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I know your local instagram armchair expert will claim to know why so many male victims of abuse don’t seek help (yada yada “toxic masculinity”), but in reality, very little research has been done to ask such an question.
But what we do know is –
Male victims of abuse are two and a half times less likely to ask for help than female victims, and not only does that deafening silence preclude such men from potentially life saving services, but it also removes them from much of the data that society continually uses to discuss such a issue.
Men don’t seek help, and therefore less help is given to them, and therefore fewer men seek help, and yup, as a consequence, less help is given again.
It’s a brutal self-fulfilling cycle that rolls over abused men, and has erased them from the picture for generations.
And so it would seem that solving the problem of ‘barriers to male help seeking’, is one of extreme importance and pressing urgency; and the good news is that various academics, including the world-leading IPV professor Denise Hines, have answered the call.
Their new study scales up the research to unprecedented levels, asking more than 1,100 men, who were abused by women: “what are the major barriers you experienced when seeking help?”
And their responses tell us far more than what we thought we knew…
Shame, concern for being labeled an abuser, fear of retaliation, or of false allegations in response; not knowing where to go, hopelessness, love and protection of their abuser, and feeling like domestic abuse is a “private matter”, to name a handful of the dozens of barriers abused men provided.
So could this data help increase the resolution of a conversation that for so long, has been gatekept by sloganeering social media know-it-alls?
And is it about time we asked the male victims themselves, why do so few ask for help?
What do you think?
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Full study https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2027-52236-001.html