Domestic violence against men

Domestic violence against men deals with domestic violence experienced by men or boys in an intimate relationship such as marriage, cohabitation, dating, or within a family. As with domestic violence against women, violence against men may constitute a crime, but laws vary between jurisdictions.

Whereas women who experience domestic violence are openly encouraged to report it to the authorities, it has been argued that men who experience such violence often encounter pressure against reporting, with those that do facing social stigma regarding their perceived lack of machismo and other denigrations of their masculinity. Additionally, intimate partner violence (IPV) against men is generally less recognized by society than IPV against women, which can act as a further block to men reporting their situation.

The prevalence and frequency of IPV against men is highly disputed, with different studies showing different conclusions for different nations, and many countries having no data at all. Some researchers believe the actual number of male victims is likely to be greater than law enforcement statistics suggest due to the high number of men who do not report their abuse.

IPV against men is a controversial area of research, with terms such as gender symmetry, battered husband syndrome and bidirectional IPV provoking a great deal of debate. One of the main tools used to find statistical evidence of male victims of IPV (as well as female victims of IPV), the conflict tactics scale, has been heavily criticized, and heavily defended. The lines of the debate tend to fall between two basic polemics. Advocates of battered women argue that proponents of female-perpetrated IPV are part of an anti-feminist backlash, and are attempting to undermine the problem of male-perpetrated IPV by championing the cause of the battered man over the much more serious cause of the battered woman. On the other hand, those who believe IPV against men to be a significant problem argue that radical feminists have purposely tried to suppress research so as to further their own ideology; if female-perpetrated IPV is accepted, much of the foundational feminist theory behind domestic violence in general, specifically that IPV is an extension of patriarchal dominance, would be shown to be invalid.

...
Wikipedia