The call to punish men less and to punish women more recurs frequently through­out these websites and is tied up with allegations of discrimination against men. Men are unfairly stereotyped and unjustly accused of violence, while women can behave badly with impunity. To remedy this injustice, women’s transgressions should be dealt with severely. False allegations […]

Men’s groups have deployed the equivalence argument to render men, and fathers in particular, safe or no more dangerous than women. But they also seek to show the converse: that women are as dangerous, or can be more dangerous, than men. Men’s Aid stresses the need ‘to appreciate that being female does not lessen the […]

Allegations of domestic violence towards the mother are frequently made in response to a father’s application for a Contact Order. Many children lose contact with their father as a result, irrespective of the truth, for such criminal allegations are rarely examined properly in family cases[632] . . . An unsubstantiated allegation of domestic violence is […]

Central to the strategy of rendering men safe and essential to the proper function­ing of the family is the equivalence argument. It is also crucial to the re-assertion of equality and the move to introduce gender-neutral terminology into the debate. In addition, it is used to excuse and explain men’s violence. Equivalence, equality and gender […]

The scale of the problem This chapter will focus primarily on the four groups that seem to be most active in lobbying for, and offering support to, abused men.[592] The most recently estab­lished of these is the ‘it does happen network’, set up in September 2004. Its website states that it was first created to […]

The available evidence does suggest that there are men who are subjected to violence at the hands of their partners or former partners. Nevertheless, it seems clear that it is primarily women who suffer as a result of domestic violence. The question, then, is what lies behind the campaigns by men’s groups seeking to establish […]

The Dobashes’ contention that domestic violence is asymmetrical appears to be borne out by research examining more closely the studies showing high levels of male victimisation. First, Gadd et al[532] designed a research project to assess the nature and extent of domestic violence against men in Scotland, in the light of the Scottish Crime Survey […]

It appears that when context is taken into account, and when searching interviews are part of the methodology, useful information about the prevalence and the meaning of violence can be garnered. Dobash and Dobash note that women’s accounts ‘reveal the nature of men’s violence, the sources of conflict leading to attacks, their own emotions and […]

Every now and then, and certainly in recent years, these feminist, and now official, accounts of domestic violence have been challenged. The challenge has come from family violence researchers and it has been enthusiastically taken up by groups campaigning for men. These groups seek to draw attention to men’s victimisation and to construct domestic violence […]

Since the late 1990s, a number of government initiatives have been devised to tackle domestic violence,[481] all of them focusing on women as victims; civil remedies in cases of domestic violence have been strengthened;[482] and there has been law reform[483] to address feminist criticisms of the way in which crimes involving violence against women[484] have […]