Following my piece on Antonia Hoyle’s outstanding article in today’s Daily Mail about the increasing number of male victims of domestic violence, I thought I’d send her a brief note thanking her for writing it. As happens all too often, it ended up being a fairly lengthy email, so at the end of it I asked for her permission that I publish the content in a new blog post. I had a very nice reply from her, which included, ‘Yes, please do post on the blog and include my email address antonia@antoniahoyle.com – it would be good to hear from any men who may wish to share their experiences.’ So if you’ve been a male victim of DV, do please contact Antonia.
The rest of this piece consists of what I originally emailed Antonia:
“Antonia, I lead a political party which campaigns for better support of male victims of DV (without reducing the support for female victims, obviously) so I was very pleased to be pointed towards your outstanding article in today’s Daily Mail. I’ve just put up a blog post linking to it:
http://j4mb.org.uk/2013/12/05/why-are-so-many-men-becoming-victims-of-domestic-violence/
It’s known that for heterosexual couples, in 70% of instances of unilateral DV (the victim either takes the abuse, or exits) the perpetrator is a woman. It’s known that the cohort with the highest level of domestic violence is lesbians. In May 2013 it was reported that almost 300 studies, carried out across the world, have shown that women are at least as physically aggressive towards their intimate partners as men (I believe the number has since comfortably passed the 300 mark):
Why is female-on-male DV on the rise? Maybe one contributory factor is that women are still rarely held accountable for it, and men are likely to just ‘take it’, especially if the couple has one or more children. If he leaves the home, he’ll lose the house and probably never see the kids again, although the state will force him to financially support them. Judges rarely enforce contact orders on vindictive mothers, and by the time contact orders are granted the kids will often have been alienated towards their father by the mother (very rarely vice versa, interestingly, however awful – even violent – the mother might be). Women are far less likely than men to be charged with the offence – the police’s default position is to believe a woman’s word over a man’s, so women get away with false allegations all the time – and if convicted, they’re far less likely than men to serve a custodial sentence. Having one of more children is generally a ‘Get out of Jail Free’ card for women. There are 80,000 men in British prisons, 4,000 women, and the government plans to close women’s prisons and fill them with male prisoners, while the women will be in far more comfortable ‘rehabilitation centres’.
Feminists claim that where women are the perpetrators of DV, it’s always in self-defence. Mankind Initiative recently ran a National Conference for Male Victims of Domestic Violence, at which a (female) researcher presented some findings from a recent major study. One astonishing finding was that only 4% of female perpetrators of DV said they’d acted in self-defence. She also said women are less likely than men to have the mental ‘mechanism’ which enables them to withdraw from a situation in which they’re becoming sufficiently angry as to be at risk of becoming physically violent. They just press on, as we see from some of the tragic cases in your piece.
It’s remarkable how seldom women are charged with murder of their intimate partners, and how often with manslaughter, carrying a lesser sentence in the event of conviction. I understand that following a change to the law late in the last Labour administration, at the behest of feminist MPs, a women has only to say she was fearful of her partner – no evidence need be given that fear was justified, if indeed it ever existed – and the charge will automatically be manslaughter rather than murder. At the same time the law was also changed such that the most common reason given by men for killing partners or ex-partners – provocation, and sexual infidelity in particular – was removed as a mitigating factor which would historically have led to a manslaughter charge, so such men have since been charged with murder. There truly is one justice system for men, and another for women.
Please let me know if I can supply any information on what our party’s doing – although Mark Brooks and others at Mankind Initiative are obviously far more qualified than myself to talk about male victims of DV. Our public consultation document (the precursor to our 2015 general election manifesto) is here:
http://j4mb.org.uk/our-public-consultation-exercise-2/
Thanks again for the terrific article.”