Of course, Alison Towns does not actually admit that she is distinguishing between two types of family violence, based on the research method that was used and the sex of the supposed victim. What she says is as follows:

There's two forms really of violence in intimate relationships. One is called common couple violence and that's generally not referred to as domestic violence. That's the sort of push shove that can happen between people in a distressed relation -- in a relationship where there's distress. It doesn't produce fear and in the work on community samples and around, you know, big population community samples where there's no fear the violence is quite equivalent between men and women and that's what we would refer to as common couple violence. Domestic violence is where there's fear involved and in that situation the, the offending is more likely to be from a man against a woman.(Notes of Evidence, page 560, line 29)

Towns does not explain her sudden introduction of the issue of fear into her testimony. Fear is a subjective emotion, not an objective phenomenon (although it does have physiological correlates). More importantly, fear is something that women tend to experience much more often and intensely than men do. That is the result of how women’s brains work, as compared to men’s brains (Hall, Geoffrey B. C.; Witelson, Sandra F.; Szechtman, Henry; Nahmias, Claude, "Sex differences in functional activation patterns revealed by increased emotion processing demands". Neuroreport: 9 February 2004 - Volume 15 - Issue 2 - pp 219-223). So focussing on fear, for no stated reason, is tantamount to focussing on female victims (which, of course, is what Feminist family violence researchers inevitably do). Methodologically speaking, you can most adequately research fear by interviewing victims, which (again) is what Feminist family violence researchers inevitably do. Female victims.

So Towns is banning the use of the term “domestic violence” from objective studies of what men and women actually do to each other (which she admits is much the same) – calling it “common couple violence” – and arbitrarily reserving the term “domestic violence” for the findings of Feminist researchers who interview purported female victims and purported male perpetrators! Feminist researchers notoriously do not seek out male victims or female perpetrators, as a rule.