This is from a new book co-authored by 24 of the world's leading domestic violence experts, including the editor-in-chief of the important research journal Partner Abuse.

The so-called "gender paradigm", or "feminist model" as it's sometimes called, isn't just empirically false, but has negatively impacted society, policy decisions, and victim's services for decades.

From Gender and Domestic Violence: Contemporary Legal Practice and Intervention Reforms.

For these reasons, and because the IPV victim advocacy movement soon merged with the broader feminist political movement -- a far more influential force than the social science researchers working in relative obscurity -- IPV arrest and intervention policies came to reflect, and continue to reflect, what University of British Columbia professor Donald Dutton and others have called the gender paradigm. The gender paradigm frames domestic violence as a problem of men assaulting women, with corollary assumptions regarding risk factors, dynamics, and motives (Dutton & Nicholls, 2005). Research scholars in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have referred to it as the feminist perspective (Dixon et al., 2012). In Scotland it is known simply as the common story (Dempsey, 2013), alluding to the pervasiveness of this paradigm within society and the judicial system. Whatever the terminology, IPV is assumed to be a “gendered” phenomenon -- that is, the use, or threat, of physical abuse and other forms of control by men against intimate female partners to enforce male privilege in a patriarchal society (Dobash & Dobash, 1979, 1988; Kang et al., 2017; Pence & Paymar, 1993; Wood, 2013)...

For several decades now, this view has thoroughly dominated IPV arrest, prosecution, and treatment policies in the United States and has informed child custody decisions in the family court system, largely because it has been so widely and unquestioningly accepted. News rarely reports, if ever, feature stories about men or sexual minorities as the abused party. Suppose one wishes to search beyond the headlines. In that case, accurate IPV statistics can be found within peer-reviewed journals, but these sources are available only to academic scholars. In contrast, there is an endless stream of misinformation about IPV rates, dynamics, and outcomes on Internet sites, accessible to everyone. For example, Hines (2014) examined information pages of prominent victim advocacy organizations, such as the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and its various local and state chapters, and found that almost a third of agencies presented false facts about IPV. The paradigm informs the way police are trained to conduct IPV investigations (Hamel & Russell, 2013), dominates state statutes that regulate court-mandated intervention programs for offenders (Babcock et al., 2016), and is evident among shelter workers and mental health professionals (see Follingstad et al., 2004; Hamel et al., 2007, 2009; and Russell & Torres, 2020, for a review.)

...Research over the past 30 years indicates that IPV stretches far beyond this historical paradigm and is in dire need of criminal justice reform. Aside from stymying our collective efforts to reduce rates of IPV in our communities effectively, the gender paradigm, vigorously defended by individuals who see themselves as champions for women’s rights, continues to rely upon anachronistic principles and dismisses empirically based research which can lead to benevolent sexist ideologies2 that only serve to reinforce tired stereotypes about women as helpless, child-like creatures who lack agency (Hamel, 2020b). Instead, this book provides evidence-based data that can hopefully lead to necessary reform toward greater inclusion to accommodate all victims.

There is a broad scientific consensus about this, for probably at least 10 years now (ever since PASK, which was endorsed by 42 experts and 20 different universities and research institutions back in 2012).

Note that this is not an anti-feminism post. Many feminists have started to recognize that some of their frameworks are a bit out of date, and probably wrong in many ways. This is actually acknowledged and discussed some in the book. But they still point out that, while some of these theories and ideas have shifted some, they have not shifted far enough. This is important because the feminist movement holds broad institutional and systemic power over the issue of domestic violence, including at the U.N. (via UN Women), where they continue to influence policy decisions around the world.