01 August 09 – When Men are Victims of Domestic Violence
Men are typically arrested in domestic violence matters when women are the instigators.
A recent study of male victims of domestic violence, 64 percent of the men who called a DV hotline were told that they "only helped women," and over half were referred to programs for male perpetrators. Overall, only 8 percent of the men who called hotlines classified them as "very helpful," whereas 69 percent found them to be "not at all helpful." Worse, when an abused man called the police, the police were more likely to arrest him than to arrest his abusive female partner.
An online article “No One Believed Me” published by Glenn Sacks, M.A. and Ned Holstein, M.D. reports:
A recent large-scale study of DV was conducted by Center for Disease Control and Prevention researchers and published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study, which surveyed 11,000 men and women, found that according to both men's and women's accounts, 50 percent of the violence in their relationships was reciprocal (involving both parties). In those cases, the women were more likely to have been the first to strike. Moreover, when the violence was one-sided, both women and men said that women were the perpetrators about 70 percent of the time.
In Spousal Violence Children End Up Victimized
According to a court-certified batterers' treatment provider, even when the children themselves are not abused, "There is an overwhelming, irrefutable body of research indicating that children are adversely affected by witnessing inter-parental violence, regardless of the perpetrator's gender."