victim was unable to fight back. Kate, unable to talk the perpetrator down, had no choice but to pull her own gun and as soon as the perpetrator pointed their gun at the victim, shoot.

While Kate was legally justified for shooting the perpetrator, she still felt terrible about it- she hadn't expected to have to use deadly force so early in her career. After her time on paid leave, as is custom for officers after using deadly force, she came back on the force with the strong belief that any perpetrator of domestic violence is a scumbag an deserves no sympathy, and she was absolutely right to shoot the perpetrator that night.