October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, a time for
communities to unite to mourn the loss of every individual
who has fallen victim to domestic violence, and to raise
awareness of the prevalence of the problem throughout the
world. A time to remember and mourn the deaths of people
like Phil Hartman, George Whitley, Sincere Understanding Allah,
Dilip Bhosale, Adam Munn, Joseph Wallace and Yovany Tellez Jr.
Or is it?
The executive proclamation setting aside the month of
October as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month
declares that it is part of the federal government's
commitment to "make it possible for women to seek
relief from abuse and reclaim their dignity and their lives."
Children and men are not mentioned.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services
describes the month as a time to "mourn the women who lost
their lives to domestic violence, as well as celebrate the
strength of women who have survived." Evidently, dead
men and children are not to be mourned, and the survival
of a male victim is not something to be celebrated.
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence boasts
that every year the organization "collect[s] information on
incidents of women who have been killed by an intimate
partner and produces a poster each year for Domestic
Violence Awareness Month listing the names."
Dead men not only tell no tales; they also don't show
up in posters.
When the Battered Women's Act was under consideration
in Minnesota, a lone legislator sought an amendment that
would have made its protections available to all victims,
regardless of gender. That proposal was vehemently opposed
by others in our legislature. The Act passed without the
proposed amendment, and to this day the law continues to
contain provisions discriminating against--and encouraging
others to discriminate against--male victims of domestic
abuse.
Similarly, when the Violence Against Women Act was
introduced in Congress, men were not permitted to testify.
Congress did not want to hear about male victims.
In fact, it appears that none of us really wants to hear about
male victims. Male victims are an embarrassment. Worse,
their existence threatens the validity of the one stereotype
that the vast majority of us seem to need to believe--the
stereotype that says men are violent and aggressive, while
women are gentle and submissive. Or, to put it another way,
the idea that violence is a male phenomenon. As a culture,
we prefer to make male victims the subject of levity and jest,
not offer them help. Mostly, though, we would prefer to believe
that they simply do not exist. .
Do male victims of domestic abuse exist? According to a United
States Department of Justice study, there are approximately
835,000 domestic assaults against men annually. A more
recent Bureau of Justice Statistics study reports that the number
of male victims 12 years of age and older is nearly 1.6 million
per year. And it has been estimated that as many as 4,000 children,
mostly male, are killed or maimed every year, mostly by women.
It is often asserted that gender-exclusionary laws and policies
are justified in this area because male victims supposedly
comprise only 5 or 15% of the total. Yet, even if the percentage
really were that low (and it isn't), would that justify ignoring
male victims altogether? Black people comprise less than 5%
of the population of Minnesota. Does that mean that we
therefore need only concern ourselves with crimes against
white people?
The truth is that male abuse victims exist, and their existence
is not anything new. In fact, policy-makers have known about
them for many years. They have been marginalized for the
same reason that lesbian abuse victims are marginalized:
their existence runs counter to our fundamental cultural desire
to believe that violence is a male phenomenon. Sadly, the
principal victims of our stubborn adherence to sexist ideology
are neither women nor men. They are Sincere Understanding
Allah, Dilip Bhosale, Adam Munn, Joseph Wallace, Yovany Tellez,
and thousands of other children like them--children that some
among us have made invisible while the rest of us work very hard,
in one way or another, to keep them that way.
Tom James is an attorney who works with both male and
female abuse victims, and is the author of the book,
Domestic Violence: The 12 Things You Aren't Supposed
To Know (Aventine Press, 2003).
