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Struggling to make a difference for male victims in Wales

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What’s it like being a man fighting for male victims of domestic violence in a world dominated by people whose primary concern is keeping the spotlight on female victims? Glen Poole of insideMAN speaks to Tony Stott of Healing Men, who has been campaigning on the issue in Wales for several years.

I’ve been watching men trying to influence public policy on gender issues for 20 years. I’ve seen fathers fighting for dads to have an equal right to be part of their children’s lives when parents separate. I’ve seen men who say their genitals were mutilated without their consent as children, fighting to protect boys from medically unnecessary circumcision. And I’ve seen men fighting for male victims of domestic violence to have equal protection and support.

The gender political war around domestic violence, in particular,  is one the most difficult gender battles to stomach as it puts anyone who attempts to advocate on behalf of male victims in direct conflict with those who work to help female victims—and nobody in their right mind would ordinarily choose to place them self in opposition to people speaking out for female victims.

Feminism has a problem with male victims

I have written elsewhere on the way the emergence of male victims and female perpetrators threatens the very existence of feminism and feminists who are the primary advocates of female victims. So it is a brave (or foolish) campaigner who attempts to tackle the status quo in a domestic violence sector that is dominated by feminists running services and programmes for female victims and male perpetrators.

One such man is Tony Stott of Healing Men who has been campaigning for male victims of domestic violence for many years, most recently in Wales, where he has been fighting the passage of a new Violence Against Women Bill—not because he supports violence against women, but because he believes it excludes male victims.

Last week Tony was at the Welsh Assembly watching the Bill being debated. He told me:

“I have been campaigning, pointlessly so far, against deeply sexist and unequal legislation being debated within the Welsh Assembly and wanted to see this at first hand in the Assembly chamber.”

Tony believes the Bill demonstrates that Wales has become a “Feminist One Party State”. He says the architects of The Bill have a gender political approach to domestic violence which can be characterised by the following passage from the book “Perceptions of Female Offenders” which describes the feminist view of the issue as:

“A result of patriarchal social systems where men are exclusively the batterers and females are exclusively the victims….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.”

Masculinity is seen as the problem 

Tony is particularly incensed by a passage in the “Task And Finish Group Report” which informed The Bill:

“Masculinity is associated with violence in most cultures and Wales is no exception; thus, all preventative work and interventions must be designed to address men’s violent behaviour, while at the same time recognizing that both men and women may be the victims of violence that is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men.”

Tony believes this viewpoint is nothing short of discrimination against men. “Would such a gross and wholly stupid statement be tolerated against black or Muslim peoples?” he asks. “No! But this statement against men and boys is supported and uncritically welcomed by the Welsh Government. “

Tony is genuinely concerned that all victims of violence get the help and support they need. He has followed and engaged with every complex stage of The Bill since its inception in 2012 and even launched a epetition that gathered support from campaigners around the world.

Radical gender warriors

He feels that the entire process has been “hijacked by the radicalised gender warriors” in Wales and transformed from a project which could recognise the complexity of intimate human relationships (and the necessity of including mutual and female abuse and violence for the sake of children) to the Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Bill.”

After spending 90 minutes listening intently to the Welsh Assembly debating the Bill last week, Tony told be he was in “despair for men in Wales and fearful for the boys and girls in Wales who will be left to learn violent and abusive behaviour at the hands of violent and abusive parents”.

“The main discussion,” he says “was around the question of how quickly the Welsh Government could get organised to teach seven year boys the “masculinity is associated with violence .. and all interventions must address men’s violent behaviour” theme.”

“Some wanted this ‘education’ to be put in the Bill”, he said, “but the Minister, rather chillingly I thought, sought to appease by stating that the charity Women’s Aid have volunteered to send in staff to teach ‘Healthy Relationships’ in schools.”

Tony is deeply frustrated at what he sees as the refusal of the Welsh Government to give consideration to the needs of male victims, despite his constant hard work to bring the issue to the table.  But he isn’t giving up and he has one message for those who share his concerns—do not be silent!

—Photo credit: Flickr/ky_olsen

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Why men should complain to the BBC about Domestic Violence documentary

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The BBC’s Panorama programme completely misrepresented the reality of Domestic Violence  and men should speak out and complain, says Nick Langford.

This week the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme purporting to cover the issue of domestic violence (DV).  I have made a complaint to the BBC about this programme and would encourage you to do likewise: a larger number of complaints will make it more likely they will be taken seriously.  This is why I have complained.

Panorama claims to feature “investigative reports on a wide variety of subjects”, it is the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme and has been broadcast since 1953.  It has made some remarkable programmes including Martin Bashir’s 1995 interview with Princess Diana and the 2006 exposure of the Vatican’s suppression of child sexual abuse scandals.

Last night’s programme involved no journalism, investigative or otherwise, despite being produced and directed by award-winning journalist Joe Plomin.  It said nothing new about DV, despite professing to present a “real understanding of what it is” and presented no solutions, coping strategies or general advice to victims.  It was a 30-minute state-sponsored fund-raising propaganda video for the feminist lobby group Women’s Aid which is currently running a campaign to criminalise “coercive control”.

Panorama depicted DV as perpetrated only by men with women as victims, and children as incidental victims.  Women were presented fleetingly as perpetrators only in same-sex relationships and there was no mention at all that men could be victims or that fathers might sometimes need to protect their children from DV.

Panorama entirely misrepresented the reality of DV.  Perhaps the best source of accurate data is the Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) which reports that 28.3% of women are perpetrators and 21.6% of men; over a lifetime 23% of women and 19.3% of men will be victims, meaning that men represent 45.6% of victims.  Any male victim of DV watching would have felt, yet again, that he was invisible and irrelevant; that his license fee was being used to promote a disgraceful lie.

The only DV support organisation referenced was Women’s Aid, of which Julie Walters, the narrator, is a patron.  There was no mention of any other women’s organisations, and certainly none of support groups for men.

I feel particularly aggrieved for the very brave women featured.  No doubt they felt that allowing the cameras to intrude into their lives, recording their horrific injuries, would raise the profile of DV and help other victims come forward and escape abuse, but I believe they have merely been exposed to further exploitation and victimisation by the BBC.

Sandra Horley, chief executive of Women’s Aid’s sister group, Refuge, famously said, “If we put across this idea that the abuse of men is as great as the abuse of women, then it could seriously affect our funding”.

Domestic violence is big business, attracting a great deal of funding, chiefly from our taxes.  The victim of DV is a cash-cow, and if anyone were seriously committed to ending DV they would stop misrepresenting it as a gendered issue, come clean about the reality and seek to understand why some people abuse intimate partners and how they might be helped to stop.

—Picture credit: Flickr/Steven Depolo

You can buy Nick Langford’s new book, An Exercise in Absolute Futility: Whatever happened to family justice? from Amazon. Nick has also co-authored a handy guide to family law in the UK, with his wife Ruth, which is also available on Amazon.

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The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of the insideMAN editorial team. Whether you agree with the views expressed in this article or not we invite you to to join the conversation about men, masculinity and manhood. Our only request is that you express yourself in a way that ensures everyone’s voice can be heard.

We need a new approach to helping violent men and women

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David Eggins, of TEMPER Domestic Violence, a service that works with both male and female perpetrators, explains why it’s crucial to move beyond a gender-based understanding of the issue.

— This is article #88 in our series of #100Voices4Men and boys 

Twenty years ago last September Ms Sandra Horley, CEO of REFUGE spoke on the subject of domestic violence at a conference in Northampton, organised by Women’s Aid. Her message was “violent men will not change, the only thing for a woman to do is to leave.”

As one of a number of RELATE delegates there I was appalled at her disparaging comments about men and their inability, in her view, to change. My own experience as a man and of men was that virtually all men are able to change and I almost immediately knew of various methods to help men change which needed to be welded into a programme.

A number of the other delegates there were similarly struck. We resolved there and then to build a programme to address these problems.

Both men and women need help

The policy of stopping and preventing violence to women and girls sat very easily with me with all the chivalrous stuff that I’d been brought up with. But counselling work I’d been doing in RELATE in the early 90’s, clearly indicated that not only some men could be violent to women, but also some women could be violent to men, too, and deceitful and manipulative, just like some men.

The course we devised focussed on bringing about change by learning new skills and developing people’s greater awareness of themselves, particularly when getting out of their own control – more usually in those days it was called “anger management”: we would now call it “emotional regulation”, setting the work in a therapeutic context. We had been trained largely in psychodynamic methods of counselling and systems theory and personally I’d learnt a great deal about myself from “experiential exercises” which usually meant “activity”.

We’ve found virtually no difficulty about working with men and women in mixed groups – and, unlike Duluth, we’ve found most of the men very well motivated, and the women no less so. But, of course, the national policy is “preventing violence to women and girls”, so working with women is utterly, utterly frowned upon, not that we knew that at the time.

‘Statistics tell their own truth’

We ignore it now for the nonsense that it truly is; the statistics tell their own truth, women are now thought to be responsible for between 20% and 40% of domestic violence, depending on whether you believe government statistics or Women’s Aid’s!

So what else have we learnt? Well, The Duluth programme, a “perpetrator programme” “a DVPP” was designed to address the problems seen by women in their violent men. The problems they saw were, of course, all to do with patriarchy and men’s “sense of entitlement” to dominate everything, particularly women. So therefore you couldn’t work with women who couldn’t be patriarchs, and of course there is no real violence in lesbian relationships or in gay relationships, because that would mess up the whole patriarchy theory on which the work has to be based!

For our part, we just saw people, in whatever relationship, that needed help to recognise and change their behaviours. Men take revenge on women that displease them was what “they” said. Women finally retaliate against men who are coercive controllers. Those are the “official” or strived-for views. All men are liars and have to be disbelieved, for example male victims are really in most cases really abusers. All women tell the truth, a woman who claims to be an abuser has really just not understood her role as a victim of men’s previous violence, and she needs to learn that.

Why ignore violence to boys?

Twenty years ago REFUGES were in short supply. They are now plentiful. The practice of moving a woman as far away as possible with her daughter(s) from her (potentially) murderous man (for which read all men!) is now being slowly contradicted by local authorities, recognising that moving women and girls into refuges far away from their own support networks meant they were “locked up” in a different, dependent relationship.

The average of two women per week being killed by a partner or former partner (of 15.2m women in intimate relationships) is well known. Female deaths are down this year to 78 (claimed as progress, of course – despite a similar earlier one year “blip” and subsequent re-bound.) And the number of children killed in domestic violence scenarios? It averages about 60, but not one of 25 professionals I asked at a recent conference knew that! Why would they? It deflects from the feminist message!

“Preventing violence to women and girls”? Why would preventing violence to boys be ignored? After all, according to feminist theory (all) boys will be the next male abusers. But from whom and how and where are they learning that abuse, that learned behaviour? From disenfranchised and absent fathers, of course! Where else?

“I’ll box your ears, my lad!”

Very sadly there is only a half a platoon that knows about this state of affairs! At least a small army is needed; your country needs you!

Our nation’s children need the wisdom and action that men can bring to the agenda, and we need it soon. Money is also needed. How is it that the CEO alone of a smallish women’s charity can earn more, about four-times more, than the total money devoted to two national charities supporting mainly men? Some things simply do not add up.

Picture credit: Cambridgeshire Police

TEMPER! Domestic Violence works with domestic abusers, both men and women in mixed gender groups with a therapeutic thread. To find out more visit their website here

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.