Abuse isn’t a female issue. It’s a human issue.

When the topic of abuse comes up, the most likely image we get is that of a woman in dire need of help in many forms. They’re usually victims of, and often times not the first, an abusive boyfriend or husband. And granted, we have the right to think of this as always the situation. A total of 54-percent of all documented and reported abusive relationships are in fact males being the abusers.

But there’s a huge gaping hole on the other side of that pie chart – or the 46-percent of all those abusive relationships in which women are doing the abusing.

There are a slew of reasons you don’t hear about female on male violence, and many of them have to do with social standards and double standards. Men are supposed to be these rock solid, unfeeling, providing beings unhurt by anything anyone really does.

Women, on the other hand, are always protected, perceived as physically and emotionally weak regardless of their situation. So when the topic of a man being abused by a woman arises, most people refuse to believe such a thing exists. Or, if they do acknowledge it, they don’t take it seriously, calling the man things like “pansy”, “not a man”, or “just complaining”, among other names not printable in a newspaper format. With those kinds of responses, you don’t need scientific data to know why a 210-lb man won’t speak up about getting beat up by his 120-lb girlfriend.

As for the men themselves, there’s no help for them.

The natural psychological reaction for human males is to deal with problems themselves, bottle things up, and not really tell anybody much. This does not help in an abusive situation. As a matter of fact, it only intensifies and worsens all negative feelings that go along with being abused. But then again, who would believe them? As for psychiatric help, there really isn’t any. The psychiatric method commonly used for helping abused victims, the Duluth Model, is incredibly biased against men and places the blame solely on the males. Even when the male is the one being abused, it does not take into account the female or the female’s past in any form, leaving these battered men in a dimension beyond abusive alienation.

The troubling thing is, things don’t seem to be getting better in the sense of abused men.

It took years, pardon me, centuries, for the common practice of women being abused to become acknowledged in a public light. It took even longer for something to be done about it. The abuse of men is nothing new. Countless studies have shown that women and men have an equivalent chance of being violent towards their partners, and this has probably gone on since the dawn of time. That being said, nothing has been done to help abused males, nor has awareness of domestic violence towards men increased.

The main issue is that the problem is being completely ignored by anyone who is not an abused male. But ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away – ask any politician. But then again, if you ask any politician about domestic violence against men, they’ll deny it and say the only “real” victims of abuse are women.

Society is not on a battered man’s side.

Psychiatrists are not on a battered man’s side.

The law is not on a battered man’s side.

What are they to do?

This is not meant in any way to paint women as terrible and all men as victims. This is just to raise awareness about the other side of an issue we constantly hear about, but are not nearly educated enough about.

Not all men are monsters.

Unfortunately, not all women are innocent.

This isn’t Lifetime. This is real life. And everyone needs help.