October was 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 was 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 battered women's laws were first introduced, the suggestion would
sometimes be made that they should provide protections for all abuse
victims-women, men, boys and girls. Those proposals were vehemently
opposed and overwhelmingly rejected. To this day, the laws of many states
and countries continue to discriminate against--and encourage others
to discriminate against--male victims of domestic abuse.
Similarly, when the Violence Against Women Act was introduced in the
U.S. 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 according to the United States Department
of Health and Human Services, it has been estimated that as many as
5,000 children, mostly male, are killed or maimed every year, mostly
by women.
It is often asserted that gender-exclusionary laws and policies are
justified 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? Asians
comprise less than 5% of the population of the United States. Does that
mean that we therefore need not concern ourselves with a crime when
an Asian is the victim?
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 in private practice and the author of the
book, Domestic Violence: The 12 Things You Aren't Supposed To Know
(Aventine Press, 2003)
