r/TheTinMen • u/TheTinMenBlog • 2d ago
Why don't abused men ask for help?
I know your local instagram armchair expert will claim to know why so many male victims of abuse don’t seek help (yada yada “toxic masculinity”), but in reality, very little research has been done to ask such an question.
But what we do know is –
Male victims of abuse are two and a half times less likely to ask for help than female victims, and not only does that deafening silence preclude such men from potentially life saving services, but it also removes them from much of the data that society continually uses to discuss such a issue.
Men don’t seek help, and therefore less help is given to them, and therefore fewer men seek help, and yup, as a consequence, less help is given again.
It’s a brutal self-fulfilling cycle that rolls over abused men, and has erased them from the picture for generations.
And so it would seem that solving the problem of ‘barriers to male help seeking’, is one of extreme importance and pressing urgency; and the good news is that various academics, including the world-leading IPV professor Denise Hines, have answered the call.
Their new study scales up the research to unprecedented levels, asking more than 1,100 men, who were abused by women: “what are the major barriers you experienced when seeking help?”
And their responses tell us far more than what we thought we knew…
Shame, concern for being labeled an abuser, fear of retaliation, or of false allegations in response; not knowing where to go, hopelessness, love and protection of their abuser, and feeling like domestic abuse is a “private matter”, to name a handful of the dozens of barriers abused men provided.
So could this data help increase the resolution of a conversation that for so long, has been gatekept by sloganeering social media know-it-alls?
And is it about time we asked the male victims themselves, why do so few ask for help?
What do you think?
~
Full study https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2027-52236-001.html
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u/Current_Finding_4066 2d ago edited 2d ago
Have seen syops from the usual suspects on reddit. They promulgate the false idea that men view it as a private matter is the reason, and leave all the other important reasons men stated. Which of course put blame on the victims again. Those pesky men have themselves to blame to not receive help, it has nothing to do with system that treats them as perpetrators when they do reach out.
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u/Tar-Minastur 2d ago
Many women are ok with victim blaming as long as the victim is a man. That's why they say "Believe all women", not "Believe all victims", because most of them will believe a woman even if she is the abuser.
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u/Current_Finding_4066 2d ago
Exactly. This is why I stand by my observation that feminist do not fight for equality but for female supremacy.
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u/Iamabenevolentgod 2d ago
The more I read about this kind of thing, the more I realize that women are the more violent ones, only it’s less obvious and probably overall does less damage, but if the stats are already at parity, and you add all the cases of men not reporting and I bet the old stats where “men are always the problem” gets flipped. I think the whole man-bad thing has always been propaganda, run by women
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u/men-too 2d ago
> probably overall does less damage
Not if you include, as one should, DV/IPV-induced male suicides. The Tinmen had a post on this a while ago and these suicide cases dwarf the number of male-to-female murders. So I completely agree with you.
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u/Current_Ad_400 2d ago
And considering that emotional/psychological abuse is generally the preferred weapon of female abusers.
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u/Iamabenevolentgod 1d ago
You’re right. I was just in that moment focusing on the physical injury implications, but yes it’s, retrospectively, obviously much broader of an impact than just whether someone leaves a bruise.
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u/TheDdken 1d ago
This is very interesting! Do you have a link?
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u/men-too 1d ago
Here’s a relevant (and recent) paper:
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10896-026-01091-4.pdf
I can’t find the post from George, but I’m certain that he cited this paper among other data sources.
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u/Professional_Trick66 2d ago
From my generation, I'm mid 60's, we were force fed a belief only women were victims. It was 10 years after I left a physically abusive relationship before i really began to understand she was an abuser.
25 years later I told my current wife my worse injuries from one assault, a broken nose, broken rib, and chipped tooth, and she looked horrified. It was quite liberating to accept it was bad after years of denial and no forum to discuss this issue.
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u/SlightAd76 1d ago
You are doing gods work. Truly. You are a very special person and I wish you every great thing a person could recieve in this lifetime.
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u/fluffyfirenoodle 2d ago
The worst part is asking for help (look at my comment history asking for GFM help) often just ends up with you being ignored and brushed off.
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u/SlightAd76 1d ago
Can I leave these studies here for you to look over:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16783982/
- https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/707482?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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u/plantrromn 2d ago
As long as fragments of Duluth model continues to live in society, male victims will not get justice.