Self exposure

Last month the British Sun newspaper ran a campaign against domestic violence, under the headline "Expose the wife-beating brutes".

It was not good timing, therefore, when the editor of the Sun was arrested last week for domestic violence.

The plot thickens further, though, as the editor is a woman, Rebekah Wade. This serves to illustrate the point that it is not only men who are perpetrators of domestic violence - there are also women who hit their husbands or children.

Rebekah's husband is an actor on Eastenders. As it happens the man who plays his on-screen brother was also the victim of domestic violence at much the same time. His former partner, Angela Bostock, was arrested for assault only hours after the attack on his work colleague.

These two men were both assaulted by their female partners. And yet campaigns against domestic violence routinely assume that men are always the perpetrators and women are always the victims.