Misconceptions About Male Domestic Violence Victims

When you think about domestic abuse, what comes to mind? For most people, the scene would be of a despicable man in a wife beater hitting his helpless girlfriend. Most don’t consider the latter with a man being hit by his girlfriend. Why is this? In society today, we generally do not perceive men as being able to be abused because we have this false dichotomy that since men are typically stronger than women, they are unable to be abused by one. This mentality of ours leads to little or no help offered to men that suffer from this kind of subjection, even though reliable statistics have shown that men who have been abused is surprising likely common and is not too far off as the number of women who are domestic violence victims. We do not take …show more content…
Males have always been abused by their intimate partners in America. Massachusetts Bay colonists adopted the Body of Liberties that described that a woman should not be hurt by her husband, unless he is defending from her assault (“Domestic Violence Programs Discriminate Against Male Victims”). One misconception about male domestic abuse victims is that there is not that many in the world to have a huge movement of help like female victims. Although there is a gap between how many victims there are between the genders, there are millions of males who suffer from domestic violence and aren’t getting the proper help or means of getting out of a abusive relationship. There are more than 830,000 male domestic violence every year, meaning one out of three domestic abuse victims are male. A man falls victim to abuse every 37.8 seconds in America (Rhymes E.). This shows an undeniable truth: men are being …show more content…
Males and females are abused the same and deserve help the same. There are more than 4,000 domestic violence programs in the U.S., but few provide for the male victims and only a small amount of the population knows how big this problem is. The treatment of male victims and how they are depicted in media is a textbook definition of discrimination between the sexes. Women and men abuse the same way whether is be by physical, emotional, or sexual damage inflicted on the innocent victim. In fact, a study done by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health asked questions to a sample of 14,322 individuals between the ages of 18 and 28 on intimate relationships in the past five years and whether it had involved violence. The 24% that were violent half showed mutual violence and half showed a one-sided violent relationship. In the one-sided violent relationships, 70% were women and mutual violent relationships were more common with women than men. Regarding injury, men inflicted injury more than women and reciprocal caused more injury than