The Story Of An Assaulted Man
Author: Tom Parker, © 2000

I am reporting some experiences of a close friend of mine. He experienced DV at the hands of his wife for 10 years. The incidents ranged from verbal and emotional assault which I witnessed, to physical assault with thrown objects, hands, feet, baseball bat, boiling water, etc. The particular incident I have in mind took place about 1990-1991.

He was phyically attacked by his wife, who then left. He had his 5-year old son with him. He called the police. The dispatcher told him that if the police came out, they would simply take his complaint and throw it away on leaving, or arrest him as the perpetrator if his wife complained, because "women don't beat up men in this state".

I called a DV shelter on his behalf, looking for advice or support. I was told that I should turn him in as the abuser, since "only men perpetrate DV".

We contacted some lawyers on his behalf, and were uniformally told that we would have to anticipate losing in a court case, and he would probably lose custody of his children almost automatically in a divorce case, since "men are not victims of DV". We were also told, by a sympathetic lawyer, that if my friend's wife complained to the police about anything physical, even a bruise, he could quite likely be arrested for DV against his abuser. He suggested we go to family court and see what happened.

We did so, and it was an eye-opener. One woman couldn't make it to a hearing for child custody because she was in jail for selling crack from the house her ex-husband was paying for. The father of her children was refused custody, because "children belong with their mother". In every case where an accusation of DV showed up in the record, the father was the perpetrator by definition and the mother was granted sole custody, regardless of the reality of the accusation. We left the court heartsick.

My friend was attacked by his drunken wife with a baseball bat one night not long after. She cracked three of his ribs and passed out on the floor. I drove him and his son to ER. He told the ER doctor and nurse exactly what happened in my hearing. They recorded him as a "household accident". I don't know if they didn't believe him, or just didn't care, or had been so heavily conditioned in the "man-abuser, woman-victim" mindset that they simply couldn't grasp what he said. No matter, he didn't show up on the DV statistics as a victim, proving once more that "men are not victims of DV". After he got home and settled his son, he cleaned up his wife and put her to bed to sleep it off.

My friend didn't grasp that he was a victim of DV, because only women were victims of DV. He just thought he was a bad husband and deserved what he got.

When his wife finally dumped him, (3 years later) she naturally received custody of the children (by then there were two), and he received visitation on her sufferance. This despite the fact that his ex-wife told the judge in court during the hearing that he was a better parent than she was. However, the judge had no problem giving him maximum support payments, which resulted in him living in a boarding house for some time, until he finally paid off her legal bill and all the expenses of the divorce, plus his back CS.

When my friend went in for counselling, he brought up the ten years of abuse (by that time I had talked him into seeing it as DV). The counsellor asked him what he had done to provoke it. He gave up counselling.

It comes down to this:

Men can be victims of DV too. Many men have great difficulty striking a woman under ANY circumstances, even when attacked. My friend is one of those, and his then-wife knew it.

When women initiate DV, they use weapons more often, and/or attack from behind or while their victim is sleeping. This more than nullifies any height/weight/skill advantage.

Even now, 10 years later, men are most often arrested regardless of who the perpetrator is. Studies in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zeland indicate that men are DV perpetrators about 25% the time, women are perpetrators about 25% the time, and the violence is mutual about 50% of the time. Nevertheless, by far the majority of those arrested for DV are men.

Men can be victims of DV, be arrested as perpetrators, and be denied any but supervised visitation of their children while the person who abused them, and possibly their children, has sole custody.

There is one (1) DV shelter in the US and Canada that will actually take in men who are victims of DV.

Women are not alone being targets of domestic violence. Men are on the receiving end, too. We need to broaden the preception of DV (not the definition) to see that men, elders and children are just as much at risk as women. DV is not a simplistic "man-abuser/woman-victim" thing that the Duluth Model holds up, but rather a complex set of inter-related processes that can result in abuse, injury and even death for any person in a domestic situation, depending on a poorly-understood and complex dynamic. DV is a PEOPLE problem, and until we are willing to see that, we will never make a start at resolving the whole problem.