We’re told that the greatest predator on earth isn’t the tiger shark or the lion but the lowly straight white male, a violent, aggressive thug who prowls the streets, raping, beating and killing unsuspecting women. But it is not so: in fact, women in relationships with other women are dramatically more likely to get knocked about by their partners.

Lesbian violence is poorly understood because it is poorly researched, and poorly researched because it makes the gay lobby deeply uncomfortable. We’re not supposed to admit that any kind of gay relationship might have a dark side. It’s all unicorns and Mariah Carey, as far as charities, politicians and the media are concerned.

Except it really isn’t. The news yesterday that a child was spirited away from its birth mother to be brought up by gay dads and the mother subjected to a gagging order so she couldn’t go to the press about it chilled some researchers to the bone. They know what I’m about to tell you: that many children going to adoptive parents, and many surrogate babies, go to lesbian couples.

And so rampant and apparently worsening is the dyke domestic violence epidemic that statistically 1 in 3 of these children will witness domestic, or, as we call it these days, “intimate partner” violence.

We’re just starting to see the results of letting gay couples bring up children. It’s not a wholly pleasant vista. Some studies show that children brought up in gay households are more likely to have emotional problems.

And then there’s the harrowing confessional Dear Gay Community: Your Kids Are Hurting by Heather Barwick, a former gay-marriage advocate turned children’s rights activist who was raised by two women. When kids turn against their homosexual upbringing it always seems to be mom couples.

If you’ve ever heard of a gruesome murder in your neighbourhood in which the short-haired victim was beaten savagely with a rolled-up copy of Saga magazine and then strangled with a jock strap, it’s probably not some terrifying new sadistic white male serial killer, but rather another dyke domestic that got out of hand.

Up to 45 per cent of lesbians have been the victim of at least one act of violence perpetrated by a female partner and that 30 per cent of lesbians have reported sexual assault or rape by another woman. And those are conservative figures from a small domestic violence support group.

Only transsexuals have a rate anywhere close to that, with 34.6 per cent of trannies reporting nails ripped off, wigs torn and HRT pills flushed down the loo, according to a Massachusetts survey.

Cover-up

Despite woolly reporting and gerrymandered figures, if you dig down you can discover just how big the gap between gay and straight domestic violence figures are: in one study, 23 percent of men who had lived with a man as a couple reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked by a male cohabitant, compared to just 7.4 percent of straight men.

Studies that claim the figures for gays and straights are about the same tend to rely on figures that are 20 years out of date or more, practically useless given the fast-moving nature of this issue. Not that you’ll read any fluent demolitions of shoddy research papers: gay charities in particular don’t like to talk about anything that paints homosexuals as less than perfect, and there is no appetite from the gay press for stories about it.

They also cover up just how frequently lesbians come to blows by muddying the waters, lumping gay men and lesbians in together. This 25-32 per cent, for instance, appears to be a deliberate conflation of the two in order to to hide the extraordinarily high number of dyke drubbings.

The Huffington Post reported in 2014 that 50 per cent of lesbian women experience one of these Sapphic skimishes at some point in their lives. Yet it wasn’t until 2002 that researchers bothered to look into the scale and character of lesbian domestics and understanding of the phenomenon has not increased dramatically, even among lesbians themselves.

Plus, the women who submit themselves to surveys like this tend to be white and middle-class. When you consider how much higher domestic abuse rates are among poorer communities with drug problems, the overall rate of lesbian violence is likely to be very much higher.

We know, for instance, that black women experience intimate partner violence at rates 35 per cent higher than white women. And those girls know how to swing! So the real figure for lesbian batterings is much higher than we know.

Perhaps the reason lesbians are known for “eating carpet” is that on any given night the butch has the femme in a headlock with the latter’s head rammed against the floor after an argument over a triple-world score in Scrabble.

Fanny batter

We know that a woman’s sexuality is more malleable than a man’s, and that women quite often yo-yo like Anne Heche between male and female partners during their lives. It’s not the done thing to speak of sexuality as a choice, but for many women that’s of course exactly what it is.

Which makes me wonder: why would women choose to put themselves at greater risk of being slapped, kicked, hit or bitten, when so many of them become lesbians precisely to avoid a repeat of their last abusive relationship with a bloke?

It’s not like they’re in it for the sex. Maybe it’s the faint whiff of cat sick, maybe the chafing of polyester bedsheets, but it’s well known that lesbians stop having sex after the first few months and retreat into hobbies like softball, vegetarianism, penis envy and Twitter.

There’s a common presumption that gay domestic abuse is really just sex or physical intimacy that gets out of hand; that the supposed victim likes it, really. Indeed, I have first-hand experience of such incidents. But that isn’t the case for lesbians, whose double-headed dildos rarely see any action after their first monthiversary.

The strict accuracy of what’s called “lesbian bed death” may be disputed, but that doesn’t mean lesbians aren’t perpetually reminded of their mortality: the threat of being offed in the shed with a golf club is all too real for many wives and girlfriends.

Gays and lesbians are more likely to fight back when assaulted, suggesting that lesbian domestic abuse scenarios look and sound more like pitched battles between caterwauling shrews than one party beating the other senseless.

Just because she can put up shelves doesn’t mean she’s a good surrogate for a man, and she’s probably going to beat you up anyway. So why not at least stay with the dude, instead of settling for a few weeks of scissoring before sexual ennui and fisticuffs set in?

Three quarters of all of bisexual women say they are victims of sexual violence, which suggests that women who do flip-flop between men and women are merely bouncing from abusive relationship to abusive relationship; from straight men who beat them to lesbians who do the same.

I’m not saying all lesbians are violent – though the data suggest that committed lesbians are more likely to raise their fists than bisexual women – but if you were offered a bowl of M&Ms and told that a third of them were poisoned, would you take one?

There’s little excuse for women who say they don’t know about all this: while there is little to no support for gay men who get beaten up by their boyfriends, even though men tend to suffer far worse injuries, plenty of female support networks and hostels cater to both straight women and lesbians.

Who knows. Perhaps these women don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, and imagine that lesbian relationships are a blissful domestic idyll, rather than the hellish reality of being kicked to death by someone in sensible shoes.

Bloodbath

So here’s one final thing you might not know, and strap on—sorry, in—because it’s a doozy. It comes straight from the mouth of a psychotherapist who treats the rich and famous, who says that this little factoid is so incendiary that the psychiatric profession dare not even discuss it.

You may have seen on TV, read about or even experienced how groups of women living or working in close proximity over a long period of time have a tendency to… line up. That is to say, their “special times” coalesce, and those four days when there are absolutely and completely obviously no differences whatsoever in their mood, critical thinking skills and short-temperedness cluster together and get ever more closely in sync.

You can work out the rest for yourself, can’t you? When therapists ask abuse victims to keep a diary of violent incidents, they discover these regular intervals, and eventually work out that both women are – how should I put it? – not at their most calm and reasonable, at exactly the same time, every 28 days or so.

That may go a long way to explaining why lesbians fight so much: there’s no level-headed bloke in the room, so perceived insults and accidental oversights spiral out of control and turn into full-blown wars, complete with shrieking, hair-pulling and airborne knitting needles, as this infamous 1972 study explosively revealed.

(Imagine, if you can, being in the women’s correctional facility at which that study was conducted. Hundreds of women in deadly menstrual harmony, arriving at the cafeteria to discover that the ice cream truck failed to show that week.)

And that’s before we even get to the menopause, whose cruel ravages have driven many a middle-aged woman to lash out at perkier, younger gals. Which is where I think we’ll leave it for today, save to say: if lesbians are offended that some people don’t want them to adopt or have their own kids, perhaps they ought to stop kicking the shit out of each other.