Its near impossible at this point to fully trust anything regarding stuff you cant personaly witness or experiment on as the case may be. It is helpful to read actual research, not what the media reports about it or the abstract, the actual data as well as obviously having a critical look at methodology and so on.
While, obviously, academics can not be trusted, at least to some degree the hard sciences you can look into and test on, the social sciences... Well, probably look at data older than 20 years ideally if you want to know anything other than what their narrative is, really. Of course, what we are interested in looking into itself is... Well, theres been a lot of interest in violence against women and rape of women, and there is data to show that the vast majority of not just domestic violence (and thats exclusivly direct physical violence, there are other forms of abuse of course but that is the clearest thus weve got a bit more data on that) but the majority of intimate partner violence is done by the female partner as well as rape by women, espacialy of children, is quite common. Over 90% of sexual abuse of those children by staff in american juvenile facilities is done by female staff for example. Even looking at that requires some stepping back from many of our assumptions.
However, what we do have, what we can allways rely on are ethical principles. The truth of the matter here is irrelevant, the existance of a state and state mandates or restrictions are never justified.