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‘I would like for professionals and society to look beyond black and white stereotypes about domestic violence’

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On Wednesday insideMAN published an article detailing the findings of a new study into male victims of domestic violence that found the male victims who contributed to it were often arrested under false accusations and their disclosures of victimisation initially dismissed by police.

Following a surge of interest in the findings and more than 5,000 views of our article, insideMAN contacted the study’s author, Dr Jessica McCarrick, a Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology and Chartered Psychologist at Teesside University, to find out more about what motivated her to undertake her research.

Here are her responses to our questions.

Why did you choose this area of study?

The reason I chose this area of research stemmed from both a need within myself to conduct research which would have meaning and application to people’s lives, and experiences I’d had as a Trainee Counselling Psychologist in my early placements.

Following a six week training course in domestic violence, which was heavily influenced by the feminist model, I began to question some of the assumptions underpinning this philosophy. Through my doctoral training as a Counselling Psychologist I was encouraged to think reflectively about issues which affect people, and to focus on people as individuals, rather than broadly categorising people.

It was these thought processes, coupled with my doctoral training that began to nourish the initial idea for my research. This idea was then developed further when I began my first placement, which was in a local charity which provided therapeutic support to both male and female survivors of domestic violence.

It was on this placement that I really began to learn about the violence, trauma and psychological distress that men and women experience within abusive relationships. Later in my doctoral training, whilst in the midst of writing up my research, this charity, which was the only service in the local area providing support to male survivors of domestic violence, sadly lost its funding and was forced to close.

Knowing that there was now even less support in the local area for men affected by domestic violence motivated me to complete my research and publish it, with a view to spreading the word and making changes on a societal level.

Why do you think there is resistance to acknowledging male victims of domestic violence?

I believe this resistance is stemming from a number of complex factors, rather than one cause. It’s likely that people are resistant to believing that domestic violence towards men occurs due to the belief within society that men are strong and tough.

Recent research has displayed that stereotypes around gender and domestic violence are still apparent within society, and there is still a way to go before we move towards a more gender-balanced view of domestic violence. I believe society needs to work towards recognising the complex and multi-faceted psychological impact of domestic violence.

The research and policies that have supported female survivors of domestic violence have been invaluable to service provision and the local services for women in my area are excellent sources of support. I would like to see the same happen for men and this change needs to be supported in a ‘bottom-up’ way through research and campaigning, but ultimately from a ‘top-down’ way, in order for services to be provided with funding and support on a national level.

How many men did you speak to?

I had six men participate in my study. However since the beginning of the research process back in 2012 I have received many e-mails from male survivors detailing their own personal experiences.

Can you tell us about any further experiences the men you spoke to told you about that are not detailed in the article?

“I can now fully understand how Afro-Caribbean people felt in the 50s and 60s when they first arrived in the UK. They were treat like pariahs, they were segregated and that’s how it feels.”

“I was basically walking on eggshells… you know it’s going to happen you just don’t quite know when.”

“If a police car was driving up my street, I was wary about where they were going, whether they were following me.”

The men in my study described a negative psychological impact which was likened to ‘a pressure cooker’ and this was connected to feelings of rage, loss and post-traumatic stress symptoms.

I would like to call for professionals and people in society to look beyond black and white stereotypes and to listen carefully to the calls of both men and women and respond appropriately to the people involved in this hidden crime.

You can find out more about Dr McCarrick’s study Men’s Experiences of the Criminal Justice System Following Female Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence here

 

 

insideMAN signs open letter castigating CPS for “misleading and damaging” report that airbrushes out male victims

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In a letter published today in the Guardian newspaper, 30 of Britain’s leading experts in abuse recovery, child protection and men’s health have called upon Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders and other public bodies to reaffirm commitment to addressing and supporting the needs of all victims of intimate and sexual violence.

The letter explains how last week’s CPS report entitled ‘Violence against Women and Girls, Crime Report 2014-15’ seriously misled the public by counting male victims of intimate crimes including rape, sexual assault, child abuse and domestic violence as victims of crimes against women and girls. As the accompanying data section made clear (but the text of the report did not) crimes against more than 13,000 men and boys were included in the statistics, equivalent to around one in six of all victims described.

It goes on to say:

Your article (More people than ever being convicted of violence against women, figures show, The Guardian, 25 June) was inaccurate and damaging. It is simply untrue to say, “about 107,100 cases concerning violence against women and girls were prosecuted over the [past] 12 months.”

Responsibility for this error, however, lies not with your staff but with the Crown Prosecution Service and their report, misleadingly entitled ‘Violence Against Women And Girls, Crime Report 2014-15.’

Despite the title, this analysis included more than 13,000 male victims of crimes including rape, sexual assault, child abuse and domestic violence. Many will have been gay or transgender, many will have had their children or dependents affected.

Designating these men and boys as victims of crimes “against women and girls” not only misleads the public about the complex and diverse dynamics of abuse, but also serves to conceal and marginalise the experiences of all male survivors of intimate and sexual crimes while perpetuating the myth that “real men” don’t get raped, abused or become victims of domestic violence.

Victims of intimate violence face significant psychological barriers to reporting these events. Some fear they will not be believed, or even cast as the perpetrator. Those who find the courage to report their abuse to the authorities often say they are motivated less by the need for justice or revenge but for validation that what happened to them was real and was wrong.

Many men tell us  that the experience of intimate violation has left them feeling like ‘less than a man’ making interaction with authorities even more complex and challenging. For those same authorities to publicly disregard this and erase the experiences of around one in six of all victims is unjust and a cruel betrayal of their bravery.

We fully support drives to eliminate intimate and sexual violence and understand that focussing on female victims is central to this. It is also essential that we retain due consideration for male victims of these crimes. We call on the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders and all public bodies to affirm their commitment to addressing and eliminating intimate violence against human beings of any gender and to take care in future not to compromise the dignity and public understanding of any survivors.

Yours etc.

Ally Fogg, Writer and journalist
Michael May, Director, Survivors UK
Duncan Craig, CEO, Survivors Manchester
Jane Powell, CEO, CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably
Mark Brooks, Chair, The Mankind Initiative
Nick Smithers, National Development Officer, Abused Men in Scotland
Bob Balfour, Founder, Survivors West Yorkshire
Prof. Damien Ridge, Professor of Health Studies, University of Westminster
Dr John Barry, UCL Medical School
Dr Nicola Graham-Kevan, Reader in Psychology, University of Central Lancashire
Dr Mike Hartill, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport, Edge Hill University
Dr Ben Hine, Lecturer in Psychology, University of West London
Dr Melanie Lang, Senior Lecturer in Child Protection in Sport, Edge Hill University
Dr Michelle Lowe, Lecturer in criminological and forensic psychology, University of Bolton
Dr Luke Sullivan, Clinical Psychologist and Director of Men’s Minds Matter
Anthony Murphy, Lecturer in Psychology, University of West London
Dan Bell, Features Editor, insideMan magazine
Martin Daubney, Journalist, broadcaster and committee member, Being A Man Festival
Brian Dempsey, Lecturer, School of Law, University of Dundee
Richard Duncker, Founder, Men Do Complain
Alex Feis-Bryce, Director of Services, National Ugly Mugs
Justin Gaffney, CEO, MSH Health & Wellbeing
Glen Poole, UK Coordinator, International Men’s Day
Shane Ryan, CEO, Working With Men
Martin Seager, Consultant Clinical Psychologist
Mark Sparrow, Journalist
Simone Spray, CEO, 42nd Street
Gijsbert Stoet, Reader in Psychology, University of Glasgow
Martyn Terry Sullivan, CEO, Mankind Counselling
Tina Threadgold, Trustee, UKNSWP

 

What happens when a feminist man dares to speak out against the sisterhood?

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In February Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist and comedian, who was one of 2,000 male celebrities selected by the feminist White Ribbon campaign to tackle violence against women in Australia, wrote an article highlighting how men are forgotten in the domestic violence debate.

The article triggered outrage among feminists and a furious, and ultimately successful, campaign for his resignation as a White Ribbon ambassador.  InsideMAN was the first UK publication to report the story, here Tanveer describes in his own words what happens when a feminist man dares to go against the sisterhood. This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, Australia.

***

I have been considerably disempowered after writing about male disempowerment. Wading into the treacherous, virulent, oestrogen laden waters of modern feminism I have learnt that the gender wars are seen by many as a zero sum game, much like poker or derivatives trading.

After writing in the Australian last month about the limited discussion of male disempowerment in the context of domestic violence, I was treated to an orgy of abuse, threats and complete mis-representation. The attacks were distributed in the convergent media – online, mobile and television.

‘I was labeled a misogynist’

The article was partly in response to my own experience of seeing relatives and patients who had been violent to their partners. I despised them as a child and adolescent, but with maturity and an education, came to understand that they experienced the social upheaval forced upon them through migration as a kind of humiliation.

I was labeled a misogynist and a blamer of women. Threatening messages were left at my practice. Nurses at my psychiatric hospital in western Sydney took me aside to apply their counseling skills to the public assaults on my character. ‘You’ve really pissed some people off, doc. Are you OK?’ This encounter occurred while actual patients were threatening self harm on the ward.

I had morphed into a wife beater and misogynist still pining for the patriarchy after suggesting violence is often an expression of underlying distress. It is alright to try and understand those sanctioned as bona fide victims oppressed by power, but anyone we see as privileged perpetrators are not entitled to exercises in illumination.

The saga was given extra juice for I was closely connected with the White Ribbon movement, a campaign whereby men wear a looped ribbon on their chest and encouraged other blokes not to bash women. My face was one of five to feature in their campaign. I had even gone to Pakistan a few years ago to help expand the campaign there, funded by AusAid. I met furtive, male activists in the cosmopolitan town of Lahore, female victims of abuse at the stronghold of Sufi mysticism in Multan and radicals who were incensed that violence against women was even stigmatised in the madrasah capital of Pakistan, the desert town of Bahawalpur.

A ‘veneer of reason’

Meanwhile, Western feminists remain focused on elite issues such as the pay of women on corporate boards or the wages of millionaire Hollywood actresses, as bemoaned by Patricia Arquette at the Oscars.

Fairfax polemicist Clementine Ford, described by Andrew Bolt as ‘some feminist with bared tattoos’, criticised my views for using the sneakiest, most privileged tool of the patriarchy, a ‘veneer of reason.’ She also illustrated the ridiculousness of modern feminism being criticised as man hating, by writing ‘I don’t have time for men’s woe-betide-me feelings.’

Two nights after my column was published, Labor politician Tim Watts spoke in federal Parliament calling for my resignation. I watched online bemused by it all. An emergency teleconference was held with the administrators of White Ribbon. They asked for a clarifying statement, only to publish a press release the following day outlining how the CEO Libby Davies was shocked and that I was sorry for my views.

I wasn’t sorry for my views, only that they were so horribly misrepresented. The contradiction was highlighted further by White Ribbon Australia’s chief scientific advisor, Dr Michael Flood, who had co-authored several studies across the region confirming male disempowerment as a growing factor driving violence against women.

Class traitor and collaborator

A British men’s group published a story titled ‘Global feminism goes into meltdown as male supporter reveals he has a mind of his own.’ A parallel, splinter group also called White Ribbon focused on violence against both sexes, begun by the global founder of women’s shelters Erin Pizzey, wrote an open letter of support on their website. I later learnt that the local White Ribbon movement was embroiled in a legal wrangle with the Canadian site for using the name without permission. I felt like a newly adopted child caught amid divorce proceedings.

Male victims of violence emailed me their stories of abuse and I was invited to speak at an upcoming conference in Toronto about modern masculinity, all expenses paid. Several local academics wrote to me, on strict conditions of anonymity, to tell me about how difficult it was to speak openly and scientifically about this issue in their departments.

Fellow psychiatrist and Marxist writer, Dr Tad Tietze, told me that I was seen by sections of the Left as an ‘Uncle Tom’, a term used for race traitors. This struck a chord because my wife and family joked that my growing inability to tolerate chilli laden food was a sign I was becoming a coconut: dark on the outside, white within. I was condemned to befriend other such traitors of my ilk, such as self-hating Jews, house Negroes and bananas – those outwardly Chinese in appearance but eager to adopt white, middle class ways to ease their desire for social climbing.

The White Ribbon site continued to be mobbed by posts demanding my resignation. Despite the group being about men, the hundreds of angry posts were entirely from women. The following day, White Ribbon issued a statement that the calls for my resignation were so persistent that I had been asked to step down. In a final twist in keeping with the totalitarian character of the entire episode, in order to be reinstated, I would undergo a recommitment program to make sure my views were in keeping with the movement. I packed my ribbon away in a basement drawer and sheepishly returned to my practice, no longer an ambassador for the cause, and resumed writing prescriptions for psychoactive drugs.

Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a psychiatrist, media commentator and author.

Picture credit: Flickr/Khalid Albaih

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Why I’m fighting a charity that supports female domestic violence victims

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Why would a man who wants to end violence end up fighting with a charity that helps female victims of domestic violence?

—This is article #75 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

I’ve been fighting for male victims of domestic violence in Wales to be given equal treatment by the state for around seven years. As a result, one of the organisations I cross swords with in on a regular basis is Welsh Women’s Aid (WWA), a charity which has been supporting the introduction of a new bill that seeks to help women and girls in Wales, to the exclusion of men and boys.

As part of this work I co-ordinated an online petition which recently prompted WWA to send me an official letter, outlining their response to my campaign. The first thing I noticed was that the letter heading for WWA states very clearly “ putting women and children first”.

This raised a question for me “who comes second?”. One answer is boys who, unlike girls, are excluded by WWA from refuges for victims of domestic violence from quite a younger age. WWA’s letter also carried the statement and logo “ children matter” and yet they makes no reference to keeping girls and boys safe from all forms of domestic violence, including abuse by their own mothers.

WWA frequently mentions the number of women killed by their partner each year but not the 60 to 70 children who are killed each year by their parents. Surely this shocking fact in connection with domestic violence should be clearly recognised by those proclaiming that “ children matter”!

WWA also fails to address the human suffering and distress caused by domestic violence against women ins same-sex relationships. Surely this would be a priority in “ putting women first”?

Suicide amongst men is a major issue in Wales. Recent research has shown that men kill themselves after suffering domestic violence and that this could bring the number of deaths attributable to domestic violence to something like equality between men and women.

I believe that the shaming of men is contributing to these grim statistics and the WWA approach—i.e. “men second”—can only be making matters worse. I also wonder what impact the concept of “men second” may have on young Welsh boys and how young girls may feel about what is, or is not, it is an acceptable way to relate to boys.

Research by Dr Erica Bowen at Coventry University has found that it is seen to be OK to hit boys because “he probably deserves it”.

In a recent paper called “women more aggressive to partners than men”, given to the British Psychological Society, Dr Elizabeth Bates from the University of Cumbria said her research found that:

 “ … women engaged in significantly higher levels of controlling behaviour than men …. This study found that women demonstrated a desire to control their partners and were more likely to use physical aggression than men … Thissuggests that [domestic abuse] may not be motivated by patriarchal values and needs to be studied within the context of other forms of aggression, which has potential implications for interventions …”

Patriarchy theory 

I find it somewhat troubling that the current policy of the Welsh government continues to be based on the neo-Marxist “patriarchal” theory, which is increasingly inappropriate to new legislation looking forward into the 21st century in Wales.

Solid, evidence based research and practice that protects children and subsequent generations from all sources of domestic abuse (including violent women) must be the central principle that guides government policy and new legislation in Wales moving forward into the 21st century.

In my view, the neo-Marxist “patriarchal” theory continues to dominate the Welsh Government’s thinking as it has not undertaken to treat all victims (both men and women) “equally” in accordance with the Equality Act 2010.

Dr Amanda Robinson, who is the lead author of the report which informed the drafting of the Welsh Bill defines the neo-Marxist theory of domestic abuse as follows:

“The gender paradigm of [domestic abuse] argues that domestic violence is a result of patriarchal social systems where men are exclusively the batterers and females are exclusively the victims of male dominance and privilege.”

Neo-Marxist sexism 

“This Neo-Marxian model posits the masculine (bourgeoisie) as occupying the upper rungs of privilege, authority, and power over the feminine (proletariat).

“Thus, domestic violence is the physical manifestation of his social dominance as it is forcibly imposed on her submissive feminine body. Conversely, female violence is initiated reactively, purely as a form of self-defence.”

In my view, female instigators of, and active participants in, domestic abuse in Wales must be recognised equally and correspondingly with male victims in order to formulate interventions that help break the generational cycle of learned dysfunctional and abusive behaviours that perpetuates domestic violence.

Violent women and male victims must not be ignored or marginalised in the formulation of new legislation in the 21st century in Wales because of blind, radicalised dogma and Marxist theories that date back to 50 to 150 years ago.

It is time for us to take a new approach.

—Picture credit: DFAT

Tony Stott campaigns for men in Wales as “Healing Men”.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Why is there such resistence to recognising male victims of domestic violence?

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Regular insidMAN reader, Nigel Johnson, is a commissioning manager at an NHS Clinical Commissioning Group. Here he explores why the UK’s approach to tackling domestic violence has consistently over-looked male victims and female perpetrators.

—This is article #56 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

Regular readers of insideMAN may well be aware of the recent debate in Wales around a consultation on a Violence Against Women Bill.

Given the very strong socialisation to be protective to women and girls, it can look churlish not to say “unmanly” to object to such a thing. Surely societies in the west have for centuries placed women in the role of “damsel” in need of care and protection and simply modernising this very traditional paradigm is all to the good? Protecting women and girls from harm, nothing could be more worthy.

So why has there been such a debate and why does it get so heated in some circles?

As is so often the case the devil is in the detail. The centuries-old tradition of protections and support for women and girls is still alive and well. Few in the debate seriously challenge the view that women and girls need to be protected from harms, though perhaps pointing out that boys and even men should be equally supported.

At the core of the debate is the idea that these harms are uniquely “gendered”. The notion that the collection of abusive behaviours covered by the bill are always committed by males and always against females. And here is the problem. Put simply, this view is both wrong in terms of actual fact and elsewhere has contributed to both misunderstanding of the causations and direct and indirect discrimination against boys and men,  and women and girls who are on the “wrong” side (who need help with their abusive behaviour or find they are abused by a female).

Surprises and anomalies

The early years of looking at domestic abuse in the UK was driven by interest in “Dating Violence” in the United States. In the United States there had been a series if large scale quantative research reports indicating that violence — which was generally taken to include “emotional violence” and other non physical abuse — was relatively common in adolescent relationships. As is often the case this concern was picked up in the UK and there were a small number of relatively large scale pieces of research done. At the same time Sugar magazine and some other publications for girls and young women did online surveys of their readership.

In terms of covering the experience of both boys and girls navigating the transition to adulthood there was research done for NHS Scotland, Southwark, NSPCC and the Northern Ireland Government. Though not on the scale of the research done in the US, these were on relatively large populations with attempts to make sure these were “typical” of the age cohorts. Simply because of the difficulty in gaining funding most such research tends to be focussed on specific smaller populations (children in care, care leavers, victims in court cases etc.) so these reports remain the rare examples of a more typical population.

The results reported in the data tended to reflect some interesting trends common in US research. In particular in each the researchers reported a number of “surprises” or “anomalies” in the results. These were noteworthy as they were challenging to the hypotheses of the authors which reflected the gendered understanding of abuse in relationships.

‘Boys less likely to see themselves as victims’

The studies found a much higher incidence of both violence and other abusive behaviours towards males than expected. In fact in some cases higher than experienced by the females. Indeed where girls were asked about their behaviours towards their partners, they were indicating even higher incidences. This particularly was so in “emotional violence” but included such things as hitting or throwing things.

Even more surprising is that more boys than girls reported being forced or coerced into sex. A result startling to the authors and not at all what could be expected.

The clues to this surprising set of findings perhaps can be found in the attitudes expressed by the young people. In a sense these perhaps reflect a combination of widespread public information programmes and some traditional social norms. Perhaps the higher reporting of their own abuse of their partners reflected that girls were much more likely to view behaviours as abusive. They were also much more likely to regard some behaviour as upsetting and having a long term effect. The boys reported being very much more tolerant of violence of all forms against themselves and fatalistic about this being what they had to put up with.

Absence of political will?

So how does this link to the debate in Wales. Well it has to do with what happened following these reports. The first thing is that the recommendations from the above mentioned reports were focussed on the findings for girls. At least in part because the commissions came from programmes focussed on abuse against women and girls. So anyone reading the Exec. Summaries and Recommendations will have little clue to the intriguing and unexpected findings with regard to boys.

The second is that because the anomalous findings are about boys, the suggestions that there should be further researched have gone un-headed. The cynical might think it’s because they represent a serious challenge to the authors’ lead hypothesis. But it is true that research funding in this area is driven by VAWG strategies.

So for instance the Bristol University unit followed up their research with a further piece looking at children in the care system again with a focus on vulnerable girls. As there is no funding to explore the intellectually interesting findings about boys’ victimisation then it takes considerable determination to research it.

Without any political will to further investigate typical populations nor to fund outside the gendered paradigm not only does the opportunity for paradigm shifting research get lost but far more importantly the widespread abuse of boys in relationships remains concealed from policy making on education, awareness, treatment and prosecution.

Nina Schutt, from her work for Safer Southwark Partnership, states: “The survey carried out among young people in Southwark overall identify that young people both experience and perpetrated various forms of adolescent domestic violence in their dating relationships. The survey also showed that this is something that is being experienced by both young men and women, and that in some cases young men report experiences higher levels than young women. The young men are also more likely than young women to accept aggressive behaviour in a relationship, as well as justify such behaviour with actions made by their partner, such a cheating on them”

The process of ignoring boys is facilitated by the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy which is policy in England and the adoption by the Scottish Government of a “gendered” definition of Domestic Abuse. In this way these create indirect discrimination that “silences” the experiences of men and boys. Of course this reflects a much bigger silence about Domestic Abuse. One can see similar processes in forced marriage, elder abuse and abuse of disabled people as the actual variety and complexity gets more and more reduced to issues of gender and so a very specific paradigm reinforced by funding being attached to this paradigm.

—Picture credit: Flickr/David Goehring 

SOURCES:

  • Partner exploitation and violence in teenage intimate relationships, Christine Barter, Melanie McCarry, David Berridge and Kathy Evans October 2009 www.nspcc.org.uk
  • Young People’s Attitudes to Gendered Violence. By Michelle Burman and Fred Cartmel University of Glasgow Published by NHS Scotland 2005
  • Domestic Violence in Adolescent Relationships. By Nina Shutt. Published by Safer Southwark Partnership 2006
  • Attitudes of Young People towards Domestic Violence, Judith Bell, Community Information Branch, Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (Northern Ireland) 2008

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

So why don’t UK equality laws apply to male victims of domestic violence?

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The UK is said to have some of the most comprehensive equality laws in the world. So why aren’t they being applied to ensure male victims of domestic violence are treated equally asks Nick Smithers of Abused Men in Scotland?

—This is article #53  in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

What a shame life constantly turns out to be so complicated while we struggle to provide simple answers to ever shifting problems. Let’s consider equality, specifically the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), as prescribed by the Equality Act 2010, and how this is applied at the moment in Scotland with regard to Domestic Abuse policies and funding.

It is clear from the legislation that there is a duty upon public bodies such as local authorities and the NHS to ensure that services provide equally and proportionately for those people with shared or different protected characteristics.

It states that public sector bodies have a duty to ‘advance equality of opportunity between persons who share a relevant protected characteristic and persons who do not share it’. One such protected characteristic is sex hence there is a duty to provide equal and proportionate services for men and women.

What about male victims? 

What should proportionate services look like in Scotland? Well if we take the bottom line as being recorded police incidents of domestic abuse approximately 20% were against a male victim (around 10, 500). This figure is itself widely regarded to be an underreporting based on the Scottish Crime and Justice survey which reflects many similar studies around the world suggesting around 1 in 3 victims of domestic abuse are men.

Of course these types of figures and studies do not give detail of the context of the abuse but it remains clear that there are large number of men experiencing domestic abuse in Scotland and services ought to reflect this.

Unfortunately, as with most other places, the service provision is nowhere near proportionate with domestic abuse services uniformly being delivered as Violence against Women or Gender Based Violence and often excluding men explicitly or implicitly through gendered policy and language.

Representing Abused Men in Scotland for 18 months now I have been a participant in many policy and strategic discussions with a variety of stakeholders who have expressed a range of views as to how to develop services. Fundamentally however there remains a significant deficit in services targeting and embracing the needs of male victims.

Men deserve equality too!

The main obstacle when dealing with mainstream agencies such as the NHS and Local Authorities lies in their interpretation of the PSED and their responsibilities to it. Looking at the figures and working with men in Scotland, as I have for a number of years, I believe that this is a clear equality issue and that men represent a large minority who are currently discriminated against.

When I have challenged policy officers on this issue however they have claimed to be satisfied that PSED is being met. In practice this manifests with services being focused on women and children or in the case of the recent Scottish Government policy document Equally Safe: Scotland’s strategy for preventing and eradicating violence against women and girls, also excluding boys.

How can it be that this approach satisfies PSED? Well this lies in the interpretation and analysis of domestic abuse. For many service providers domestic abuse is a cause and a consequence of societal gender inequality. This simplistic analysis leaves little room for male victims or women in same sex relationships and herein lies the problem.

Men of all backgrounds deserve our help

The dominant explanation of domestic abuse seems to indicate that it is something that impacts on women only as it is a cause and consequence of unequal gender power relations in society hence services being almost wholly funded for women appear to meet the duty. The fact that thousands of men are known to be victims of domestic abuse is something of an inconvenient truth but one which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

So we have a situation whereby the language of equalities excludes a very large and diverse section of society. Whether you’re an elderly Pakistani Scottish man in Edinburgh, a middle aged gay white man in Orkney, a teenage man with learning difficulties in Perth, a homeless Aberdonian man with addiction issues, a business man on the Isle of Skye or an asylum seeking father of four in Glasgow – if you are suffering domestic abuse there is a substantive lack of support available which is likely to be sensitive to your needs and circumstances.

This is not merely an issue of semantics it is being used to justify services being exclusively targeted at women and girls. It is a matter of urgency, literally life and death in some circumstances, that Government at all levels as well as other public sector bodies succeed in reconciling perceived societal gender equality issues with specific equality issues as they manifest in the lives of men, women and children in daily life. It is clear to me that until this happens many public sector bodies are singularly failing to fulfil this basic, legal duty.

—Picture credit: Purple Sherbert

Nick Smithers is National Development Officer with Abused Men in Scotland (AMIS). You can follow AMIS on twitter @malesurvivors.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

Why men remain silent about domestic violence

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Why are male victims of domestic violence more likely to suffer in silence? One man explains why he kept the problem to himself.

—This is article #23 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

I’m task-oriented. I will discuss my aims, my projects, my achievements with anyone.  But if you asked me how I was feeling, the answer you would get would be , “I’m fine,” even if I wasn’t.

It just wasn’t part of my nature to talk about my feelings and emotions.  If I felt hurt, I wasn’t going to make an issue of it – I certainly wouldn’t let anyone know – I’d simply dust myself down, pick myself up and carry on.   I would talk about what I could do or what I was going to do, but never about how I felt or the circumstances behind emotions.  I would say that this is true for most men that our innermost angst remains locked away in our psyche.

For a long time, I didn’t recognise the violent assaults on me as Domestic Abuse.  I’d made a wedding vow that included the words, “ for better or for worst, in sickness and in health.”   The actions perpetrated against me, I reasoned, was because of some undiagnosed illness caused by the stress of bereavement and maybe even physiological changes due to childbirth.  My pleas to my ex-wife to seek medical attention for her extreme anger outbursts were ignored.

I kept telling myself the violence would stop 

I didn’t see the attacks on me as criminal assaults although they clearly were.  I kept telling myself that the violence would end once the grieving had ended or once the baby had arrived.  It never did.  The more I accepted her pattern of behaviour, the worst it became.  Also, how could I even think about involving the Police and pressing charges against the woman I loved?

I felt I couldn’t tell anyone.   Who would believe me?  Most people thought that women are incapable of attacking the physically stronger man.  I wish I’d known back then that women attacking their male partners is far more prevalent than assumed.   Although hit, I’d never retaliate back.  To me, striking a women even under provocation, is totally unacceptable.

When I first stayed away from the marital home a counselling session was arranged.  This was facilitated by our Bishop before they realised the extent of the abuse.  In fact, I would like to think that this session helped them comprehend the severity of the abuse I suffered.  In trying to comprehend all that had happened, I spoke about being physically hit by my ex-wife and said that I would never hit her back. She responded in a loud, angry voice, “If you did hit me, you’d only do it once!” to which I calmly responded , “That’s the problem though, you’ve hit me more than once.”

However, the attitudes I encountered afterwards were all dismissive about the severity of the abuse.   I suspect though, were I female, it would have been a different story.

Why do men remain silent? 

Men remain silent because they suspect that they won’t be believed.   This is borne out by statistics from  The Mankind Initiative:

  • Twice as many male victims (28%) than women (13%) do not tell anyone about the domestic abuse they are suffering – highlighting the level of underreporting.
  • Male victims are three times (10%) more likely not to tell the police they are victim than a female victim (29%) and only 4% of male victims will tell a health professional compared to 19% of female victims.

I looked up the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS)  guidelines for Domestic Violence. I thought that perhaps I could find reasons for why men don’t feel comfortable going to the authorities.  It makes interesting reading:

6 – Gender and the CPS violence against women strategy

The Violence against Women Strategy provides an overarching framework for crimes that have been identified as primarily being committed by men, against women, within a context of power and control.

Domestic violence prosecutions should therefore be addressed within an overall framework of violence against women and an overall human rights framework……..Prosecutors should also recognise that domestic violence also takes places within same sex relationships that men can be abused by women and that family members can be abused by siblings, children, grandchildren and other relatives.

Although there is a token reference to male victims (recognised that men can be abused by women), the clear emphasis made is that Domestic Violence is primarily committed by men against women.

I decided to explore this more and came across:

Matczak, A., Hatzidimitriadou, E., and Lindsay, J. (2011). Review of Domestic Violence policies in England and Wales. London: Kingston University and St George‘s, University of London. ISBN: 978-0-9558329-7-0

This proved to be insightful and offered some history about UK Governmental Policy development:

Violence against women was recognised as a fundamental infringement of human rights in the 1993 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women and was a major topic at the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women (UN Women, 1995). The serious consequences of domestic violence have also been recognised by the World Health Organisation (Krug et al. 2002).

Over the past 30 years there have been major changes in the national policy and comprehension of domestic violence in the United Kingdom driven and in response to advocacy and campaigning by the women‘s movement and non-governmental organisations providing services to abused women (Harvin, 2006)…..

During the period between 1997 and 2010, the main focus of policy and legislation on domestic violence was on implementing measures based on prevention, protection and justice and the provision of support for victims of domestic abuse, to be implemented by partnerships of service providers at local and national levels. Interestingly, in formulating policy, the government defined domestic violence in a gender-neutral way. Since 2010, following the election of a Coalition government (Conservatives and Liberal Democrats), there is a shift in policy direction with increased focus on a more broad gender-based agenda to ―end violence against women and girls (Home Office, 2010).

The UK Government is currently reviewing policy in this area and is utilising the United Nations Declaration‘s (1993) definition, namely:

Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’. (Home Office, 2010)

The current government is consulting on whether to extend this definition to include younger people (Home Office, 2011).

The consultation also recognised that men and boys could be victims of domestic violence and the impact of domestic abuse on families and children. In March 2011 a new action plan Call to End Violence against Women and Girls: Action Plan was published setting out immediate and longer term priorities for action and the responsibilities of different government departments and framing policy development within an equalities and prevention framework with a distinct and new focus not only on adults but also on the protection of children from domestic and gender based violence within families, schools and from harmful material on the internet. It is backed by a £28 million fund to support the provision of specialist services for victims and prevention work.

Male victims are excluded

The last paragraph offers once more the nominal concession to men and then promotes the new Action Plan which excludes men.   It does concern me that the move away from a Gender-Neutral to Gender-Based approach will stop men from speaking out.  It goes without saying that if only female abuse victims are heard and listened to, even fewer men will be strong enough to come forward.

The truth is that Domestic Violence is no respecter of gender.  These statistics show that while  slightly more women than men suffer DV, the gap between the two genders isn’t that wide:

  • 40% of domestic abuse victims are male: for every five victims, three will be female, two will be male
  • 7% of women and 5% of men were estimated to have experienced any domestic abuse in the last year, equivalent to an estimated 1.2 million female and 800,000 male victims
  • 31% of women and 18% (one in six) of men had experienced any domestic abuse since the age of 16. These figures were equivalent to an estimated 5.0 million female victims of domestic abuse and 2.9 million male victims
  • Partner abuse (non-sexual) was the most commonly experienced type of intimate violence among both women and men. 24% of women (3.9 million) and 13% of men (2.1 million) reported having experienced such abuse since the age of 16: for every three victims of partner abuse, two will be female and one will be male.
  • In 2011/12, 4% of women (675,000) and 3% of men (491,000) experienced partner abuse: a split of 57%.43% (for every seven victims – four will be female, three will be male)
  • 1.1% of men and 1.3% of women were victims of severe force at the hands of their partner during 2011/12. Over a lifetime the figures are 6.1% and 13.2%
  • More married men (2.3%) suffered from partner abuse in 2011/12 than married women (1.8%)
  • More men in managerial and professional occupations (3.0%) suffered from partner abuse in 2011/12 than women with the same occupation (2.6%)
  • Men with children (3.0%) are as likely to be victims of partner abuse than men without children. The figure is the same for female victims (3.5%)
  • In 2011/12 – 17 men (one every 21 days) died at the hands of their partner or ex-partner compared with 88 women (one every four days)

Source:  ManKind Initiative

These figures certainly make nonsense of the claim made in the following UK Government’s Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls March 2011 document:

The vast majority of the incidents of domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking are perpetrated by men on women.

This claim is clearly unsubstantiated and should not be the basis for a Gender-based approach.   All Domestic Abuse is wrong and both sexes are as likely to be victims/ perpetrators.

Men remained silent because their voice is not heard or when it is, it is seldom believed.

—Picture credit: Flickr/David Goehring 

This article is written by “Si Victim”, a UK-based blogger who writes about his experiences of being a domestic violence survivor at The Silence of Domestic Violence blog.

You can find all of the #100Voices4Men articles that will be published in the run up to International Men’s Day 2014 by clicking on this link—#100Voices4Men—and follow the discussion on twitter by searching for #100Voices4Men.

The views expressed in these articles are not the views of insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to take take part in this important discussion, our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

You can join the #100Voices4Men discussion by commenting below; by following us on Twitter @insideMANmag and Facebook or by emailing insideMANeditor@gmail.com. 

 

‘Dangerous, feckless and disinterested’ — Former social worker on how stereotypes about dads put families at risk

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The question of how gender stereotypes impact on people’s lives has been a feminist issue for decades and with good reason — assumptions about the division of labour within the home and in the workplace, have created barriers to women fulfilling their potential and arguably led to an unbalanced society. But this focus on stereotypes about women is only part of the picture.

As a man working in the heavily female-dominated world of the early years setting, I have seen how stereotypes can also have a deeply negative impact on men. Most ironically of all, however, is that these negative assumptions about men are often rooted in the very same ideology that has fought so hard to combat prejudices about women.

My day-to-day experience of working as a social worker in an early years project, was that I was often in meetings and events as the lone male presence and frequently felt like ‘the token male’. The scale of disparity in the gender or sex of practitioners is fairly stark – especially for midwives and health visitors, who are at the forefront of child protection work and among whom I met only one male practitioner in six years. The social work team fare slightly better, although this is still very much a female domain and certainly dominated by feminist theory. And I would argue the dominance of feminist thinking in these professions has some unintended consequences, one of which is a fundamental problem in engaging fathers in child protection work.

‘Dangerous, feckless and disinterested’

As a lone worker tasked with the job of dealing with fathers, I gained an interesting insight into the barriers to fathers’ involvement and the impact of gender stereotyping. I entered practice with implicit ideas about the task of working with men, which have changed through my experience of the disadvantage and marginalisation that so many face.  The message that was inculcated — through social work education and through countless policy publications — was that men are dangerous, feckless and disinterested in family life. My experience taught me that these deep-set ideas were tied up in a dangerous chicken and egg situation — services were overwhelmingly provided by women for women, and thus struggled to grasp or understand the impact of the inherently negative stereotypes with which men were perceived.

I would go further and suggest that this is compounded in areas of economic deprivation, where the men suffered further deficits through barriers to even fulfilling the breadwinner role — which continued to often be expected of them by health and social workers, as well as partners and wives, despite the obvious contradiction with key feminist objectives of men taking on greater domestic responsibility, while reducing barriers to women having equal career opportunities.

Towards the end of my time as a fathers worker I ran an ante-natal group for dads-to-be which was designed as a therapeutic space for young men approaching fatherhood, typically the men were in families known to social work. It was in the process of visiting local teams of nurses that I was reminded sharply of the problems facing men in the area.

Failure to engage

The midwifery team told my colleague and I, starkly, that they don’t work with the fathers to be. The health visitor team went further and explained that they tended not to work with fathers and explained that they were scared of the men in the area. A more vivid illustration of negative gender stereotyping would be hard to find. But the real tragedy is the impact on vulnerable children, as the failure to engage fathers by staff, with real discretionary power in child protection decisions, potentially has calamitous outcomes for vulnerable families.

If we try to understand the extent to which these stereotypes are ingrained and perpetuated it is worth considering the work of Dr Gary Clapton at University of Edinburgh. Dr Clapton carried out an audit of social work literature and government policy documents to assess the depiction of fathers and identified a pattern whereby the presentation of healthy family life was overwhelmingly characterised by an absence of fathers.

Dr Clapton found many more images which demonstrate a pattern whereby the stereotype of family life as the domain of the mother is perpetuated by the omission of father. Where fathers were included they were invariably presented negatively.

Secondary victimisation

Again and again professionals and public are fed the message that men and fathers are dangerous, risky or disinterested while mothers protect, provide and maintain healthy family environments alone.

I carried out my own research into men’s experience of child protection which highlighted some particularly harrowing and dangerous examples of marginalisation of fathers. The issue of domestic abuse emerged as a prominent issue for many of the men who were interviewed, their experience in many ways characteristic of an unsophisticated approach to a complex issue, based largely on gender stereotypes.

These men, despite in some cases being victims of serious abuse and attempting to protect their children, were routinely labelled as dangerous perpetrators thus experiencing secondary victimisation at the hands of the state. The public story of domestic abuse is mostly reliant on a stereotyped analysis that can deny or rationalise female abuse and violence while creating a context where it becomes almost expected of men to behave in these ways – even when there is little empirical evidence for this position. That is, the majority of men who have contact with social services are routinely treated with suspicion without due cause, there is a deficit of discernment to accurately assess what is going on in complex situations.

Consider again the response of the midwifery and health visiting teams — they become entirely rational and understandable when placed in the context of Dr Clapton’s findings and my professional experience working with and researching men.

‘Two-hour witch hunt against men’

In my current role with Abused Men in Scotland I have received a number of calls from students who were unhappy about the characterisation of men in their domestic abuse training. One nursing student described the input at her institution as “a two-hour witchhunt against men”. When I followed up this complaint, an NHS spokesperson told me that in the two hours available there was no time to deal with male victimisation and that because the training fell within the Gender Based Violence programme it did not require to address men. This may seem confusing as gender-based violence is generally understood to include male victimisation, but it was clearly interpreted as referring only to female victimisation in this case, which is not uncommon.

Thus the largely female professional body dealing with the front line of child protection and domestic abuse, are fed a continual and overwhelming story of gender which instils in them the most negative and outdated stereotypes about men. It is of vital importance that academic institutions, public bodies and relevant third sector organisations consider this issue as a matter of primary importance. This means reviewing publicity and policy documents thoroughly and grasping the often counter-intuitive reality that the Gender Equality Duty is just that — it applies to men as well as women.

The fact is that there is a real and devastating impact for many men, women and children of such lopsided and outdated practice. Child protection and early years’ services need to target men positively and nowhere is this more important than in the area of domestic abuse, where male victimisation and the barriers to recognition and support have  devastating consequences.

This is the sharp end of the deliberately gendered approach that currently overwhelms health and social services delivery. It is time to overcome ideological differences in order that women, men and their children receive timely, effective support and appropriate intervention as and when required – without fear or favour.

By Nick Smithers

Nick Smithers is National Development Officer with Abused Men in Scotland (AMIS). 

Photo source: Children’s Panel Scotland

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