If you are experiencing intimate partner violence or domestic abuse, you can get help with just a call or chat. Trained advocates at the National Domestic Violence Hotline offer free, confidential support 24/7. Get help now.

Intimate partner violence is a horrifying crisis among humans, with statistics revealing that: 

• Globally, more than 1-in-4 women suffer “physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner”.
• 24 Americans per minute experience “rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner”.
• Nearly 1-in-3 women and 1-in-10 men report that such violence has impacted “their functioning”.

Yet, instead of directing every available resource toward preventing this violence and supporting its survivors, governments around the globe pay animal researchers to recreate “violent, criminal acts” in the lab — on animals.

Under the hollow pretense of studying human trauma, these researchers endlessly subject nonhuman animals to physical and sexual violence.

By way of example only, Safer Medicines recently exposed a study in which animal researchers strangled young female rats by suspending weights — representing three times their body weight — from their necks and bashing their heads with other weights to cause brain injuries. (Some rats required resuscitation after the strangulation.) 

The “groundbreaking” conclusion from this atrocity? Strangulation and brain damage cause more harm than *just* brain damage alone — with researchers calling for even more studies that cause even more trauma, stress, and suffering without alleviating any. 

And, this is just one example of the perverse violence happening the world over each and every second of each and every day behind laboratory doors.

In another study, U.S. researchers got paid to “model” childhood sexual abuse by rendering rabbits immobile and, then, inserting balloons “into their anuses to simulate anal rape” three times per week. The balloons were left in place for 21 minutes “‘to simulate time to [human] male ejaculation’”. The finding? Abused rabbits understand and fear the context of their abuse.

Another U.S. study paid researchers to watch “just-weaned female rats” get sexually assaulted and raped by males made “sexually aggressive”. The conclusion? Sexually abused rats have trouble learning.

These studies don’t help human survivors. They don’t provide solutions. They don’t alleviate suffering – rather, they create and compound it.

As Safer Medicines correctly and insightfully concludes, the justifications for this perversity — that it “might one day lead to therapies” for victims of abuse — is on the order of the “most absurd”. 

For one thing, interpersonal human violence is not biological; it’s societal — and it cannot be understood by strangling rats and sexually assaulting rabbits. Pretending and acting otherwise is not only unethical but wasteful, diverting attention and resources away from real solutions — like education, prevention, social support, and policy change – just like other areas of animal research, including depression and addiction.  

For another, these atrocities aren’t even expected to help humans. Instead, they are examples of “basic” or “curiosity-driven” research, which has less than a 2% chance of even claiming some future human application.

How many nonhumans must be exploited and sacrificed — and how many human victims must be effectively ignored — before we stop pretending that this is “science”?

We owe it to all animals, including humans, to invest in ethical and effective research and to stop ignoring the realities of human violence – including that inflicted inside laboratories.

We owe it to all animals to stop funding violence and to start investing in justice.

We owe it to all to do it now. 

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