Men are much less likely to report being a victim of family violence

Male victims of family violence and abuse - like women - often face many barriers to disclosing their abuse:

• They are likely to be told that there must be something they did to provoke the perpetrator’s abuse
• They can suffer shame, embarrassment and the social stigma of not being able to protect themselves
• They can fear that if they disclose the abuse there will be nowhere for them and their children to escape to
• In cases of intimate partner violence, they can fear that if they disclose the abuse or end the relationship, their partner might become more abusive and/or take the children
• They can feel uncertain about where to seek help, or how to seek help
• Services are less likely to ask whether a man is a victim of family violence, and when they do ask, they are less likely to believe him (indeed many health departments have mandatory domestic violence screening for young women, but no such screening for young men)
• Male victims can be falsely arrested and removed from their homes because of the assumption that because they are male, they must be a perpetrator and not a victim. When this happens, children can be left unprotected from the perpetrator of the violence, leading many men to suffer the abuse in silence in an attempt to protect their children.

Because of these barriers, men are much less likely to report being a victim of family violence than are women (and women also frequently don’t report violence against them).