What is Domestic violence against men?

Domestic violence against men is violence or other physical abuse experienced by men in a domestic setting, such as in marriage or cohabitation. As with domestic violence against women, violence against men may constitute a crime, but laws vary between jurisdictions. Men who report domestic violence can face social stigma regarding their perceived lack of machismo or other denigrations of their masculinity. Additionally, intimate partner violence against men is generally less recognized by society than intimate partner violence against women, which can act as a further block to men reporting their situation.

The relative prevalence of intimate partner violence against men to that of women is highly disputed between studies. Women are substantially more likely to be injured or killed in incidents of domestic violence. Some researchers believe the number of male victims may be underreported to law enforcement. For men and women alike, domestic violence is among the most underreported crimes worldwide.

intimate partner violence against men is a controversial area of research, with terms such as gender symmetry, battered husband syndrome and bidirectional IPV provoking a great deal of debate. The lines of the debate tend to fall between two basic polemics. The first of these argues that scholars who focus on female-perpetrated violence are part of an anti-feminist backlash, and are attempting to undermine the problem of male-perpetrated abuse by championing the cause of the man, over the much more serious cause of the abused woman. The second polemic argues that violence against men is a significant problem and underreported, that domestic violence researchers and feminist academics have ignored this in order to protect the fundamental gains of the battered women's movement, specifically the view that intimate partner abuse is an extension of patriarchal dominance, and that concealing violence perpetrated by women puts the abuser herself at risk of future escalation of IPV. One of the tools used to generate statistics concerning IPV perpetration, the conflict tactics scale, is especially contentious.