In the UK, following debates the the US in the late 1990s in the US about "Dating Violence" in teen relationships. There were a series of large scale research projects done with late teenage boys and girls in the first decade of this century. In Northern Ireland, England (south west and London borough) Scotland and Wales. These were in fact very unusual in both the size of the samples (1000s in a couple) and the care to be "representative" in sex, race, social class etc. (as readers will know most abuse research doesn't even include males and usually only includes small samples of women in specific settings). All 6 produced "surprising" results. Girls and Boys were far more likely to condone female violence or other "abusive behaviors" against boys by girls than vice versa (it seems the social injunction for boys never to hit a girl and control their temper and "language" with the fairer sex was still in full force) this is only surprising to those who did the research and whose ideology made them ignorant of the powerful socialization to protect females, "benign sexism" as it was called in the '70s. The other "surprising" finding was that girls reported being much more abusive than the boys reported being abused; the gap appearing to be that boys regarded the bad behavior of girlfriends as "just something that happens" to be endured. As one more astute but still female focused researcher observed the problem with not addressing this is eventually the boy may lose patience and hit or snap back.

In fact if one had started out with the hypotheses that a. boys are socialized into being protective of females and b. unlike girls who are constantly trained to identify abusive behavior (even their own) boys are not and simply endure it. The data fits perfectly! The logical results might be more even handed education so Girls learn to be less gung ho about physically hitting boys and boys become less fatalistic and patient if enduring bad behavior from girls, even if its to stop it before they "snap" and hit back either literally or in abusive behaviors.

Needless to say these reports, despite the comparatively huge resources used for sociological research, soon sank without trace.