Men Are Also Victims of Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Every year, more than 1.6 million lives are lost as a result of some form of human violence in the world. Violence is among the leading causes of death for people 15 to 44 years of age worldwide, with 14% of these deaths occurring among men and 4% among women. These are just some of the worldwide violence statistics that influenced the World Health Assembly at their 1996 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to adopt a resolution declaring violence as a leading public health problem worldwide (World Health Organization, 2002). One form of violence that raises much concern worldwide and at the national level is intimate partner violence. Violence against intimate partners occurs in all countries with much cultural variation for its tolerance. Worldwide, the majority of intimate partner violence occurs in women at the hands of men. It is estimated that 10% to 69% of women around the world report some form of intimate male partner violence. With such alarming epidemiological data, the focus of intimate partner violence has been on the female victim, much to the neglect of the male victim of intimate partner violence (World Health Organization, 2002). The latest information from the U.S. Department of Justice/Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that while intimate partner violence against women is more often reported than is intimate partner violence against men, it is still a significant public health problem. The Intimate Partner Violence Prevention Fact Sheet developed by the Department of Justice indicates that 834,700 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner each year. In the year 2001, men constituted the largest majority of murder/homicide victims in the United States. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports, in the year 2001, there were 10,503 men murdered in the United States, whereas there were 3,214 women murdered. These numbers indicate that 76% of all murder victims documented by the FBI in the year 2001 were men. Furthermore, the report indicates that of all the men killed, 9,371 were older than the age of 18. The alarming statistics regarding violence against men in the United States should be a call to action for all of us working to address the problem of violence in society. It is clear that men are not just the perpetrators of violence, as is often constructed in social-psychological discourse, but they are also disproportionately the victims of brutal violence and murder when compared to females, and they experience intimate partner violence at a rate that is all too high. Society’s social construction of men and violence primarily renders men invisible as victims but emphasizes the fact that men are more often the perpetrators of violence than are women. This social construction has neglected to recognize men as legitimate victims of violence at the hands of women and other same-sex partners. Society’s narrow focus on men as victims of intimate partner violence has primarily emphasized same-sex intimate partner violence to the exclusive