6 DOMESTIC ABUSE
It’s a depressing fact of life that some people get off on controlling others. Since life is horrible, this often translates to marriages where one partner physically or emotionally abuses the other. Usually, the victims are women and the abusers male – hence the existence of women’s shelters and charities and so on.Thankfully, decades of effort has made women more aware of their existence and removed the stigma of seeking help. The same cannot be said for men’s shelters.
The Guardian recently revealed that forty percent of all UK domestic violence victims are male. In America, the numbers are almost as bad. Shockingly, more married men were victims of abuse than women in 2012 – yet men’s shelters remain almost non-existent. In the UK, for example, there are 33 beds available in the whole country, compared with 4,000 for women. Worst of all, (male) police officers are often unsympathetic to abuse victims, leading to a frighteningly-low conviction rate, even by domestic violence standards. For a whole host of stupid reasons, our culture continues to see men who are abused by women as pathetic, unmanly and even undeserving of sympathy. And that needs to change, because victims are victims, no matter who they are.