@suzonline Right, so according to your twisted logic, demanding that male victims of abuse be treated with compassion and that their female perpetrators be held to account is "hating all women", yet according to you, it's acceptable and egalitarian to argue from a gendered narrative which quite literally stigmatises me personally as as survivor of female perpetrated child abuse and domestic violence, as an urban myth, if not a pathological liar, who "had it coming to me" and as effeminate scum.

Oh and before you start with the crap about how you're caring for the vast bulk of male victims of general violence whose perpetrators are male, as one such male survivor, don't try and insult my intelligence.

The fact is that you, like every other feminist out there, EXPLOIT the assault I endured at the hands of a violent male offender, to stigmatise me as a survivor of female-perpetrated domestic violence and child abuse to justify "putting me in my place" - which is as the scum beneath your feet, suffering in shame and silence.

After all my visible existence, as with that of every male survivor of feminist-perpetrated abuse, is a living heresy to feminist dogma, and you and other feminists just can't have that - now can you?

vr041

Don't know if you have seen this.

http://www.responsibleopposing.com/comment/lasttime.html

I will never forget the intensity and range of emotions I experienced the last time that I hit a woman.

I know now, as I knew then, that it doesn't matter:

That she had attacked me first, verbally and emotionally;
That she was the first to begin shouting and intimidating;
That she was much bigger and much stronger that I;
That she hit me first; or,
...
During my apology to my mother, as my father had predicted, she demanded that I acknowledge that I had caused her to hit me, that her violence was my fault. My father had advised me not to argue that point even though, objectively speaking, it is not true.

He explained I could use logic and rationality to devise an acceptable response to her demand without having to lie to her by falsely admitting that I thought her violence was my fault. He advised me to keep my logic to myself, explaining that women do not highly value logic at the best of times and that they detest it when they are emotionally upset. (I told you that much of our discussion was not politically correct.)

Wolly B, I am past reading anecdotes irrespective of the genders of the victim and the perpetrator. Over the years I've read too many of them. In the domestic violence industry literature it is laden with them. It sees them as a substitute for meaningful granular statistics. They are all shaped to portray something like a male perpetrator as an ogre and a meek passive brutalized woman with children cowering with fear in the background with the intended suggestion that they need protection from the former. The ancedotes usually include manufactured photos. Of course there is never ever any suggestion or even the slightest hint that the woman featuring in the anecdote participated in dishing out the violence as the initiator of it or otherwise. The relaters of these anecdotes take literary license to excess. They have absolutely no shame in falsely characterizing what the broad spectrum of domestic violence is. This has been going on for 30 years or more.

If you don't think people in the domestic violence stoop that low here's something to read about those of the ilk that I talk about:

"Khouri's hoax will take its place in a long Australian tradition of literary fraud, from Ern Malley to Helen Darville-Demidenko. But no other fraudulent book has had such wide sales or impact, and in Darville's case the deception only involved her persona, not her book. Khouri has misled the world both on the page and in person."

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/23/1090464854793.html

I’m not going to address every hostile reply made to me over the last few days. Suse and I usually end up the only voices on OLO who try to refute the considerable distortions and disinformation surrounding the treatment of male DV victims – and all we do is get battered around (so to speak) for our efforts.

As with Suse, I do not – and never have – refuted that men make up a minority of domestic violence victims and that facilities and funding to address their situations are woefully inadequate. However, much of the problem lies in the fact that the DV system has been constantly undermined over recent decades through death by a thousand cuts.

In my personal dealings with DV (through friends and acquaintances), I have found the police, social workers and legal system have been completely professional in giving both male and female victims equal support and attention. In fact, a social worker friend of mine, who has had a great deal of experience in DV, gets very annoyed at the constant accusations that the DV system ignores male victims. It's an unfair and unsubstantiated smearing of the professionalism of those people, who are already trying to do their best within very difficult circumstances.

What I am mostly reacting to here is the cheap bigotry and disinformation that blames this situation on feminism – and this is the only issue I am interested in addressing on this thread.

The lack of facilities and support for male DV victims is not the fault of feminism, but of a wider patriarchal culture that assumes men do not need support of any kind and actually promotes and glorifies violence in men.

It’s not feminism, but the patriarchal culture, that has let men down.

The problem is, Killarney, that feminism has merely reiterated patriarchal culture, so if you're right that such a culture is in fact dysfunctional, then where does that leave feminist dialectic?

Craig Minns, it is not the 'fault' of feminists or feminism that many DV male victims apparently aren't coming forward to find the help they need.

This sort of 'I'm a man, therefore I don't need help' mindset has been around since Adam was a boy, long before women strove for the still elusive equal rights as men.

If the male victims of DV don't want to come forward, then maybe the other men in their lives should be more understanding of their situation, because the women already understand how they feel!