Ray Blumhorst is a 6-foot-1-inch, 230-pound, decorated combat veteran who served on the USS Valley Forge during the Vietnam War's largest battle, the Tet offensive. Ray Blumhorst is also a battered husband.
Today he walks with a limp -- he says not from war wounds, but from one of his ex-wife's assaults.
Blumhorst recently filed a widely reported sex-discrimination lawsuit against 10 Los Angeles County domestic violence shelters for refusing to accept male victims. He says his ex-wife attacked him by surprise on numerous occasions, once throwing a heavy book stand at him, which damaged his knee and put him on crutches.
"At least in Vietnam I was allowed to defend myself," he said.
Voluminous research shows that men like Blumhorst are not rare. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's 1998 Report on the National Violence Against Women Survey, men comprise more than 35 percent of all domestic violence victims.
California State University, Long Beach, professor Martin Fiebert has compiled a bibliography which examines 130 scholarly investigations -- 104 empirical studies and 26 reviews or analyses -- which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive as, or more aggressive than, men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeded 77,000.
The National Institute of Mental Health funded and oversaw two of the largest studies of domestic violence ever done, in 1979 and 1989, both of which found similar rates of abuse between husbands and wives.
Contrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, women in both of these studies were as likely as men to initiate the violence.
And while many still conceptualize domestic violence as pitting a hulking husband against a terrified wife alone in a kitchen-turned-boxing ring, research shows that abusive women use weapons and the element of surprise to compensate for their smaller size, often with devastating results.
Many local men have reported their abuse to the National Coalition of Free Men Los Angeles, a men's group that is supporting Blumhorst's suit.
The most difficult cases are those of abused fathers. For example, Ron, a Simi Valley entrepreneur who is living in his own garage in order to get away from his wife's attacks, won't leave his violent wife because he does not want to leave his children unprotected in the hands of an abuser. At the same time, he knows that if he takes his children he could be arrested for kidnapping and that the family courts would probably grant his wife custody, again leaving his children in harm's way.
Such cases sometimes have tragic results. In the highly publicized Socorro Caro murder case, Socorro abused her husband, Xavier, so badly that he almost lost sight in one eye, and the abuse was allowed to escalate until Socorro murdered three of their four children.
Despite the gravity of the problem, there is little recognition of and services for male victims of domestic violence and their children.
While Los Angeles County has two dozen shelters for victims of domestic violence, the only shelter that accepts male victims is the Valley Oasis shelter in Lancaster, 80 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
Former Oasis director Patricia Overberg, who changed shelter policy in the late 1980s in order to accept male domestic-violence victims, believes that Los Angeles County's neglect of male victims is a human-rights issue, and she notes that her shelter housed and provided services to both abused women and abused men without incident.
Blumhorst bristles at how he is at times portrayed in the media as a whiner with a gender grudge.
"Domestic-violence services are publicly funded with my tax dollars, and I want the same treatment and services available to me that any other victim has -- nothing more, nothing less."
Glenn Sacks is a radio talk show host
and columnist on men's and fathers' issues. His radio show can be heard
every Sunday on KRLA 870 AM in Los Angeles. This column first appeared
in the Los
Angeles Daily News (6/12/03).
