Male Abuse Awareness Week

There is a cultural bias which maintains that males cannot be victims. Males are expected to be confident, knowledgeable, and aggressive. When boys are victimized, they tend to be blamed more for their abuse and are viewed as less in need of care and support, than girls who are abused.

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Types of male abuse, facts and statistics

- At least 41 percent of the victims of domestic violence are men. (Harvey P. Forehand)
- As many as 1 in 5 males will be sexually abused before the age of 18. And one in five of adult rape victims are male. (Federal Bureau of Investigation in the US, or FBI)
- One in six men will be a victim of domestic abuse in their lifetime. (The British Crime Survey 2006/07 figures)
- Same-sex batterers use forms of abuse similar to those of heterosexual batterers. They have an additional weapon in the threat of “outing” their partner to family, friends, employers or community. (Lundy, Abuse That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Assisting Victims of Lesbian and Gay Domestic Violence in Massachusetts, 28 New Eng. L. Rev. 273 (Winter 1993)
- women who abuse men tend to prefer forms of abuse that don’t involve physical violence. The hurt, the injury caused by the habitual use of vicious mockery, frequent emotional blackmail, spreading odious lies and so on aren’t visible. (Harvey P. Forehand)
- Male Sexual Harassment in the Work Place on the Rise; According to a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission there were a record amount of harassment complaints filed by men in 2006. The figures given in the report state that of the 12,025 sexual harassment claims made in 2006 15.4 percent of these claims came from men. This shows a significant increase of male harassment cases made in the last ten years of 4.5. ([link])
- Munchausen by Proxy is when someone is causing illness or injury in another to obtain attention; usually by a parent or caregiver against a child (in 85% of cases the child is male) ([link])

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Useful websites and books

Why men do not disclose – [link]
ManKind (chariity supporting male victims of abuse) – [link]
M-Power – [link]

Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse – by Mic Hunter
Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse – by Mike Lew
The House On Telegraph Hill (An Asylum): Growing Up with Abusive Parents and a Lifetime After – by Charles S. Wilson

Abusive Porn

Child Pornography:

Child pornography refers to images or films (also known as child abuse images) and in some cases writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child; as such, child pornography is a record of child sexual abuse. Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts which are recorded in the production of child pornography, and the effects of the abuse on the child (and continuing into maturity) are compounded by the wide distribution and lasting availability of photographs of the abuse.
Children of all ages, including infants, are abused in the production of pornography. The United States Department of Justice estimates that pornographers have recorded the abuse of more than one million children in the United States alone

Rape Pornography:

Rape pornography is a genre of pornography involving the depiction of rape.
It was announced on August 30, 2006 that possession of depictions of rape would become a criminal offence in England and Wales. However, the resultant law on “extreme pornography” did not explicitly specify depictions of rape. In September 2008, it was announced that Scotland planned to criminalise possession of “extreme” pornography, extending the list of banned material beyond that in England and Wales to include depictions of rape, and “other non-consensual penetrative sexual activity, whether violent or otherwise.

Extreme Pornography:

Extreme porn depicts acts of incest, beatiality, violence and other illegal or abusive acts. Often the filming/photographing of this involves the forcing of people to commit these acts under threats of violence or other acts of cohersion