Male victims: You are not alone!
Are you a male victim of domestic violance? You are not alone
Prvalence and Misconceptions
Underreporting: Male victims often underreport abuse due to stigma, shame, and societal expectations of masculinity. Men may feel pressure to "tough it out" or fear they won't be believed.
Prevalence: Studies suggest that men experience domestic violence at rates comparable to women. According to some reports, nearly 1 in 4 men experience intimate partner violence (IPV) at some point in their lives.
Misconceptions: There's a stereotype that men can't be victims of domestic violence, especially when the abuser is a woman. This belief can prevent male victims from recognizing abuse or seeking help.
Types of Abuse Experienced by Men
Physical Abuse: Hitting, slapping, pushing, or using weapons against men.
Emotional and Psychological Abuse: Insults, belittling, manipulation, gaslighting, and isolation from friends or family.
Sexual Abuse: Forced sexual acts or coercion. This form of abuse is rarely discussed when it comes to male victims, but it exists.
Financial Abuse: Controlling access to money, sabotaging employment, or forcing a man to hand over his income.
Legal Abuse: Threatening to make false accusations of abuse, manipulating the legal system to gain custody of children, or making false reports to the police.
Barriers to Seeking Help
Shame and Stigma: Men may feel that admitting abuse is a sign of weakness.
Fear of Not Being Believed: Law enforcement, courts, and even friends or family may not believe that a man can be a victim.
@CatListener
Missing in the list is the religious abuse. It happens when a partner, a parent or another family member forces or manipulates a man or a boy to take part in unwanted religious practice or to share the same religious attitude.
Another, quite sophisticated form of abuse is forcing someone to treat an adult spouse (or a young-to-middle-aged mother) like a child, needing special protection, being talked to and taken care of in a very special and specific way.
I have also noticed some possibly controversial form of abuse: Very few women, diagnosed with various illnesses, may exaggerate the results of their illnesses, forcing a man to take over all daily chores exclusively. Such an impression can be misleading, because it's difficult to feel how a person with illness really feels inside, but some of them may deliberately sabotage their healing process.
Unfortunately, many forms of abuse start in our childhood, and growing up we may unconsciously choose partners who abuse us in a similar way.
@CatListener
Thanks for the insight!
I remember back in school a girl hit me multiple times. I didn’t wanna hit back so I told the principal, and he was like 'ooh she hurt you, poor boy?'(sarcastically)
I got convinced it's ok back then.
@JaceWayland
Starting from my nursery or primary school we were taught that "you cannot hit a girl even with a flower you brought for her!". Boys who happened to hit or even push a girl were set as bad examples and publicly laughed at. Just a side note: the school had all-female management and over 90 per cent of the teachers were female, so saying of this as "patriarchal" would be a mistake.
In my country there is a tradition that we let women go first through the door, as a form of respect to humans who are able to give birth to new humans. My female friend from Belarus used to joke on that sarcastically, saying the tradition of "letting the woman (or the owner of the farm) go first was dated back to post-WWII years, when the fields were full of land mines. But I've also heard about other tradition, when a man goes first and keeps the door open for a woman - because in some modern buildings the doors are extremely heavy and dangerous to use.
Another female friend told me that in some Western countries while letting a woman go first through the door you can be slapped in your face. Then - speaking just theoretically - if hit by a woman, you have two options: either not hitting back and being called a "sexist" (so actually being a double victim: both hit and offended), or hitting back and shamefully becoming an oppressor - with no other, more honourable way out (except calling the police?).
I think the rule that you should not hit a woman or a child was based on the responsibility for male's usually superior physical strength - to not use it against anyone who can be physically weaker, more fragile or incapable to defend themselves. It was one of the unwritten rules, like never punching in the face a boy who was wearing glasses.
@CatListener Excellent post. Unfortunately the info in it isn't said nearly often enough. US courts are still biased against male victims because the laws dealing with partner/spousal abuse were drawn up on the Duluth Model, a theoretical construct which presumes that women are always the victims & men are always the offenders no matter what. The Duluth Model should be discarded & consigned to history books, so more equitable & just laws can be drafted, passed & enforced.
@slowdecline48 Did not know about this. Thanks for the input.