George Tyndale : it's official - women are the violent sex

For generations we have disassociated women and violence because we have led to believe that not only are they less inclined to physicality than men but are also blessed with the natural intelligence to avoid or avert bloodshed.

Actually what was happening was that social conventions were containing their fighting inclinations and also separating them from the single major cause of violence: large quantities of publicly consumed alcohol.

Now, as anybody who has had to step over a drunken female on the pavement recently will know only too well, all that has changed.

Women now able to indulge themselves as often and as thoroughly as men. And, as a consequence, to reveal their innate tendency to physical assault.

In fact, violence is now the most common reason for a woman to be arrested in Britain.

It has overtaken theft and handling stolen goods (which now sounds quite homely, doesn't it?)

So the only surprise in the fact that women were involved in well over 500,000 attacks last year is that it has taken so long for them to reach this point.

They are, incidentally, at around the same level when it comes to domestic abuse currently - responsible for 23 per cent of assaults.

In a few years they will no doubt be on equal terms with men in the inclination to acts of all kinds of bloody, mindless brutality.

The women's movement will be so proud.