The Most Sexist People

The Independent Covers Male Victims Of Domestic Violence

by Oratosaurus

For once, the news media is telling the truth about domestic violence, so when it happens it’s cause for celebration. This article from The Independent actually takes on the topic of men as victims of intimate partner violence and does so in a way that encourages both belief in their stories and empathy for their plight.  These are men, not women.  As such, they have their own uniquely masculine problems in trying to deal with the violence directed at them by their female partners.  In the vast majority of articles in the mainstream media, men are ignored altogether as victims or slighted by the claim that, in some way, they embellish or even misrepresent what happens to them.  In the most typical of sexist ways, because they’re men, they’re expected to either not be hurt at all or to deal with it without complaining. excellent article does no such thing, instead talking with actual men and their actual responses to being assaulted by their wives/girlfriends.

An inch under six foot tall, Dave, a gardener with a deep, gravelly voice is not most people’s idea of a domestic violence victim. But he suffered two years of abuse at the hands of his girlfriend and was too embarrassed and loyal to report her to the police. He slept in his car for weeks before speaking to his local council, who found him a place at a men’s refuge.

He struggles to keep it together when he recalls the day his girlfriend smashed a bottle of Jack Daniels across his head, leaving him bleeding on the pavement: a deep scar is still clearly visible on his forehead. But when the 45-year-old from Essex describes the relief of being believed by the authorities, he breaks down, his broad shoulders heaving beneath his rugby shirt.
“When help finally comes it’s an emotional thing,” he says, sitting on the sofa at a safe house in Berkshire where he is being helped to rebuild his life. “As a man, it’s very difficult to say you’ve been beaten up. It seems like you’re the big brute and she’s the daffodil, but sometimes it’s not like that.”

Then there’s Kieron Bell.

Kieron Bell very nearly became one of those grim statistics. He is also one of a handful of men who has successfully prosecuted a partner for violence. The 37-year-old bouncer from Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, had to have emergency heart surgery after he was stabbed in the chest by his wife, Sarah, in 2009. She had been violent since the start of their marriage in 2006 but he did not want to turn to the police at first, initially because he still loved her and later because he thought they would never believe that a 5ft 2in woman would be subjecting a bulky 5ft 10in bouncer to a reign of terror.
After the stabbing, his wife tried to claim that Mr Bell fell on a knife but, while recovering in hospital, he decided to report her to the police. In 2010 she was charged with grievous bodily harm and was released from prison only in May last year. “I was scared to call the police. I’m a big bloke and I thought I’d get laughed at,” he said. “I think there needs to be more information out there for blokes. If I’d known what the signs to look out for were before, I could’ve done something sooner. But I loved her and because of my child I stayed with her.”

Dave and Kieron give us two reasons why men don’t go to the police when their partners turn violent.  First, they’re afraid they’ll be laughed at and not given any help by the police and social services workers who are supposedly there for them.  Second, there are the kids.  If a couple has children the man will often see himself as their first and last line of defense against their abusive mother.  And he knows to a virtual certainty that, if he walks out,
(a) his wife will get custody and he’ll barely ever see his children again, if then,
(b) the children will be at the mercy of their mother, and
(c) she’ll likely charge him with abuse which will get him banned from access to the kids and maybe put in jail.
Is it any wonder men don’t seek help?
Then there’s the fact that, if they do reach out, there probably won’t be a hand to grab.

One in three victims of domestic abuse in Britain is male but refuge beds for men are critically scarce. There are 78 spaces which can be used by men in refuges around Britain, of which only 33 are dedicated rooms for males: the rest can be taken by victims of either gender. This compares with around 4,000 spaces for women. In Northern Ireland and Scotland there are no male refuges at all.
Alan Gibson, an independent domestic violence adviser for Women’s Aid which runs the men’s refuge in Berkshire that is helping Dave, said: “Four organisations phoned us today looking for places for four different men. They’ve been attacked and abused, but there is only one room available in the country and someone will have to decide which of those four men is most in need.”

Unsurprisingly, this almost complete absence of services for male victims of domestic violence stems directly from government policy that assumes male victims don’t exist.

Mark Brooks, chairman of the men’s domestic abuse charity, the Mankind Initiative, said: “Support services for male victims remain decades behind those for women. This is not helped by the Government and others having a violence against women and girls strategy without having an equivalent for men. Everybody sees domestic violence victims as being female rather than male. This is one of Britain’s last great taboos.”
The Mankind Initiative helpline receives 1,200 calls a year from men or friends and family calling on behalf of men. Stigma and fear of being disbelieved, among other factors, make men much less likely than women to report abuse to the police. The British Crime Survey found that only 10 per cent of male victims of domestic violence had told the police, compared with 29 per cent of women. More than a quarter of male victims tell no one what has happened to them, compared with 13 per cent of women.
The human cost of ignoring the problem is stark: 21 men were murdered by a partner or former partner in 2010/11.

That unwillingness of the government and service providers to assist male victims only perpetuates a societal conception of DV that’s not only at odds with the truth but lays down a red carpet for false allegations by women.

Nicola Graham-Kevan, an expert in partner violence at Central Lancashire University, said: “Society is blind to women’s aggression. The biggest disparity is women’s ability to seek help which makes men very vulnerable to false allegations. People often won’t believe that men are victims. Men have to be seen as passive, obvious victims with clear injuries, whereas, if a woman makes allegations, they are believed much more easily.”

Those allegations are often used as tools to wrest custody from fathers in divorce cases.  And effective tools they are.

Dr Graham-Kevan believes the system needs to adjust to make it safer for male victims and their children, who can end up with an abusive mother. “The biggest thing for me as a parent is that children are being placed in significant positions of harm. It sounds anti-feminist, but I think we’re allowing women too many rights in the family court, because courts assume that the women are the best parent as a starting position, rather than looking at it equally.”

So in a nutshell, mothers get the vast majority of custody.  Some of that custody is given them courtesy of their own false claims of domestic violence.  Mothers commit much more of the child abuse than do fathers (in the U.S., mothers acting alone do twice as much child abuse than do fathers acting alone).  And to top it all off, children who are abused by their parents are far more likely to grow up to be abusers as adults.  If you’re the devil, it’s an ideal system.  It’s a system that perpetuates domestic violence instead of decreasing it as researchers in the U.S. have noted.

If the system offered male victims and their children some sort of help, obviously the incidence of domestic violence could decrease at the outset.  But more importantly, if the system didn’t hand over children to abusive mothers, we’d find ourselves training fewer abusers.  Of course we do none of that because the system of DV response is too committed to its own narrative of female innocence and male corruption to do the obvious.  Until that narrative changes, domestic violence will continue to be the scourge it is.

A Question From A Reader

"Why is feminism wrong? I'm sorry, it's just all I've heard is that it's good and it helps girls and things. We don't learn in school so I guess I'm just confused. "

I’m glad you asked. Very hard to squeeze into a single comment reply so you really need to investigate further yourself but off the top of my head I would say the main thing is that it is demonstrably a lie that causes much more harm than good in the world.

Women have never been oppressed as a class in the west & in fact have always been given special provisions, protected & treated as far more precious resources than the men - there is no society which forces its women to go die in war, or do any of the most dangerous jobs in which men die in their thousands every year - men still make up around 94% of all workplace deaths, everywhere in the world today.

This is not because of any misogyny or prejudice, but simply the acceptance of the biological reality that women are for the most part smaller & weaker than men, & that also all children any society has can only be carried, birthed & (historically) nursed by women, so treating women as badly as every society treats its men risks damage to not only the individual women but the survival of the society - & the human race - itself. The female of the species is the evolutionary stop-gap: you only need one bull in a fieldful of cows to replenish the herd in a single summer, whereas a fieldful of bulls & a single cow will still only result in a single calf per year. Women therefore are more valuable to society than men are & it instructs us accordingly: “women & children first”.

All feminism is based on ‘patriarchy theory’, the belief that society has been set up by men to benefit only men & that this can be seen by how few women are presidents, prime ministers, MPs, CEOs of corporations, etc.

But this is due to what has been termed ‘the Apex Fallacy’: all human systems & groups are hierarchical, with many at the bottom & only a handful at the top. The feminists looking up at the small number of men in high status positions concluded this was evidence of male privilege, but never looked down at the huge numbers of men down at the very bottom of society: men for instance are between 80 & 90% of the homeless, & there are a hell of a lot more of them than there are Hugh Hefners & Donald Trumps.

Feminists (correctly) observe that when you count up the lifetime earnings of all men & all women, the total in the ‘women’ column is less than that of the ‘men’s’ but (incorrectly) conclude that therefore “women make 70cents for every dollar a man makes doing the same job” etc. This is simply not true, & there have been laws making sure that is illegal for at least 40 years.

The ‘pay-gap’, where it exists at all, is the result of the different priorities & choices men & women have & make - for instance a married man with kids is much more likely to work longer hours than a single guy with no wife & children to feed, whereas a married woman with kids will most often work less hours, or part-time, or not at all. Again, only women can carry & give birth to children & an enormous number of women take maternity leave from their jobs, many times never returning to work, while men are more likely to continue in their jobs & so gain promotions etc. Women tend to (sensibly) trade off a better life & more time to enjoy it against higher wages & high-stress responsibility/accountability that can only be acquired through single-minded pursuit of career at the expense of everything else. Men work the overwhelming majority of overtime, night shifts, danger work etc, which all pay more than safe, secure day jobs in air-conditioned offices, etc.

The real disparity is mainly between married women & everyone else: childless, never married women in their twenties now make something like 12% more than men their same age, & it’s been that way for quite some time. But by lumping in the vast number of women who don’t ‘work’ at all, or take maternity leave, or stay home to raise children or work part-time (men work the vast majority of overtime, for instance, whereas women work most part-time jobs, & full-time work of course pays more than part-time), the statistics become seriously skewed, as does society’s impression of the situation.

Other common feminist complaints such as ‘100 years ago women didn’t even have the vote!’ completely ignore the fact that 100 years ago the majority of men didn’t have the vote either - in my country, the UK, ‘men’ as a class ‘got’ the vote the same year women did: 1918, though I was never taught that at school. The story of women’s suffrage needs to be seen in the context of the hundreds of years of campaigning for the common peoples right to vote & the evolution of human rights in general: the  Chartists, the Magna Carta, the French & American revolutions, the antislavery movement, Thomas Paine’s ‘The Rights Of Man’ etc… Feminism rejects all of this historical context in favour of its own unique patriarchal conspiracy theory explanation of how the world has to work.

Feminism, which publicly states that it is synonymous with equality, has never once worked towards anything which addressed areas in which men are discriminated against or suffering from a gender disparity, such as reproductive rights, custody, genital mutilation, suicide (80% of suicides are male), boys falling behind in schools & not going on to college (many college campuses are now 60/40 female/male), the enormous gender disparity in prison sentencing for the same crimes etc...

There is no need for feminism to continue in the west any more than for the women’s suffrage movement to have continued past the 1920s; it keeps on only because of the political power it has acquired & the billions of dollars in private & state contributions it receives every year: there is an entire framework of gender studies departments, the domestic violence industry & women in positions acquired only through ‘positive’ discrimination that all rely on its spreading of misandry if they are to continue getting paid. Whatever genuine grievances feminists in the west actually had were rectified 30 or even 40 years ago, which means now they can only continue existing through fabricating rape hysteria & ‘glass ceilings’ & organizing ‘slutwalks’ - complete non-issues that if anything harm women (as much as they do men).

Finally, feminism is a hate movement: every single ‘triumph’ it has won has only been achieved through the scapegoating & demonizing of ‘men’ as a class, & yet has relied on men every step of the way to support it & bring about the changes it has demanded, which they have gladly handed over every time. Although probably few mainstream feminists would actually come right out & publicly say ‘all men are rapists’, that belief, that way of thinking only originates with feminist thought & was borne out of it. I tend to see the feminist movement now as a broadcasting tower which pumps out misandry 24/7, day after day after day, with no final goal even stated anymore, no end in sight.

I could ramble on about this all day but it’s a lot easier to deal with in smaller bites - if there’s any issue in particular you’d like me to go into I’d be glad to explain more. Thanks for stopping by anyhow.