My reading of that sentence was that "at least partly responsible" meant any answer from "partly responsbile" onwards.

If the options were "At least partly responsbile" or "Not responsbile", I'd be a bit more worried. (There again, if there is a significant minority who went for higher answers, that could be scary.)

Would a man in the same situation (change the genders and/or sexualities of the other people as necessary) be considered to have been asking for trouble?

Not easy to draw a direct a direct comparison. The unfortunate reality is that a drunk women is in much more danger of being a rape victim than a drunk man. Whether this means women should be expected to drink less than men is open to a whole range of valid but subjective arguments. And there will probably never be a clear answer to this one.

I'm not sure how one can draw a distinction between "asking for trouble" and "reducing the blame on the rapist" - if the victim is considered "partly responsible" (in any sense) then it's not logically possible to consider the rapist "totally responsible".

That's not the way I'd look at it. People who consider a man who was stupid enough to wave a wad of cash in a dark alley partly responsible for being mugged. That certainly would not mean the mugger was any less to blame.

However, how you or I interpret "partly responsible" is not important. What matters is how the people who answered the questions interpreted it.

It's not an either-or question, of course. Very often both are true.

I'm not so sure. If a man hits his wife a second time, I'd have serious doubts he actually was sorry the first time round.

If anyone is genuinely sorry but doing it again, they need help urgently.

Though, if you want to include American cases too, have a look at this very recent Supreme Court decision

The difference is the context in which the stories are reported. One gets the attention of the press because a man quite possibly got away with murder on a technicality, and another got the paper's attention for committing the same horrific act again. Both implicitly question how this was allowed to happen.

What you don't have is entertainment columns poking fun at the victims for this happening to them. True, there's no way anyone would do this when the case was murder, but I have heard moderately seriously cases reported as the "And Finally" story. Would a story of a man who, say, cut off his wife's breasts because she was unfaithful be a funny story? Of course not.

Obviously, this doesn't mean violence against women shouldn't be taken any less seriously. But I fear that when it's violence of women against men, society may be putting an additional barrier to coming forward in place: go to the Police, and you might get laughed at.

Although, now I come to think of it, perhaps an even more worrying discrepancy is society's attitude towards violence against children. A lot of people blur the difference between discipline and just hitting your child in anger.. And a man beat his wife as a premeditated punishment (or the other way round), there's no way anyone would excuse that (or at least no-one would do so openly). And yet a vocal minority will quite happily advocate that against children, in the form of "bring back the birch."

Seems that society has a along way to go in a whole range of areas.