False Representations — Husbands are Rarely Abused by their Wives?
92016-04-15 by Object of Contempt
There is a ubiquitous perception that husbands abuse and wives are victims. Although some blogs and other web resources claim to know that husbands can also be victims, their statement is frequently accompanied by the advice that men should just mentally switch the pronouns as they read. It is frustrating lip-service. Some of those sites still largely consist of articles that display a bias against men, making them into the de facto target of anger and contempt. Reading the comments on such blogs reveals that the readers are not absorbing an even-handed outlook. Telling men to mentally substitute pronouns while reading isn’t effective, and frustrates those men most who are most in need of help.
In many cases an admission that men do suffer abuse by their wives is made completely useless because the blog asserts or assumes the common (but false) belief that those husbands are a negligible proportion of the problem. The popular statistic says 70% of domestic abuse victims are women, and it is perpetuated by frequent repetition despite research, analysis and examination that invalidate the statistic. The research shows that men and women perpetrate abuse at approximately the same rates.
And, to be clear, the research was mostly dealing with physical, violent abuse. What I’m concerned about on this blog is emotional and mental abuse. These are not less damaging forms of abuse. The non-physical types of abuse are generally agreed to be the most damaging. It is possible to find in a few scattered articles the suggestion that women possibly perpetrate much more non-physical abuse than men because cultural assumptions hide it under the guise of common feminine behavior. Such a statement could be true, but I am not aware of any research that supports or proves it. Regardless, it is only reasonable to believe that men comprise about half of all emotional abuse victims and are not just a negligible statistic.
While some strategies for manipulation and control are common regardless of gender, this doesn’t mean that some tactics aren’t favored by either male or female abusers. It also doesn’t mean that the same tactic is employed identically by men and women. Additionally, the way that various tactics impact men and women may be extremely different. The descriptions of abusive husbands are really not a match for accurate descriptions of abusive wives with pronouns changed.
This isn’t a matter of feeling forgotten and unimportant. There is a very practical aspect in the fact that men are often frustrated who are searching the web for validation, descriptions, and help for their actual situations. The search results they receive are dominated by web pages that are meant to help women. In the absence of results that address the man’s situation, Google also shows a bias, assuming the person was much more likely to need help escaping an abusive husband.
This post is here to provide links to credible information that will show men the truth. Hopefully the resources below will also be useful in showing to others to gain even a little bit of credibility. Some of these links (closer to the bottom) provide some validation by way of accounts by men with abusive wives.
Unfortunately, I can’t say these sites have a Biblical worldview at all, or even a consistent one. Some of the authors I’ve read are feminists, but they are disgusted about the disinformation campaign and have been honest about it.
The Surprizing Truth About Women and Violence
http://time.com/2921491/hope-solo-women-violence/
The Number of Male Domestic Abuse Victims Is Shockingly High
— So Why Don’t We Hear About Them?
https://www.yahoo.com/beauty/the-number-of-male-domestic-1284479771263030.html
Woman As Aggressor: The Unspoken Truth Of Domestic Violence
http://www.mintpressnews.com/woman-aggressor-unspoken-truth-domestic-violence/196746/
Men: The Overlooked Victims of Domestic Violence
http://domesticviolencestatistics.org/men-the-overlooked-victims-of-domestic-violence/
Patriarchy and Wife Assault: The ecological fallacy
http://www.batteredmen.com/duttfull.htm
Domestic violence against men
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_against_men
Female Psychopaths – Are there more than we think?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-equation/201205/female-psychopaths
Can Men Be Abused by Women?
http://shrink4men.com/2010/10/27/can-men-be-abused-by-women/
In His Own Words: Living a Nightmare
http://shrink4men.com/2013/10/01/in-his-own-words-living-a-nightmare/
Men Have Emotions, But Women Don’t Listen
http://shrink4men.com/2009/01/14/men-have-emotions-women-dont-listen/
How to Deal with a Borderline Woman
http://shrink4men.com/2009/01/13/how-to-deal-borderline-personality-woman/
Look for more links to come in the future with a more immediate type of practicality.
Roll Away My Shame 
have you seen this site?
https://toysoldier.wordpress.com/
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Hello Ame,
Thank you for your comments! I really hope that your stepson will find some peace, strength, and confidence. I remember 19. It was tough. I didn’t move out until a few years later, but I had hope of escape. I stumbled and got into a marriage with a person who was very covert in her mental abuse. If your stepson finds relationships with healthy people for the future, that may be the thing that helps most.
I found it difficult because I was not very outgoing, not very cool, not very confident, and depressed enough that I didn’t attract healthy friends to interact with me. I got retraumatized in a variety of ways because I became sensitive to rejection.
I suspect that if your stepson trusts his dad and you for advice on friends, he will be able to find some peace and healing there.
With respect to the toysoldiers website, no I don’t remember seeing it. Although, I might have glossed over it because it seems more geared towards sexual abuse problems. I see it has a decent sized “link farm”, though. I’ll definitely go through it and see what’s there. Thank you for the link.
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As a child I was physically and emotionally abused by both parents. At age 14 I had a “nervous breakdown” and was put by my abusive parents in a state insane asylum. Against my doctor’s advice, and despite the fact that my behavior was not the least bit out of control.
At age 15 I was drugged and raped by a male psychiatrist in the mental institution. I almost died from the drug he gave me, the third and last time he raped me. My soul left my body and the nurses could not find my pulse.
My first husband physically beat me between 50 – 100 times during our marriage. My second husband tried with all his enraged strength to break my neck because I was thirty minutes late getting home from work. Today, more than forty years later, I still have constant pain in my neck, with all but the top two disks in my neck being either badly herniated or completely obliterated.
Today I am in my sixties. I have been on disability for severe PTSD 8 years. So I know about abuse. I know about every kind of abuse.
In my life, my worst abuser was a woman. My mother, whom I call my momster. Yes, she is female. And she is by far the most evil, remorseless abuser I have ever known.
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Lady Quixote,
I didn’t know how to respond to all this pain, so my response has taken a long time. I am glad you wrote this comment.
It was incredibly horrible what those people did to you. There is no excuse or explanation that could reduce the guilt or the pain. It isn’t just the original abuse that matters, either. The ongoing physical pain and the wounds to your spirit are real. There is nothing fair or just in any of that. My heart is breaking for you, and I can’t do anything about it. It makes me angry that people would do these things to you. It genuinely pisses me off. I wish I could give you comfort and make things right.
And I still don’t know what to say to make you feel even just a little bit better for even a few minutes.
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Oh wow… your words are very healing. Very. Thank you so much! It is amazing what heartfelt, compassionate words can do. Like rain in the desert.
I am sorry that I got impatient. That’s an old trigger of mine, being treated with either apparent indifference, or like I must be a pathological liar because”nobody” would be that cruel to their own daughter or their own spouse.
The truth is, cruelty knows no bounds in the hard heart of a person who is following after the evil one. Just watch the news or read a history book and it’s easy to see how horribly true that is.
Your kind words are very caring. Again, I thank you. I am sorry if my comments about my past abuse were traumatizing to you or your readers. Sometimes I forget that can happen. I think some of my trauma history even traumatized my Christian therapist. Hmmm, I wonder if that may have been part of the reason why he decided to move out of state last September? 🙂
The good news is that the Lord is healing my broken heart, more every day as I put Christ and His kingdom first and foremost in my life.
My birthday was this past week. Birthdays, especially mine, have been a trigger for me since my hellish 17th birthday, more than forty years ago. But every year does get easier.
God bless you, brother in Christ. I hope you are well today.
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Thank you for this post. I hate that the world assume that I am the abuser because I have a penis. This is a gender stereotype and it is used as a weapon by female abusers.
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You write so beautifully, with a perfect mix of rationality and emotion. I’m glad I found your blog. I also think I may have been, in the past, one of those people whose blog was mostly peppered with posts that pertain largely to women who’ve been abused by men. Like you, I focus on emotional and psychological abuse.
In the early days of my blogging, the experience was very raw and the emotional abuse had been severe, so I was writing very much from personal experience. I think the pronouns I used simply reflected that fact, and also the fact that, as you say, most of the web users who search for help can only find information pertinent to women, and therefore nearly all my blog visitors were women.
After the past year, however, I have encountered numerous men, one a very good friend of mine, who has been absolutely shattered by the relentless emotional abuse heaped on them by their wives or girlfriends. I have since researched the topic as well as kept my eyes open when observing people. Some of the interactions I see while couples are out shopping are truly shocking. The contempt and control displayed by the women must humiliate these men day in and day out, and it is every bit as devastating as physical abuse. There’s a great writer and therapist who has written a number of excellent books on the topic. Her name is Patricia Evans. If you Google her, she’ll pop up all over the place. One of her books is titled ‘The Verbally Abusive Man’, which is really an unfortunate title, because once inside the covers, you discover that what the writer is saying is that there is hope for abusive men to change their ways – but she asserts that she has never, ever seen an abusive woman reform; not in all her years as a therapist. I won’t go into it further but it’s an excellent read and I thoroughly recommend it.
Hopefully, I’ve rectified my writing style now to reflect the reality that both genders use this devastating form of abuse. When I reblog articles that rely heavily on the feminine pronoun to describe the victim, I write a disclaimer at the top, to remind readers that abusers can just as easily be female. I’d like to go back through my many blog articles and change the pronouns etc, but I have a chronic and debilitating health condition and I just don’t have the energy at present. Keep up the amazing work, brother.
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@Miss Min,
I was just replying to one of your other comments, and accidentally deleted it 😦 Sorry.
Thank you so much for the kind compliments!
Just so you know, I’m not holding a grudge against every blog that is written from the perspective a an abused woman.
Obviously I think it is better if a blog has an even-handed approach that expresses the truth, statistically and otherwise. However, I’m far more concerned about blogs that have a strong bias that assumes men are guilty. Even when they publish a post that admits that men are also abused, it does nothing to overcome the bias.
Your blog wasn’t even on my radar when I wrote the post. 🙂 Thank you all the same for being willing to do the tedious work of editing. It is very much appreciated!
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[…] can guarantee that this is not a problem that only men perpetrate on their wives and children. I stumbled from blog to blog, looking for answers to my problems […]
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