Battered
husbands trapped by shame
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1353322,00.html
Times
- 11th November 2004
AN OVERWHELMING number of battered husbands have swamped Britain's
only refuge for abused men. Now a former victim is opening the second
centre today with more to follow across the country.
Workers
at a secret safehouse for abused men in Somerset say that there
is a constant waiting list of men who have been scratched, kicked,
bitten or attacked with bottles and knives.
Stephen Fitzgerald, national organiser for the ManKind Initiative,
which refers men to the refuge, said that some fathers had moved
into the safe house with their children.
“A
lot of these men have suffered both physical and mental abuse for,
on average, about six years,” he said. “We have spoken
to men who have been laid out with iron bars, had glass put in their
food and been set upon with a knife. Others have been stabbed, punched
in the face and threatened with an axe.”
Discussion
of violence towards men has long been regarded as a social taboo
with victims offered little support, charities say. While the number
of women sufferers has fallen over the past few years, the estimated
number of attacks against men has risen by nearly a third, up to
150,000. Home Office statistics show that one third of victims of
domestic violence are men.
A study
by Dewar Research, a firm that specialises in domestic violence
issues, found that men often endured the abuse because they did
not want to walk out on their children.
Others were
frightened to leave because they had nowhere else to go and some
said that they still loved their partner and hoped that her behaviour
would change. One of the main problems, however, was a fear of being
ridiculed.
Dewar’s
research showed that many male victims were critical of the police.
Many said that their complaints were not taken seriously and in
some cases they were treated as the aggressors. A spokeswoman for
the Home Office told The Times that the Government’s measures
to help abuse-sufferers are “non-gender specific” and
“will protect both male and female victims”.
However,
ManKind insists that the Government is unwilling to fund help for
men who suffer at the hands of brutal partners.
“Apartheid
is still with us in the form of gender apartheid which is being
practised by David Blunkett,” said Mr Fitzgerald, who has
been happily married for 37 years.
In a letter
to ManKind this year, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, Minister of State
at the Home Office, told the charity that she would not meet it
to discuss support because “funding is very limited”.
She added: “It is predominantly women who tend to be the victims
of domestic violence and who are more likely to suffer lasting damage
to their physical and mental health.”
A new support
group, It Does Happen, was set up by a man who was in an abusive
relationship for more than two years, during which he was stabbed
and beaten. Mike Kenny, 33, a businessman, raised funds to set up
www.itdoeshappen.org in September to help male and female sufferers.
Within a
fortnight, more than 20,000 men had contacted the website. He plans
to open three safe havens for men, each costing £2.4 million.
The first will open in Newcastle today, with centres in Yorkshire
and the Midlands to open in January.
‘I
thought abuse came from bowels of hell’
THIRTEEN
years after his divorce, Steve still takes a cocktail of anti-depressants
and sleeping tablets.
The nightmares
subsided after a decade, but Steve, 61, says that he will never
recover from the years of abuse inflicted by his former wife.
“For
the last 15 years of my marriage I was physically attacked all the
time,” he said. “I was punched, my hair was pulled,
my ears were pulled, all quite routinely. I was threatened with
being stabbed.”
With two young children in the house, Steve says that he was unable
to walk out, believing that they would suffer. Instead, he spent
his life in fear, cut off from friends and family. “The children
were aware of the shouting and the unhappiness, but they weren’t
aware of the severity of what I was going through.”
He left
after he suffered “a kind of blackout”. He still has
no memory of an incident in which he had lunged at his wife, knocking
down his son, who had tried to intervene.
Steve has
since spent years in and out of hospital, battling depression. Forced
to give up his job, he is still out of work. “It just wrecked
my whole life,” he said.
“I
used to think (the abuse) came from the bowels of hell. It was the
most appalling verbal abuse, horrible language and awful screaming.”
He urges
abused men to seek help. “I always thought it would be hopeless
trying to tell someone because I was so unusual and no one would
believe me. There was nowhere to go.”
LIVING
IN FEAR
An estimated
446,000 people were victims of domestic violence in the UK in 2003
Men accounted for 34 per cent of victims last year, compared with
27 per cent the year before
About 48 men have died from domestic violence incidents this year
Domestic violence claims the lives of two women each week
Although incidents of domestic violence are chronically undereported,
Home Office research suggests that it accounts for a quarter of
all violent crime
