Unfair Domestic Violence Treatment Towards Men
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In 1994, The Violence Against Women Act ( VAWA ) was signed by President Bill Clinton and passed by Unite States in an effort to provides additional funding toward investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women. According to the United Nations Declaration, violence against women includes “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in any physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life (United Nations, 1993)”. The most common types of violence against women is domestic violence or physical, emotional and or sexual abuse of women by their intimate partners or ex-partners.
In our society, “domestic violence” usually portrays women as the victims and men perceived as the perpetrators and seldom in the reverse role. This pattern of discrimination can be commonly observed from different array of social media, research and studies, reported statistics, advocacy agencies and help centers and nation’s lawmakers.
The idea of women as violent is not foreign. The comic image of the past is the woman chasing after her man with a rolling pin. What made this funny to some was that people saw it as a fictional event. When a woman really comes after a man with a rolling pin, there is nothing funny about it at all. In a real life event that illustrates this fictional event were the most recent charade between Tiger wood and his ex-wife Elin Nordegren. Where Nordegren allegedly attacked Wood with a nine iron golf club and where he sustained a head injury as he fleeing from their home in his car. Nordegren continue to chase after Wood in the neighborhood and is seen repeatedly beating the windshield after he had crashed his car at a nearby fire hydrant.
“Men have been shot, stabbed, beaten with objects, and been subjected to verbal assaults and humiliations. Nonetheless, I do not believe these are the “horrors” of violence toward men. The real horror is the continued status of battered men as the “missing persons” of the domestic violence problem”
Domestic violence against men has little to no public awareness because our society deems it’s a counter-intuitive nature of the phenomena, the social stigma that disinclines men to come forward. Men are less likely to report the violence due to embarrassment or the assumption that others would not believe them due to political and institutional focus are on violence against women. Battered men are treated as invisible victims to society at large and to the governmental institutions that are in charged with providing equal protection to all citizens. VAWA was written in a gender-neutral language aiming to reduce domestic violence among both sexes, yet the title of the act suggests otherwise that emphasize men as the perpetrator only. This existing pattern of discrimination by the states in their provision of funding and services to male victims of domestic violence is unconstitutionally and deprives them of equal protection set forth by the Amendment of the United States Constitution.
In the Fourteenth Amendment, it states, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The equal protection clause is not intended to provide “equality” among individuals or classes but only “equal application” of the laws. By denying states the ability to discriminate, the equal protection clause requires states to apply the law equally and cannot discriminate against people or groups of people arbitrarily.
Although the Bill does not discriminate against men, but the very people that makeup of the government branches shares different outlook on the purpose of VAWA. Discrimination begins at the highest levels of the federal and state governments, national domestic violence organizations, and state domestic violence coordinating councils. In 2002, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women has issued openly discriminatory directives that order Delaware Domestic Violence coordinating council that, “states must and only programs that focus on violence against women”. For many years, the Department of Justice National Institute of Justice has explicitly refused to fund studies that investigate domestic violence against men. In the one of the recent DOJ’s funded research solicitations have explicit interest in domestic violence against women, “NIJ welcomes research on all aspects of justice system responses to intimate partner violence and stalking of women”. DOJ excluded applications that focus on male victims. The Solicitation for Proposals from the DOJ specifically prohibited “proposals for research on intimate partner violence against, or stalking of males of any age or female under age of 12.”
In the latest released study conducted by the Center for Disease, The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey ( 2010 ) Summary Report compares the estimated number of violence incidents between both men and women within the last 12 months. The finding shows an approximately 5.4 million men were victimization by an intimate partner versus 4.7 million found in women in 2010. These shocking figures translates to an approximately additional 700,000 men were victimized than women and more than half of the battered population ( 53% ) were men. From the hundreds of thousands of dollars that was spent on this research, these alarming statistics was not highlighted or summarized in its key finding and executive summary sections. From the widely distributed The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Fact Sheet, it provided statistical information that centered around women and in bold print “Women are disproportionally affected by sexual violence, intimate partner violence and stalking.”
Men who are victims of domestic violence, however, say they suffer a special stigma. They complain bitterly of the injustice of a system that would punish them harshly for hitting back, but gives them no help in stopping their wives assaults, and often treats the whole situation as comic. In search for assistance for the battered, there are overwhelming numbers of advocacy agencies including shelters dedicated for women, but only two battered men shelters are in operation in US and few hotlines.
In the study conducted by Denise A. Hines, Ph.D., Clark University, reveals her findings on what happens when abused men call domestic violence hotlines or shelters seeking help. Hines study included 302 heterosexual men