By Melanie Phillips. First published in the Daily Mail, February 13 2003.

The BBC is about to send its very own Valentine to the nation’s men.

Tomorrow, it unveils a ten-day season of programming devoted to the subject of domestic violence. There are to be special programmes, topical films, and relevant story-lines in the soaps, all on the same theme.

Of course, all violence in the home is a cause for concern. But alas, I fear, this is not to be a dispassionate presentation. On the contrary, this electronic abuse-fest has all the hallmarks of a propaganda onslaught, representing domestic violence as a one-way street in which men are the abusers and women are always the innocent victims.

Yet there is overwhelming evidence that this stereotype simply isn’t true. Women in the home are just as violent as men -- and more so when it comes to violence against children.

Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC – which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries -- has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy ‘research’.

Dismayingly, this warped view has now become the official received wisdom, with the whole panoply of law, political activity, voluntary action and public money being used to promote the fiction that men are programmed to be violent towards women and children while women are blameless.

The overwhelming message of the BBC’s ‘Hitting Home’ season is that men are the pariah sex. Violence by women barely gets a look in. The season’s website thoughtfully lists the warning signs of impending violence – but only by men. It provides helpful tips for changing abusive behaviour – but only by men.

Its schedules are similarly programmed. Behind Closed Doors features a neighbour suspected of abusing his girlfriend and her son. Kilroy will spotlight men who are violent towards their partners. Jeremy Vine will interview the well-known daughter of a violent father. The related film is entitled ‘Skin of Man, Heart of Beast’. You get the idea.

The website justifies this remarkable approach by claiming that domestic violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men upon women. And it trots out the hoary old statistic that one in four women suffers domestic violence.

But the claim is simply false; and the one in four statistic, like so much of the research that backs up these claims, is not worth the paper it is written on.

For all such assertions have been made by feminists who simply wrench the facts to fit a venomous prejudice against men. Some of these studies are outrageously skewed, based on samples of utterly atypical women in battered women’s hostels. The rest just don’t meet the most basic standards of rigorous research.

By contrast, the many authoritative studies that have been done paint a very different picture. The fact is that much -- if not most -- domestic violence is reciprocal. There’s usually a fight, in which both partners are violent. Dozens and dozens of studies have now shown that women at home are as violent as men, if not more so.

Nor is it true that most violent women act only in self-defence. Some do; but women strike the first blow in about half of all disputes. Studies have shown that some wives assault their husbands when there is no impending danger of an attack upon themselves, or where husbands have never shown violence towards them.

The doyens of this research, the highly respected American social scientists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles, have reported that in about half the cases they studied both partners were violent, while in the third quarter only the husbands and in the fourth quarter only the wives were violent.

Other studies have found women up to six times more likely than men to use severe violence. Even the Home Office put a toe into these most agitated waters when it reported that equal numbers of men and women said they had been assaulted by a current or former partner.

All this evidence, however, has been furiously denounced by feminists on the grounds that more women are more seriously injured than men in domestic violence incidents. That is true; and more women are killed by men than vice versa. But that is largely because men are stronger than women. It does not mean that men are aggressive and women are not.

On the contrary, as the psychologist Dr John Archer has noted, many men actually hold back when they are when attacked by women. Some 29 per cent of women college students admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. O those women, half said they had no fear of retaliation. So in fact, far from fearing men’s aggression, women take their restraint for granted.

None of this, of course, finds its way into establishment thinking about domestic violence. The ‘Hitting Home’ website goes so far as to acknowledge that men can be victims -- but then promptly rubbishes such claims.

It says, for example, that many male perpetrators of violence falsely claim that they have been victims, in order to exonerate themselves from blame and avoid police action. Yet this is extremely unlikely, since men are known to be excessively reluctant to identify themselves as victims of domestic violence for fear of ridicule.

Moreover, the website does not level the same charge against women of making unfounded claims of domestic violence. Yet there is plenty of evidence that they do; sociologist Dr Sotirios Sarantakos, for example, has said that the credibility of women’s accounts of violence is highly questionable.

Even more astonishingly, the website claims that men are rarely denied their parental rights by the courts. This assertion is simply ludicrous. The courts perpetrate gross injustices against men, who are frequently denied the right to live with or even have contact with their children on the basis of unproven and often spurious claims of abuse.

Divorce lawyers say many women simply make up such allegations because they know the courts are predisposed to believe them. One such barrister says that in his experience, more than half the wives in divorce cases invent charges of violence ranging from being pushed during an argument to child abuse. Such claims are generally believed because of the inbuilt assumption that men are intrinsically violent, and women intrinsically good.

The result is that many fathers are unjustly deprived of contact with their children. Even worse, the frequent breaches by mothers of court contact orders are justified by feminists in the higher judiciary on the grounds that the children in such cases might be harmed by abusive fathers. In other words, regardless of the lack of proof – or even evidence -- all men are guilty.

This thinking is now entrenched in official circles. The ‘Hitting Home’ season’s steering group included several government officials. The extreme feminist agenda of vilifying men through character assassination, distortion and lies has now got the full force of the political machine behind it.

The result this weekend is the kind of concerted propaganda exercise one might expect to see in time of war, with men targeted for attack here by what might be described as gender fascism.