Both men and women can be controlling. Both men and women can violent. Domestic abuse occurs in same sex and heterosexual relationship. This means both men and women can be victims of domestic violence. Yet domestic violence-informed practice requires a gender analysis and an understanding of coercive control. In this episode Ruth and David examine some of the controversies and challenges associated with identifying and providing assistance to male victims of domestic violence including:
Check out the Safe & Together Institute's white paper on "Unraveling the Gender Paradox at the center of the Safe & Together Model"
Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real
Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."
Both men and women can be controlling. Both men and women can violent. Domestic abuse occurs in same sex and heterosexual relationship. This means both men and women can be victims of domestic violence. Yet domestic violence-informed practice requires a gender analysis and an understanding of coercive control. In this episode Ruth and David examine some of the controversies and challenges associated with identifying and providing assistance to male victims of domestic violence including:
Check out the Safe & Together Institute's white paper on "Unraveling the Gender Paradox at the center of the Safe & Together Model"
Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real
Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."
[00:00:16] And we're back and we're back. OK, here we are without Tiberius the dog, but, you know, sitting on the couch different couch. Yes, no. We're actually on holiday. This is what we do on holiday. And I'm David Mandel, executive director of the Save It Together Institute. [00:00:31][15.5]
Speaker 1: [00:00:32] And I'm Ruth Stearns Mandel and I am the e-learning and communications manager. [00:00:35][3.5]
Speaker 2: [00:00:36] You're listening to partner with Survivor, and thank you for joining us. And this is a podcast about things the domestic violence related. And I was trying to find the best way to say that. And it came out of our discussions. Ruth and I together about my experience as a professional fields and your personal experiences [00:00:56][20.2]
Speaker 1: [00:00:57] survivor [00:00:57][0.0]
Speaker 2: [00:00:58] and and it's expanded and grown over the last year to include interviews and themes. And, you know, we're really super proud of our office involved domestic violence theme. [00:01:07][9.1]
Speaker 1: [00:01:08] Yeah. And we want to include diverse voices on our podcast because that's the best way for us to have a complete understanding of the needs of the field and domestic violence survivors and children who grow up in domestic violence. So we like to include lots of different perspectives. Not everybody's going to agree on those perspectives, but in order for us to create a world where we can collaborate together and solve the issues behind violence, Gender-Based Violence, Domestic Violence, domestic abuse, coercive control, listening to all those diverse voices is incredibly important. [00:01:52][43.8]
Speaker 2: [00:01:53] So we invite you to send us questions or suggest interviews and really kind of engage with us, you know, like this podcast? You know, please subscribe to it and send it on to friends. So today it's interesting you just said gender based violence, and today we're going to talk about male victims of domestic abuse. We are and we haven't done before on this podcast before. [00:02:15][22.0]
Speaker 1: [00:02:15] No, we have not. [00:02:16][0.6]
Speaker 2: [00:02:17] And you were just asking me before about being cranky. Is he cranky as well? He said No. You know, the subject makes me cranky. [00:02:26][9.0]
Speaker 1: [00:02:28] But tell us about, you know? [00:02:29][1.1]
Speaker 2: [00:02:29] Well, I think it's it's about me. You know, I can say only about me. I think it's it's it's a fraught conversation. It's a complex conversation. [00:02:37][7.3]
Speaker 1: [00:02:39] But you've worked in domestic violence and child well-being for over 30 years, and you ran groups for domestic violence perpetrators. You've come into contact with a lot of the sort of story, as it's told by domestic violence perpetrators themselves. That's right. Men who feel that they're victimized by their partners. So that's part of it. [00:03:04][25.3]
Speaker 2: [00:03:04] That's part of it. Is is that? Absolutely. There's no question that. That people, the men who are genuinely domestic violence perpetrators, will can do spin. Extremely powerful, compelling images of victimization. Right there there's there's just there's just no question about. [00:03:28][24.2]
Speaker 1: [00:03:29] And that was why I felt like it was incredibly important to talk about it. Number one, because there are male victims of domestic violence and many of those victims begin that victimization in childhood. Hmm. Watching their own parents, watching their own father abuse and control their partner. And so having been somebody who grew up among a broad range of violence perpetrated violence where men and women were both perpetrators, although the overwhelming control narrative was controlled by men. This is very real. There were women who were violent, but over those women were men who were forcibly controlling and domestically violent. And you can't you can't strip out the reality of the harm experienced by those boys and those men. And I feel like the harm that they experience is really unique. It's very, very shaming. It creates a lot of silence and a lot of of blame. And you know, again, I'm just I'm giving my experience. People have their own experience of this and it's always going to be unique. But in in my own experience, boys were used. The abuse of boys was used as a way to frame the narrative for what control that perpetrator had, and the abuse of boys was often even more violent. Physically, it was much more violent physically than it was of girls, although I was beaten up physically and chased for days and harmed. The abuse that I witnessed of my brothers and of the boys that I grew up with was was truly frightening and truly violent and. And I'm surprised that nobody died, quite frankly. And so I feel that. In the masculine societies that we have that don't allow boys and men to express their emotional needs, their emotional suffering, their emotional harm, that we've really twisted up a lot of those who are suffering into this place where they feel very isolated. And I don't feel that as a society, we can move forward until we start to really face the reality of men who have been harmed, whether it's beginning in childhood, by witnessing domestic violence and experiencing within their families, or them experiencing a level of violence, domestic violence or coercive control in their own relationships as they get older. And we're going to break that down. [00:06:27][178.2]
Speaker 2: [00:06:28] When you immediately raised something really important, and I think when we talk about male victims, we need to be talking about adult victims and child victims of of of all forms of family violence, of domestic abuse, right? And I think, you know, for me, I've always said, I mean, I want to be super clear that both men and women commit be violent and both men and women can be controlled. I think that's for me as a baseline right and that domestic abuse happens in heterosexual and same sex relationships, right? So that's that to me, feels like a fact. It is. It has to be acknowledged is a right. It's a statistic that you know, has to be acknowledged. And so for me, oftentimes a lot of these conversations become about debates about numbers and percentages and funding and funding, right? And funding, that's a big that's funding. And for me, as a practitioner, a lot of of my work has actually been focused on. And as I've developed the Safer Together model. How do practitioners differentiate and identify people who are. I don't want to say, you know, who's the primary aggressor and who's the real victim and not the language. That's why I kind of always feels uncomfortable [00:07:46][77.8]
Speaker 1: [00:07:46] to make change the narrative. So let's change the narrative. Everybody has trauma, right to a certain extent. Some people have more trauma than others. I feel one of the things that's happened is that in the quest to understand trauma, in the context of domestic violence or domestic abuse, coercive control, perpetration that we have done a huge disservice to survivors by not being able to distinguish between, OK, this is trauma and you have that and you have challenges in your interpersonal relationships because of it. But these behaviors of coercive control and violence are not acceptable, and your trauma does not give you an excuse for its very willing. We're very willing to dismiss coercive control and perpetration of abuse. If somebody has had trauma in their past and a lot of times, that is used as a narrative by perpetrators to lighten their, you know, their accountability. And we tend to feel very deeply for men who have been harmed that way because of our thoughts of what masculinity is, because we believe that their fundamental power as a man has been broached and breached, particularly if it's a woman who's done it. We will be more disgusted with the woman perpetrating domestic violence against her male partner than we are with all the men who perpetrate against their female partners and their children, right? [00:09:17][91.0]
Speaker 2: [00:09:18] And this is this is where you know that structural gender inequity, gender inequality, right? It's something that we can't escape in these [00:09:28][10.4]
Speaker 1: [00:09:28] conversations because we believe that women are supposed to be fundamentally nurturing and men are fundamentally supposed to be [00:09:34][5.8]
Speaker 2: [00:09:34] powerful. Well, this is this is why rape in child abuse cases, even when it's a male caregiver who actually does the actual harm. Women sometimes go to jail for much, much longer, right, because they failed to protect. Right. And that's the belief is that's about that, that gender lens. She's being punished for not being the nurturer and the protector. Right. That we expect her to be. [00:09:55][20.8]
Speaker 1: [00:09:55] So we need to clear that out of the way. Yeah. [00:09:57][1.8]
Speaker 2: [00:09:58] And I think it's there's so much here. I mean, this is why I get cranky about this topic because I think it's well, I think it's really important that we we are we're kind of rigorous in talking about this because. We have to talk about context, we have to talk about power history. You have to talk about the larger, the larger social environment because it's not the same. It's just not the same, I think the studies that really kind of just sort of say tick box, here's there were times that women say they hit a man, and here's no time that a man says they hit a woman. Right? And it's equal to the same rate. [00:10:32][34.6]
Speaker 1: [00:10:33] That doesn't that doesn't say what occurred prior to that. It doesn't say if there's coercive control. It doesn't say if that man had that woman backed into a corner and she slapped him right because he was verbally and emotionally abusing her and then trapping her. [00:10:47][13.8]
Speaker 2: [00:10:47] And I've heard some of these studies, you know, which we'll talk about the the the the attribution of blame to to to women or men or equality of of numbers. And I remember listening to a study being presented at a conference and they were looking at sort of how all of these things are done with college students. You know, they're asking questions around dating and they're asking college students to look at scenarios and attribute responsibility for the violence. And they have these scenarios, and I was listening, going away, thinking, but if you add one more piece of information before that, it would totally change the attribution of responsibility to give a completely different context. Right. And so you can't decontextualized either in the relationship. Or in the larger culture. It just it just impossible to do that. So it's for me. I want to find a way we can talk about male victims that really honors their experience, that gives them a voice, that it gives them a place where they can get help. But that also we're we're not ignoring the larger context or empowering perpetrators of violence to use [00:11:57][70.0]
Speaker 1: [00:11:59] the victim narrative, [00:11:59][0.5]
Speaker 2: [00:12:00] the victim narrative or the idea that somebody fought back against them and hit them. And we know, for instance, they have perpetrators who will find that moment when when has his female partner fights back and call the police? [00:12:11][11.1]
Speaker 1: [00:12:11] That's but because that's so common, right? Because that's such a common strategy, particularly in coercive control, where there's high emotional and verbal abuse and there may not be any physical violence. This is where mapping perpetrators patterns of behaviors actually protects male victims from being confused or the biases of professionals who have come up against men who are perpetrators using the victim narrative to confuse the situation. For me, the biggest thing that we can do in order to protect male victims is to hand professionals tools which allow for them to create clarity and context so that you can clearly see side by side the behaviors of each person and determine who has the power and control and who has the patterns of violence and control within the relationship. And it becomes very clear, very [00:13:16][64.9]
Speaker 2: [00:13:17] quickly, very quickly. And I grew up, quote unquote, in a system, you know, in the state of Connecticut and the United States, where we had an extremely high dual arrest rate. Fifteen percent, which is right off the charts, you know, a lot of places will show a dual arrest rate of two, three, four or five percent. And and Connecticut was really way outside the norm, which meant working inside child welfare. I very frequently got presented by workers with cases saying, Well, both mom and dad are perpetrators. So again, we have this. This again, the simplistic and equalizing language start sometimes with this, this sort of formal system engagement where they were both arrested. I don't need to look any further, though. Both perpetrators just tell me where to send them right and just. And and so I had to develop a methodology that helped really look at risk to kids. Impact on family functioning and get beyond that, that kind of facile, simplistic neutralizing and. And so for me, it really became this way of saying tell me about each person's pattern of coercive control and actions taken to harm the kid. So that pattern based thinking that you're talking about, but not looking at the couple, looking at the individuals looking at their patterns over time? Right? Not just using incidents. And this is one of my big points. Is that? You can't figure this out using an incident based physical violence lens, period. Right? If that's your lens, you're going to you're going to misunderstand dynamics. You can use coercive [00:14:57][100.2]
Speaker 1: [00:14:58] control incidents based lens to determine coercive control, [00:15:00][2.5]
Speaker 2: [00:15:00] whereas I'm saying you can go. You can use coercive control framework as your starting point to do a differential assessment and figure out what isn't coercive control or what is right. But you can't go the other way from incentive-based to figure out coercive control. You just can't do it right. And so by using a coercive control lens and looking at also the child abuse neglect piece, which you have to factor in [00:15:22][21.7]
Speaker 1: [00:15:23] right for child well-being, [00:15:23][0.6]
Speaker 2: [00:15:24] you know that what I found is that based on the facts that were known to the workers and to me and based on criminal histories and child welfare histories, that it became super clear, often extremely quickly. Mm-Hmm. When you use that kind of look at each person's pattern, and sometimes it became clear that the female parent was perpetrated by a male partner, I want to really be really clear about that. It wasn't always like, Oh, it was always a male perpetrator and a female victim, but they're actually using that lens provided some differential power. Right? You know, and even and even, you know, the workers were really appreciative because it gave them a real fact based way. [00:16:06][41.9]
Speaker 1: [00:16:07] So let's look at that differential power. Yeah. And that's I think it's super important to to kind of contextualize, you know, the fear and control piece of coercive control is is really important for establishing perpetration, the level of fear and control that the victim experiences and that the perpetrator asserts on their victim. Let's just take an absence of any physical harm is very contextual. It's pattern based and you have to look at different factors. So say, for example, you do have a woman who is physically abusing her partner, say that he is a man who has was lost a limb in war and he's he's now disabled. You have to look at who holds the control in that situation when the abuse is starting to happen, because it's very different when you have a six foot tall man and you have a five foot five woman and the man has all the financial control. He's the breadwinner, right? So he has all the financial control. The woman is in a position where she doesn't have financial authority, where physically that person can overpower the woman very easily. Now, if you flip that situation and there's a man who is very vulnerable, the woman holds all the financial control and this does happen, right? There are situations like this. You have to contextualize that. You have to take that into account. Who is the person who runs the financial control of the household? Who is the person who has control over the car and the ability to communicate? Who is the person who has control over the house? And those things are actually really important and pertinent to safety and to autonomy. And so you have to look at power dynamics and the imbalances within that when you're looking at coercive control, particularly when you're looking at female perpetrated domestic violence. And it does occur where women do have all of that authority and there are men who are being abused by those women and controlled by that when those women in that way. [00:18:25][138.1]
Speaker 2: [00:18:26] I think, you know, you raised the word vulnerability, and I think this is really important. This is to get why my word today is facile. I'm I'm against facile interpretations or labeling because you kind of raised here somebody with disability. I know one of the factors in cases where I've identified female perpetrators against male partners was, you know, I'm thinking about what was was the male had developmental disabilities, adult male. And she the worker, walked in and and she just told them to stand in the corner, right? You know, and mean, and she was using her power right in that way. And so I think you have to look at these vulnerabilities like, for instance, if you're because you were just talking about same sex relationships, we are, you know, and male victims and in same sex relationships, right? And so maybe there's vulnerabilities there around, you know, they're being isolated from their family. Maybe they come from a super religious family and then they're disconnected, so don't have support. So they're vulnerable immigrants. They're an immigrant, you know, so you have these these vulnerabilities that can make somebody [00:19:27][61.0]
Speaker 1: [00:19:28] more [00:19:28][0.0]
Speaker 2: [00:19:28] susceptible, more susceptible. So that's one thing. And then the other thing you kind of gave size and strength and stuff like that. And and I would always give this example and training to help people understand which is if you have again, strip gender away for, you know, sex and gender, pay for a second and say, OK, you've got one human being who is, you know, six, two and three hundred pounds and you've got another one who's five, one and 110 pounds. The bigger person can block the door and entrap that person without using physical violence. [00:19:58][29.9]
Speaker 1: [00:19:59] Right? And frightened that person and friend [00:20:02][2.7]
Speaker 2: [00:20:03] and control that person without physical violence or minimal physical violence. Right. But that smart person, you may see them escalate into physical violence. He may some use physical violence with or without justification, let's say even. It's unlikely unless they turn to a weapon, right, that they're going to able to overpower the person. [00:20:22][19.2]
Speaker 1: [00:20:22] And still, yeah, if if in the context of a domestic relationship where somebody is not trying to free themselves from some type of coercive control, it's not an act of resistance to ongoing coercive control, emotional and verbal abuse. Women can and are violent, right? And in fact, the statistics show us that same sex couples and bisexual couples, I'm a bisexual woman. I actually have the highest likelihood of being a victim from either gender, bisexual women or some of the most highly perpetrated against and transwomen. So it's bisexual. Women and trans women are the most perpetrated against groups within the female gender. And so really, we have to stop and we have to say, what is what are the cultural norms, the cultural gender norms that are being adopted by perpetrators around power and control because it's not just about the gender. It's about adopting these entitlement behaviors and these gender norms narratives that you are entitled to do these things and that your partner has to fulfill certain things that you demand in order for you to feel good about yourself and relationship. [00:21:53][90.8]
Speaker 2: [00:21:55] So this is where you know, I go, and it's so important for us to be able to hold a both and perspective here that it's it's it's this issue of domestic abuse to me lands squarely in a gender based violence lens. To me, there's no question about it. You know, and it's tied in to other issues of violence against women, sexual harassment, sexual assault economics, cultural attitudes where, you know, God is perceived as masculine and that gives men more authority, you know, or economics or governments that are more filled with male leaders and all these things. And I've been quoting recently this research study on the gig economy. You've heard me talk about this book, but women, you know, in gig economy jobs like Instacart or other things where the the the person purchasing the service has no idea of the gender of the person on the receiving end that they were looking saying women are still making less money. And and one is there's there's two theories about it. One is that women have been habituated to taking less money right by other kinds of jobs, but also women self-reported they wouldn't take certain jobs because they felt unsafe. Going to those neighborhoods, going to those places at those times, those times. Right. And and and and that's a real thing that we have to really acknowledge that when we're talking about entrapment and coercive control, there's often these other factors that are weighing more heavily on on female victims than a male victim. So that's so that's part of. To me, I'm deeply committed to that framework. At the same time, we have to understand that, you know, there are other factors at play. And then in same sex relationships, male victims can be victims of male perpetrators, right? And that also we have much less frequently women perpetrators against male victims, adults now talking about rape, [00:23:50][115.6]
Speaker 1: [00:23:51] but we have at the same rights as as cis men lesbian perpetration. Right? That's that's real, right? And that really bucks against a lot of the domestic violence narrative that men are inherently violent, by the way. What a great excuse. Please stop doing that. That testosterone drives that. That's been disproven so many times. And yet there are so many people in the domestic violence field that feel very comfortable continuing that narrative. Despite the statistics which show that the lesbian community, the the gay community has an issue with domestic violence within a same sex context that has nothing to do with testosterone that has nothing to do with maleness, but it does have to do with our ideas of what relationship maleness is in power and control and in what we're entitled to. [00:24:48][56.0]
Speaker 2: [00:24:48] Well, I think when you say the word maleness, I think about just certain kinds of energy and certain kinds of way of being. Right. That human beings have to kind of make sense of and wrestle with and write and deal with. This is why, for me, I find such great relief and refuge in our mapping tool and in a perpetrator power based approach. Because as much as there's a theoretical framework around gender based violence and understanding the stats that you're talking about related to violence and same sex relationships, you know, at the end of the day. Practitioners. Need tools that they can use with this family to [00:25:26][37.8]
Speaker 1: [00:25:26] make clarity, to make [00:25:27][0.8]
Speaker 2: [00:25:27] clarity about what has the past. But you know, that's right, exactly. It seems like to me, it's sort of like we can have these, these discussions, we can look at the research, we can have debates about it. We can we can compare lenses of non gendered, understand domestic violence to gender, understand domestic violence and wild theories about this and that. But the end of the day, this is where I kind of I kind of get the sense of relief, which is you have a case come in front of you. The mapping process looking at behaviors works across all these situations and nonstandard, well, gendered way. But but also really accounts for using a course of control lens and using this lens of also thinking that domestic violence perpetrators are knowing they can also be abusing kids. Using this really powerful lens of assessment gives us the best chance of getting it right right here ahead. Right? You know, and and I've worked on cases where people have said, well, both mom and dad are violent, and I will say to them, Tell me what? Each pattern of each person's pattern, of course, control and actions taken to harm the kids. And I don't shade it. I don't I don't like put my finger on the scale. Mm-Hmm. I asked the question with an openness to just tell me about what you know from all the sources of information that you [00:26:45][78.2]
Speaker 1: [00:26:45] have, right? And it's funny because what you what you do get back is, is you'll be like, well, well, mom attacked dad and he called the police right and there was reports of child neglect from the school. And so the the you know, this is why professionals are really hesitant when men when men claim that they are victims because domestic violence perpetrators first move is to claim victimhood, their first move is to claim victim. [00:27:16][30.8]
Speaker 2: [00:27:16] That's right. And this is what [00:27:17][0.8]
Speaker 1: [00:27:17] you deny that this has happened. And so unfortunately, what's not happening is is that many who engage in this debate will blame gendered language for making non clarity, rather than blaming perpetrators for intentionally manipulating professionals and professionals, not having the tools to resist that manipulation. That's who they should be blaming. But some, you know, very vitriolic elements have entered in which feel very anti-woman and kind of can feed into that narrative that women are, you know, malicious when often that's that's not the reality. The reality, statistically, is that women are still more perpetrated against by men than men are perpetrated against by women. But it's true that male victims of domestic violence are being underreported, underserved and that we're not acknowledging the problem that they're experiencing and we're not supporting them as well. And I really feel like the reason that that is happening is because professionals have been horrible at contextualizing domestic violence and guarding against the Davo, the deny accuse, you know, behaviors of perpetrators and they really fall for it and they hurt victims, both male and female victims, by falling for that. [00:28:55][98.0]
Speaker 2: [00:28:56] Well, so you know, we're back to, you know, the importance of really doing that kind of mapping of behaviors and really looking in and having that tool and being rigorously committed to it because I think it it it has to be fact based. I knew that when I went into Chartwell for work, you know? Twenty five years ago, whatever it is now that the statistics about men's violence against women didn't matter at the case level, that the people needed a tool to differentiate to assess risk and harm to kids, to look at family functioning and to really understand what was going on and knowing that you got some domestic violence perpetrators who are really good at presenting themselves as a victim, they need to be fact based and behaviorally based. The other thing you know I'm thinking about is that really that we. The social pressure on on boys and men to act a certain way to be tough and to be strong, you're right, works against male domestic violence victims and works against us really, really working with young men and boys who have grown up in households with domestic violence and really being there for them. And I always used to think about this, this transition that happens and it happens. I think it's a harsh judgment on on black and brown boys, to be honest, because of racism. But sort of we think of boys as being vulnerable, vulnerable, vulnerable six, seven, eight years old and somewhere at eight years old. And then accelerates, we start sort of shifting and we're more likely to interpret them as perpetrators, and we stop seeing them as as as possible victims, we stop seeing them the ways they've been hurt, the way they feel hurt and the culture kind of creates this fog. Around here. Mm hmm. And and boys feel really vulnerable to other boys around it. I mean, there's just a whole mess of things that we really haven't done a good job breaking apart. And I think all those things impact. Men who are true male victims as as adults, I think that it makes them feel that shame, it makes them feel that confusion. I think, you know, you get this, you know, the classic example and looking at same sex relationships that people will look at them and go, Oh, there's violence between two men. Boys will be boys in it and assume that it's like boys. Men are violent. They're physical, and that they don't go looking for dynamics, of course, to control. They just make this assumption. [00:31:33][156.9]
Speaker 1: [00:31:34] I literally saw. Fathers in fist fights with their sons growing up, this was not an uncommon occurrence, and it was not considered out of the norm. This was considered to be the way that men worked out. Their shit was by being violent with each other and with other people. And that's the culture that we need to shift. We have to shift that culture in order to make male victims more safe. [00:32:04][30.4]
Speaker 2: [00:32:06] Yeah, there's a whole conversation about feeling powerless and and masculinity and how to differentiate between normal feelings of human powerlessness. You know, things you can't control in your life, in the world versus things that you know are related to victimization and things that can be fixed or changed? You know, I think there's just there's just a bigger conversation here. You know, I really appreciate you've been a staunch voice for, you know, we need to listen to all victims, whether they're trans, whether they're, you know, cisgender, male, you know that we need to be looking at because I think to me that that's a comment we all should have. [00:32:48][42.5]
Speaker 1: [00:32:49] Well, I think that I think that the tricky thing is is, is that you have to acknowledge that we do live in a world where the patriarchy is real, where male power is the dominant power. That's the reality where men are given license to use violence and to use sexuality as well sexual violence and control. And in fact, are entitled to certain behaviors because of their maleness. And we sort of just wash it under the rug as boys will be boys, boys, and all of that is incredibly real. Women experience it every day, which doesn't. Change or diminish the reality that men are harmed by violence. Men are harmed by male violence at the highest rates, male to male violence is a real thing. It begins in childhood in domestic violence situations, with examples like the one I gave where men are. Boys are targeted to particularly become incredibly vulnerable around the ages of 13 and 14 when their physical abilities starts to match their father and becomes a threat to his power and control. You know, and those things are all incredibly real. And we also have to acknowledge that many male victims are uncomfortable with and feel excluded by the gender narrative of domestic violence, which I don't think that we can change until the statistical reality changes and shifts. It is still that women are the most likely targets of heterosexual male violence. Well, there's no way around [00:34:45][116.4]
Speaker 2: [00:34:46] it when he mentioned it, and I think it's [00:34:48][2.4]
Speaker 1: [00:34:49] so we have to address that gendered reality. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that that women perpetrate violence and coercive control, that it may not have the same lethality as male violence towards women and children, but it does occur. It does engender fear, it does limit freedoms and it does do physical harm to men. And how do we deal with that? You know, one of the things that's been really important to me is to teach my, my boys, my son and my daughter that their physical reality is important. The way that they throw their physicality around and their power and use their body, that it is the most fundamental piece of human responsibility that we learn to be responsible with our own power. Men have greater physical power than many women. Not all women, but many men have much greater physical power than than other women. I'm sorry, guys. It may feel unfair to you, but if you're 200 pounds and you're with a partner who's smaller, if you do things which physically intimidate them or harm them and you cross those boundaries over and over again, you are not being a responsible human being with your physical power. It is unfortunate of a reality that if you are a large guy, you will be more frightening. And you need to take your own physicality into account. [00:36:29][99.5]
Speaker 2: [00:36:29] And I remember a teacher of mine, a psychologist, and he was a large man. He was big. He was tall. He was built. And he said that he said he had to learn a way to make himself less threatening. Right. That he had to really understand that his physical presence often engendered fear and that he took responsibility. And once he took responsibility for it, I don't think it was unnecessary. I mean, he felt like it was just a way to be a good human and to sort of enhance his way of interacting with people. It was to be aware of that. [00:37:02][32.8]
Speaker 1: [00:37:02] Now I have seen women perpetrate violence against men, and I have seen them use their bodies and their physicality in a way which was frightening and harmful. It was. It was much more erratic. It was. It was. It was. It was almost like a sneak attack because women are smaller than men. Like, I've seen women jump on the back of a man's back and scratched his face. All of these things I've witnessed as a child now, probably in the context, you know, looking back on that incident of that male perpetrating violence against that woman. But we we have to be able to give context to physicality and to the fear that it in genders. And so if you look at two people and maybe you do have a really huge man who's having domestic violence perpetrated against him by his partner, maybe he's not afraid that he's going to die. But being attacked physically at random times, unpredictable spaces causes a tremendous amount of trauma and harm. It doesn't matter how big you are, but you do have to take into context that power and control who has power and control, who has the patterns of perpetration over and over and over again. And it will become very obvious, very quickly. [00:38:17][75.0]
Speaker 2: [00:38:18] It will be, and it really is. And like I said over and over again, I feel really confident, comfortable with this methodology because it really just you have to you have to just commit to it and you have to ask the question. Tell me about each person's pattern of coercive control and actions taken to harm the kid. [00:38:34][16.4]
Speaker 1: [00:38:34] And unfortunately, one of the things that you will find is that very large male perpetrators of coercive control who have maybe never slapped their partner upside the head, but will say, Well, she threw something at me or she slapped me because he was standing over her, verbally demeaning her or controlling her, and she was trying to escape from that. And we have to contextualize that as well. [00:38:59][24.8]
Speaker 2: [00:38:59] I think these are where the where the wider patterns, you know, I'm thinking about sort of the the the discussions about racial inequity and structural racism where sort of the rules of politeness. Favor those in power, is that idea, right? You know, you don't, you don't, you don't, you know, you get accused really quickly of stepping out of line. You know, if you're in the one down position in the structural inequality and then you speak up, you're disrupting the peace and disrupting the order. And I think we have to look at male dominated structures like religious organizations and other places that really say men are the head of the household. Yeah. And and then if if if those who are being given support to be the head of the family, by religion, by government, by whomever they abuse that power, then where's the recourse? Right? You know, I mean, and so what you get is people resisting with violence. You get people resisting and then getting labeled as being abusive. So I think we can't really again, I keep going back to just like I've always said, you know, I can't use the term parent because our gender expectations of men and women are so radically different right across cultures. You know, there's we have to approach this with a complexity both and model [00:40:18][78.3]
Speaker 1: [00:40:19] in our heads, right? We have to acknowledge that male perpetration is the most common perpetration against against men and women. Right? That's a statistical reality. [00:40:28][9.2]
Speaker 2: [00:40:28] Men's violence against women causes more harm and is often more embedded in a partner, of course. [00:40:32][4.2]
Speaker 1: [00:40:33] Control. Right. And we have to acknowledge that men are also victims of domestic violence and that that often begins in childhood. They begin experiencing that violence and coercive control inside of their own family of origin and then that can be adopted later in their life in some shape or form in a relationship and that that is real. [00:40:54][21.1]
Speaker 2: [00:40:55] And there are there are places to get help. You know, I have tremendous appreciation for the work of Respect UK and I know people there and they've got a men's line, you know, and you can call up either and perpetration or about victimization and get help there. And I think we need we need that. And they have a really good protocol about asserting some of this out and asking questions. And I think we need professionals who are really good at doing this and and not having this naive sort of simplistic view in either direction. I mean, if you're walking around saying men can never be victims and then you're making a mistake, you're not. But if you're also walking around thinking, well, it's equal, men and women are just equally violent. And I just then, you know, if anybody's ever hit something, [00:41:39][44.2]
Speaker 1: [00:41:40] see gender rise, the whole [00:41:41][1.0]
Speaker 2: [00:41:41] gender, race, the whole conversation that I think you're making a mistake as well. [00:41:44][3.4]
Speaker 1: [00:41:45] They're right and well, it's very similar to the to the to the conversation around racism. Right? And that is this is by not acknowledging the systemic nature of of misogyny and patriarchy and male control in wanting to gender race the whole conversation. You, you, you sort of remove a tremendous amount of context, which I have to be honest with you. I believe that there are male perpetrators behind a lot of the push to do this right because it removes context and allows for them to claim victims rights. And so I feel like we actually have to do a good job creating context to protect real male victims. And again, this is what I'm going to say. One of the things that I respond to in the debate is that a lot of those who truly feel the negative impacts of not focusing on the reality that there are male victims and providing them with support. And that's real. Also, focus on gender arising the whole conversation and they are being used by male perpetrators. And the mistrust that's created in that process. Is really, really, really hard. It's really, really hard for those victims, and they don't place the responsibility in a place where it should be placed, and that is with male perpetrators who confuse this the situation with their own assertion that they are victims and they should be angry at those male perpetrators for confusing the situation. [00:43:28][103.7]
Speaker 2: [00:43:29] The case where you know the guy gives his partner alcohol knowing she has a problem is physically assaulted to her. And then where she responds physically to his wife. The police no videotapes her and then calls the police or doesn't even need to, because now he's got this weapon against her. You know, is is is these are these? You're right, these are the things they are saying. This person is going to present themselves as a victim, you know, and they're not. [00:43:57][27.6]
Speaker 1: [00:43:58] And so workers become distrustful of the claims of males that they are victims. That's what starts to happen. And the end and refuge services begins becomes fearful that they're taking in a perpetrator instead of taking in a victim. And so you have to be dedicated to creating behavioral clarity. [00:44:20][22.9]
Speaker 2: [00:44:21] And I think this is where people want to be fair. I think fairness this this decontextualized idea of fairness works against us again. So it promotes naive practice like, well, I have to be fair and listen to that, that what this guy is saying and not treat him any differently than I treat a woman. And I think that's that's both honorable and respectable. But if it's not put in the context of patterns of behavior, right? And I think that we have this idea where our man's coming forward as a victim. You know, we've got to make sure we're really responsive [00:44:58][36.5]
Speaker 1: [00:44:58] to him, right? And the other thing that you hear is there should so. So in the context of we talk about trauma doesn't give you an excuse to be violent. Right, right. We often say there's no excuse to be violent, but we do acknowledge the acts of physical resistance to coercive control and domestic violence is a fundamental right. It's self-defense. We do acknowledge that, but we haven't really done a really good job talking about that in the context of male victimhood. And I think that we haven't done that because, again, the non clarity part, because people don't understand patterns of behaviors, they don't understand coercive control and they don't understand acts of resistance. Now we have evidence that men who engage in acts of resistance towards domestic violence are far less punished by the system than women who engage in acts of resistance to domestic violence. Again, because of that gendered lens that men are supposed to be physically powerful and have a right to protect themselves. But women are supposed to be collaborative, nurturing and malleable and are not seen well when they engage in violence as resistance. So women get higher sentences for those physical acts of resistance, and men get lower sentences on average. [00:46:25][87.1]
Speaker 2: [00:46:26] And that's real. And here's. So that's another example of the gender nature of things. And so, you know, we want to do this show because, you know, we are we talked about this all the time. I mean, I've been talking about this for years. Mm-Hmm. You know, you and I have been talking about it, you know, as you follow the discussions debates on Twitter. Hmm. And for me, I guess, to kind of move to wrapping up, I think about how far we have to go in our conversations about men in general and and our attitudes towards men and our attitudes. That is, some men carry, you know, and that's why for me, this this idea that we need a really robust practice around looking at men, particularly as fathers, just the area I spent the most time talking about around their choices and behaviors are really understanding them and understanding male parental development and having these conversations until we get deeper into those experiences and build them into our practice. One is we're going to miss true male victims. And same sex or heterosexual relationships. And we're going to be manipulated by perpetrators who are pretending that they're victims and promoting that and are extremely compelling, I can't tell you how many people have sat down with perpetrators, and I know I've done that myself and listen to them. And if I didn't know better and if I did know more of the facts that I would say, Oh yeah, I could really understand how he's been victimized, right? Because when you sit across from somebody and you don't have additional collateral information, you don't have the police reports. So I'm sorry for my for my friends and colleagues out there who are mental health professionals who believe you can sit down with an individual in a room alone without collateral contacts and understand this, that you're that you're making yourself vulnerable to manipulation because there are a number of domestic violence perpetrators who will sit down and and tell a very compelling story story that's filled with holes, with gaps, with missing pieces of information, missing context lies and and in that you're at risk of being manipulated, you know? And generally, what's really interesting is because we've run groups, I've run organizations that run groups are women perpetrators arrested. You know that that they're more likely to own it. Coming in is the general sense. And then also with with lesbian victims, they're more likely to present this as sexual violence to perpetrators. There's a lot of things to wade through that we've got to kind of look at. And so anyway, it's to me, we have to get better at a whole conversation about masculinity, power, the definition of power or understanding men's men's choice of behaviors and families. So we've got a long way to go for an area to look at. [00:49:29][183.1]
Speaker 1: [00:49:30] We do. And having grown up in such complex and wide perpetration where I saw men and boys twisted in ways that was really unique from the way that women were being perpetrated against, and it was incredibly devastating to watch because men and boys don't have. The same emotional recourse that women are given, they're told that they have to just deal with it. And that's unacceptable. And that's that's continuing the cycle of violence because the reality is, is that many people who perpetrate domestic violence have histories of child abuse and domestic violence in their family, and they have simply adopted those behaviors as being normal. And that is the fault of professionals and the system and adults who don't call out those behaviors and who don't hold them accountable. It is not the fault necessarily of those children who grew up in those families. It is the fault of society who has failed to hold those behaviors to account. Really? So we really do have to talk about, you know, how this deeply impacts men in a specific way and and how we can address it and how we can. We can harden our professionals in their ability to resist perpetrators manipulations so that we can create clarity for male victims, right, so that we can create safe spaces for them and so that they can be safe and they can be well. [00:51:12][102.1]
Speaker 2: [00:51:12] So I want to invite our listeners to respond to this. This is a sensitive and complex subject. I want people to make suggestions to us. I see this opening up potential for for talking some interviews with people who are handling this issue of victimization very sensitively in a contextualized way. Right? You know, maybe in same sex relationships made in heterosexual relationships. So if you've got ideas of people for us to interview, send them along to us. Yes. You know, that would be great. I also think that there's the opening of space or we can talk about again, more about the connection between men and their experience of trauma and perpetration and how people sort that out. Because again, you've heard us say a couple of times today, trauma histories are not an excuse, but we do have to acknowledge that many perpetrators have histories of trauma. And that particularly important for me right now is is men who have histories of trauma, of colonization, trauma from from from structural racism. You know, I include childhood sexual abuse of physical abuse in that kind of bucket that is really concerning that we that we don't ignore those histories of trauma. We don't allow those things to be used as excuses for violence. [00:52:25][72.2]
Speaker 1: [00:52:25] That's correct. [00:52:25][0.2]
Speaker 2: [00:52:26] So we're really opening the door to this conversation for folks who we hope you'll join us. You've been listening to partner with a survivor. Yes. I'm still David Mandel, the executive director of the Save the Other Institute. I'm the same person I was. Mr. Mandel is still the money manager communications. And and if you like this podcast, please subscribe. Follow us on on all the platforms that are out there. Share it with other people. We really appreciate that you do that and [00:52:59][32.7]
Speaker 1: [00:52:59] change systems, not victims. [00:53:01][1.5]
Speaker 2: [00:53:02] That's right. Fix fix systems. [00:53:04][1.9]
Speaker 1: [00:53:05] Not not survivors. [00:53:06][1.1]
Speaker 2: [00:53:06] Yes, we've got we've got different hashtags there. But if you want to learn more about us, go to safety, other in sitcom. [00:53:13][6.9]
Speaker 1: [00:53:16] And if you want to see our trainings, you can go to Academy Dot Safe and Together Institute dot com. [00:53:21][5.0]
Speaker 2: [00:53:21] And there's a there's a discount [00:53:22][1.3]
Speaker 1: [00:53:23] code, there is a discount code, you have a 20 percent discount code partnered. All lowercase is the coupon code. All right, all right. [00:53:31][8.3]
Speaker 2: [00:53:32] And we're out and we're out. [00:53:32][0.0]
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