A Culture of Disbelief: Male Victims of Domestic Abuse
"For men, the first barrier is cultural. We still raise boys to equate vulnerability with weakness. When abuse enters that narrative, it collides with shame."
Over the past few years, I’ve mentored more than a hundred women and twelve men through the family and criminal courts. Every survivor’s story is singular – there is no “textbook victim” – but the men’s accounts expose a fault line that still runs through our justice system: disbelief.
“I couldn’t tell anyone. It’s all so pathetic,” one man told me. Another said, “I’m six-foot and she’s tiny – who will believe me?” His abuse wasn’t physical but psychological: daily contempt, humiliation, and control. By the time he reached court, he doubted his own perception of reality. And indeed, he was not believed; his experience was dismissed and ignored, and he was expected to find his own coping strategies.
Domestic abuse remains profoundly gendered. Women and children experience the greatest prevalence and the most serious harm, and the system must continue to prioritise their protection. But that doesn’t mean men are not victims too. Recognising male victims as victims strengthens the whole field. It helps professionals, courts, and policymakers understand abuse itself more accurately – as a pattern of domination and fear, not a stereotype of size, gender, or strength.
The social conditioning of disbelief
For men, the first barrier is cultural. We still raise boys to equate vulnerability with weakness. When abuse enters that narrative, it collides with shame. Men question their credibility, then their masculinity, and finally their right to ask for help.
“I didn’t think it counted,” one father said quietly. “It wasn’t physical and I had not heard of this happening to another man.”
Mark Brooks, Chair of the Mankind Initiative, told me: “Men as victims of domestic abuse has long been a blind spot. They largely go unrecognised, come up against barriers of disbelief and end up feeling no one will take them seriously because they are men. Often friends, family and professionals do not pick up the warning signs because they are socially conditioned that this does not happen to men.”
The political and media conversation has reinforced that blind spot. As Brooks also says: “The political and media conversation around domestic abuse is that it only really happens to women, even when the official statistics show they are a significant minority. It is not helped that for the past 15 years, male victims have been officially classed and defined as victims of violence against women and girls.”
It was a well-intentioned policy shorthand, but one that left many men feeling linguistically erased. The reality is that there is no textbook victim. Perpetrators often share similarities – and are usually men – but victims share only the experience of abuse.
When systems replicate social bias
When men disclose abuse, they are often misread as perpetrators, or their distress is pathologised as anger. One client who reported being assaulted by his partner was sent to an anger-management course. The problem isn’t hostility; it’s history. Our safeguarding infrastructure was built to respond to the urgent crisis of male violence against women – a focus that remains essential – but it has not evolved to include the full spectrum of victims.
The family-court paradox
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the family courts. Judges and practitioners, rightly alert to male-perpetrated abuse, can struggle to recognise the inverse. Men raising allegations of coercive control are sometimes asked to mediate with their abuser or denied special measures even more often than women are.
“It was like shouting into a void,” one man told me. “Everyone assumed I was exaggerating. I just wanted to feel safe.”
These are not isolated experiences. Research commissioned by the Mankind Initiative on magistrates’ training needs found that gender stereotypes profoundly affect how male victims are perceived; many magistrates admitted feeling less equipped to identify or respond to them (Executive Summary, 2024; Full Report, Sunderland University, 2020).
A dual truth we keep resisting
The difficulty is conceptual as much as institutional. The women’s movement fought – and is still fighting – to have domestic abuse recognised as a systemic, gendered form of inequality. That analysis remains essential. But our system has struggled to hold a dual truth: that abuse is gendered, and that anyone can be a victim.
When we fail to make space for both, we narrow our understanding of coercive control and risk replicating the very hierarchies of power we are trying to dismantle. Recognising male victims does not divert empathy from women; it deepens the empathy available to everyone. It demands a justice system sophisticated enough to identify power dynamics wherever they appear and to protect victims on the basis of harm, not assumption.
Towards a justice system that truly sees everyone
At Fair Hearing, we see this as part of a wider design challenge. The family-justice system still lacks trauma-awareness, survivor feedback and the data needed to understand how different groups experience it. Reform must therefore focus on competence, not competition – building courts that can recognise abuse in all its forms while remaining alive to structural gender inequality.
Supporting male victims isn’t about levelling the scales between men and women. It’s about understanding abuse as a human problem rooted in power, control and fear – and designing responses that can hold complexity without collapsing into binaries.
If justice means truth, then every victim – male or female – must be able to tell their story and be believed. Equality requires more than balance; it requires the courage to look again at what we’ve been trained not to see.
