Battered men, victims of domestic violence, should not be ignored in the industry outcry against California’s budget cuts.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to cut California’s funding for domestic violence services, the National Coalition For Men says. The group says the costs, which could be withdrawn completely, can hurt both male and female victims of domestic violence. The public outcry against these funding cuts largely ignores male victims, as usual.
Yesterday, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence issued a news release, referring to victims only as “women and children” or “women, children, and families.” This leaves male victims and their children invisible.
The National Coalition For Men (NCFM) recently followed a landmark case in the California Court of Appeal. The court declared that “domestic violence is a serious problem for both women and men,” and “men experience significant levels of domestic violence as victims … male victims of domestic violence are similarly situated to female victims for purposes of the statutory programs.”
The appeals court said approximately 15 percent of California’s State-funded domestic violence programs refuse help for male victims. NCFM contends the percentage is much higher. See Woods v. Horton (PDF – 2008).
Double Standard
There is a double standard applied to domestic violence, often also perpetrated by domestic violence support groups.
“This double standard is absolutely wrong. If it were AIDS victims or homeless veterans, who are 80 to 95 percent male, we would say ‘men and women’ to include everyone. Why not for domestic abuse victims? Don’t they deserve the same dignity?” – Marc Angelucci, the NCFM attorney who represented the plaintiffs in Woods v. Horton.
Statistics show that male victims of domestic violence are much less likely to report it, making most official data unreliable. More than 200 empirical studies using various methods all show “women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationship with their spouses of male partners.”
An online bibliography maintained by Professor Martin Fiebert at California State University shows men sustain one-third of domestic violence injuries.
Centers for Disease Control researchers ran a major study that found:
- half of heterosexual domestic violence is reciprocal
- women perpetuate more than half of the non-reciprocal violence
- women perpetuate about 71 percent of the reciprocal violence.
Women are as violent and controlling as men
The University of New Hampshire recently conducted a 32-nation study that found women are at least as violent and as controlling as men in dating relationships worldwide.