This work offers a social movement perspective on family violence, framing the discovery of abuse toward women and men as a natural development flowing out of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It combines clinical and statistical methods to yield a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics underlying spousal violence. It examines both men’s violence and the violence of their female partners, both psychological as well as physical. The problem of women’s violence is one that has remained largely ignored compared to the mountain of research on men’s violence toward women. The authors present the first in-depth examination of how, when and why women instigate violence and why violent couples require a systems-level intervention programme rather than simply trying to counter male violence. There is a strong consideration of factors that can work to reduce or eliminate the problem.