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Domestic violence advocates and family violence researchers often appear to contradict each other when they describe and report on the extent and nature of intimate partner violence. Although the term “”domestic violence”” has a very clear specific meaning to advocates working in the domestic violence field, it is used in other ways in other contexts to cover many different types of couple conflict. This paper helps to clarify some of the misunderstandings, errors, and apparent contradictions that derive in part from these differences in language use, in part from not understanding where the statistics come from and what the strengths and limitations of the data are, and in part from wrongly treating “”domestic violence”” as a single phenomenon. (Author abstract)