If you are like me, then you probably know very little about this topic! I've never been a victim of domestic violence, and I also don’t know very many people who are, or at least, I haven’t met anyone willing to tell me about it. I’ve heard of it, have been told of its horrors, but have done little research about it outside of this article I’m writing now.  I have recently been made aware, however, of an outstanding issue about DV that deserves a discussion – the under-reported and under-treated male victims of DV.

To begin this article I wanted to find a definition of domestic violence. The first definition I found comes from an article urging medical practitioners to look for warning signs of domestic violence in their patients, so as to catch it early and prevent further damage. The author describes it as “criminal aggression (in the case of intimate partner violence) occurring between married or unmarried partners and is defined as physical, sexual or psychological harm by a current or former intimate partner or spouse”. Things that fall into the category of domestic violence include “child abuse, elder abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV). It represents both a major human rights abuse and a significant public health challenge, directly affecting millions of Americans’ lives and contributing to violence, adverse health outcomes, lost economic opportunities and substance abuse problems across the nation. Although gang conflict and stranger violence make headlines, the majority of interpersonal violence is domestic violence.”  

In the same article cited above: “IPV is the leading cause of nonfatal injuries among women in the United States; more than half of women’s visits to emergency departments result from domestic violence, and the lifetime risk of IPV for American women is as high as 50%” the article then goes on to touch on “child and elder abuse”. In many other articles I scanned in preparation for this journal, women, children and the elderly are also specifically mentioned. While nothing I read specifically excluded men from victimhood, the lack of a mention really does give one the impression that DV is mostly, if not entirely a problem for women. I fear there might be a sort of out-of-sight out-of-mind thing at play here.

I’ve thought the same before while noting that the majority of DV awareness was geared toward women victims. I never had a problem with this - people focusing on female victims - and I still don’t, but I had always just assumed that there were also proportional resources and support for male victims. I was surprised recently to find how much of a tilt there was!

Part of the problem is the level of under-reporting, preventing accurate numbers from being brought to the table. Underreporting is already an attribute of DV, “because intimidation and threats are commonly integral to the pattern of domestic violence” making victims already reluctant to speak out. Underreporting seems to be even worse among men, when you factor in the socially unacceptable situation of a man getting beat up by a girl. Some estimates run in the hundreds of thousands per year for men. In another article which deals specifically with male victims (Domestic Violence Programs Discriminate Against Male Victims from the Stop Abusive and Violent Environments website), reports that “according to the National Violence Against Women Survey, 835,000 men are assaulted each year by their intimate partners. About one-third of those assaults are “severe,” meaning that the men were kicked, bit, hit with a fist, threatened or attacked with a gun or knife, or beat up. Knowing that a victim of severe partner assault will be in need of assistance, it is estimated that each year about 275,000 abused men need domestic violence treatment or rehabilitation services.”

Even in the hypothetical total absence of number estimates, for men or women victims, the impact of DV cannot be denied. No one needs numbers in order to conclude that a victim of abuse needs help. However, the problem that our male victims run into starts first in being denied victimhood.  I sometimes find it hard to believe that anyone could assume that there simply could not be any male victims of female violence (I always knew there must be some silly people out here who might assert that - there always are silly people), and so for a long time I denied that there could be such an outstanding bias. As I have become more and more acquainted with it, I’m starting to see that there is in fact a substantial amount of bias, to the level that male victims are not being given the care needed. That is why this issue needs to be addressed.  

The article I cited for the estimate on male victims is a good place to start. It’s from the SAVE website (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) and is called Domestic Violence Programs Discriminate Against Male Victims --- [link]
Especially interesting about his article is that it outlines the ways in which, the reasons for which, and the extent to which male victims are denied help, it's worth a look if just to better understand that whole predicament.