Whether domestic violence should be addressed in terms of gender stereotypes has been extraordinarily controversial among scholars for more than three decades. Consider, for example, Current Controversies on Family Violence, published in 2005. It included an article entitled “Women’s Violence Toward Men Is a Serious Social Problem.”^ That article was matched with another, more aggressively titled article, “Men’s Violence toward Women Is the Serious Social Problem” (relevant emphasis added).^ In 2011, the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior issued with the subtitle Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence. Its editorial preface observed:

Forty years of research, social activism and practice in the field of partner violence (PV) have created a certain amount of consensus but have mainly led to controversies. … The collection of papers presented here reiterates the conflict-ridden environment in which the understanding of PV emerges.^

The controversy centers on competing frameworks. The gender-stereotyping framework sees the problem of violence as the problem of men attacking women. The holistic framework takes seriously social-scientific evidence of approximate gender equality in the perpetration of domestic and partner violence. The holistic framework views domestic violence as a complex and multifaceted interpersonal problem.

The gender-stereotyping framework has overwhelmingly dominated domestic-violence research and policy. The scholarly field of domestic violence research is largely a horrifying, repulsive spectacle of irrationality, gender animus, and symbolic violence. Objective, social-scientific study of domestic violence has had little public significance.^ Given the importance of family law and the criminal justice system, caring persons should not avert their eyes and close their ears to the intellectual brutality of domestic violence and partner violence scholarship.

Symbolic violence in the field of domestic and partner violence research has a long history. It began in 1975 with the pioneering National Family Violence Survey. Using a broad measure of physical violence, that survey found that roughly 12% of both men and women physically assaulted their partners.^ One lead author of the study, who identifies himself as a feminist^, ignored the implications of these statistics and initially focused on male domination of women as the cause of partner violence.^ His female scholarly colleague, however, in 1977 wrote a scholarly article, “The Battered Husband Syndrome.” That article explored the characteristics of men victims of partner violence. In response to her article, the author received a deluge of scholarly abuse, as well as a bomb threat at her daughter’s wedding.^

All three lead authors of the 1975 study suffered-long lasting personal attacks as result of their finding of gender symmetry in domestic violence. One of the lead authors more than two decades later observed:

our finding that the rate of female-to-male family violence was equal to the rate of male-to-female violence not only produced heated scholarly criticism, but intense and long-lasting personal attacks. All three of us received death threats. Bomb threats were phoned in to conference centers and buildings where we were scheduled to present. {The female lead author} received the brunt of the attacks—individuals wrote and called her university urging that she be denied tenure; calls were made and letters were written to government agencies urging that her grant funding be rescinded. All three of us became ‘non persons’ among advocates. Invitations to conferences dwindled and dried up. Advocacy literature and feminist writing would cite our research, but not attribute it to us. Librarians publicly stated they would not order or shelve our books.^

Despite the attacks, one of the lead authors persevered. He became a leading scholar in objective, social-scientific study of family violence. In 2011, at age 85, he wrote the lead review article for Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence. He declared:

The high prevalence of PV {partner violence} by women, either minor violence or clinical-level violence, is not perceived by the public and is often denied or concealed by academics. The denial and concealment is documented in {references}. It is crucial to change academic denial and public perception because ending PV by women is morally, legally, and therapeutically necessary. It is also an essential step in reducing violence against women because, as {reference} found, “…a woman’s perpetration of violence was the strongest predictor of her being a victim of partner violence.” Similar conclusions follow from the longitudinal study of {reference} and {reference}’s meta analysis of risk factors for victimization. The effort to end PV by women must include attention to psychological aggression and minor violence by women such as slapping and throwing things at a partner because those behaviors are harmful themselves and because they tend to evoke retaliation and escalate into more severe attacks by both parties {references}.^

In 2010, in a scholarly article entitled “Thirty Years of Denying the Evidence on Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment,” he made a similar argument:

It is time to make the effort to end all family violence, not just violence against women partners, because this is morally and legally necessary and because it is crucial to protect women. This must include PV {partner violence} by women, which is widely viewed as mostly harmless {reference}, because physical injury inflicted by women is more rare than physical injury inflicted by men {reference}. On the contrary, even when attacks by women result in no physical injury, ending PV by women is a basic prevention step to reduce violence against women and all other humans.^

Acronyms, jargon, and numerous scholar references make these journal articles unappealing reading for ordinary persons. Nonetheless, close reading of the above passages reveals symptoms of a long history of abuse. Note that the above text makes no direct reference to violence against men. The concluding reference to “reduce violence against women and all other humans” shows the male scholar’s wounded sense of self. From his female colleague’s explicitness in describing “the battered husband,” he withdrew.

Evincing the social power of the label “feminist,” supporters of gender-stereotyping domestic violence have attacked studies showing gender symmetry as being the work of anti-feminists or pseudo-feminists. In Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence (2011), the leading review article is entitled, “Gender symmetry and mutuality in perpetration of clinical-level partner violence: Empirical evidence and implications for prevention and treatment.” The abstract for that article begins:

This paper addresses the contradiction between the conceptualization of partner violence as almost exclusively perpetrated by men and over 200 studies with data on both men and women which found “gender symmetry,” i.e., that about the same percentage of women as men physically assault a partner.

Apart from its conclusion and addenda, the article has eight primary sections:

1. “The gender symmetry controversy”
2. “Method”
3. “Results”
4. “Does the high rate of female assault result from self-defense?”
5. “Asymmetry in effects: the basis for denial of symmetry in perpetration”
6. “Limitations”
7. “Theoretical implications”
8. “Prevention and treatment implications”

This article concludes:

Although denial and concealment of gender symmetry in perpetration describes the current situation, recognition of the symmetrical and predominantly mutual nature of PV {partner violence} perpetration is starting to happen, as indicated by a growing number of articles and books which recognize the importance of gender symmetry in PV {references} and new journals that explicitly recognize that PV is perpetrated by both men and women (Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, and Partner Abuse). These publications are part of a process that is likely to ultimately end the present ineffective ideological approach to PV and replace it with evidence-based approaches that do not deny the overwhelming evidence on the prevalence and importance of female perpetration of PV. If this continues, it is likely to open the way to more effective prevention and treatment of PV.^

The author of that article elsewhere described himself as a feminist.^ Nonetheless, the subsequent article in that issue is entitled, “Gender and types of intimate partner violence: A response to an anti-feminist literature review.” Apart from its introduction and conclusion, this scholarly article has two primary sections:

1. “A feminist perspective on domestic violence”
2. “The anti-feminist backlash”^

This article places social-scientific study of domestic violence within a battle about feminism. It organizes that battle under the banners “feminist” and “anti-feminist.” A third article in Current Controversies on the Role of Gender in Partner Violence joined the battle. It is entitled “Feminist contributions to understanding woman abuse: Myths, controversies, and realities.” Apart from its introductory section, it has three primary sections:

1. “What is feminism?”
2. “Myths and realities about feminism”
3. “Studying woman abuse: academic apartheid or the genuine sharing of knowledge”^

Academic apartheid seems to refer to rigid separation between work labeled “feminist” and work labeled “anti-feminist.” That’s a socially constructed, ideological division. The article describing it also documents its social construction. Even in scholarly work, division between “feminist” and “anti-feminist” dominates division between tendentious ideology-pushing and objective truth-seeking.

Ideological fear has been at the core of the criminal justice system’s development of domestic violence policy. Consider a scholarly article published in a prominent law review in 2004. Apart from its introduction, a tendentious historical section, and its conclusion, the article has three primary sections:

1. “The Critique from Within: Criticism of Domestic Violence Criminal Justice Policy by Battered Women’s Advocates”
2. “The Attack on the Changes in Domestic Violence Policy from Outside the Battered Women’s Movement”
3. “Progressive Strategies”

This article associates findings of gender symmetry with men’s rights groups and pseudo-feminists:

The primary goals of both the men’s rights groups and the pseudofeminists’ attack on the conception that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of intimate violence have little to do with domestic violence policy. Their critiques of the numbers and the policy changes are simply support for their arguments that women are violent, men can be victims, and feminists are liars who distort data to suit their agenda.^

An apparently threatening claim of parties labeled “men’s rights groups and “pseudofeminists” — the claim that men can be victim of domestic violence — hasn’t been sufficiently influential to overcome unequal services for male victims of domestic violence or pervasive gender-stereotyping of domestic violence. Moreover, the scholar expressing these ideological fears played an important role in shaping the New York judicial system’s response to domestic violence. She served as Deputy Director of the Center for Court Innovation, a public-private partnership with the New York State Unified Court System. As the Director of Domestic Violence and Family Court Programs at the Center for Court Innovation, she was closely involved with the development of the influential Felony Domestic Violence Court in Brooklyn. Ideological fear of “men’s rights groups and “pseudofeminists” is deeply entrenched in the dominant public response to domestic violence.

Scholars expressing concerns about domestic-violence policy have sought to allay ideological fear with expressions of support for women’s rights and feminism. One social-scientific scholar, who described himself as “a supporter of women’s rights on any issue from abortion to workplace equality,” declared:

I resent the self serving argument that the gender paradigm group somehow represent women’s interests and are the only “feminists” and take a moral higher ground associated with women’s rights. I say that IPV {intimate partner violence} is not an issue of women’s rights but of couples with dysfunctional conflict management styles or psychopathology. The gender paradigm thinking has led to criminal justice practices that do not protect women or men {references} and obfuscate focus on serious high risk offenders of each gender. My critiques of the gender paradigm grew not from gender politics but from a review of the domestic violence literature I was doing for the third edition of my book The Domestic Assault of Women. In so doing I discovered a voluminous literature indicating that the modal form of IPV was bilateral matched for level of severity. More disturbingly, I also discovered a series of studies that had serious flaws in sample selection, extrapolation from criminal justice or shelter samples to the general culture (without identifying the selection factors that initially created the sample), cherry picked data, and conclusions that did not fit the reported data. These were not random errors; they all lay in one direction—to support the gender paradigm. I reported these solecisms and re-titled the book Rethinking Domestic Violence.^

Another scholar described an alternative approach to helping female victims of domestic violence. She described her work as part of a larger project of saving progressive feminism:

the conventional wisdom seems to be that there are two opposing progressive groups that address women’s issues—feminists and those who have receded from feminism. To many, this apparent fracture is exemplified by theorizing about domestic violence, where mainstream feminists supportive of harsh punishment of abusers square off against scholars who criticize feminism for compounding the problems faced by people of color. This article argues that, to the contrary, much of the newer scholarship on women’s issues, particularly with regard to domestic violence, does not recede from the feminist mission, de-emphasize women’s subordination, or abandon the majority of traditional feminist ideology, but rather it represents a new method of feminist theorizing. This paper is the first to systematically catalogue the specific traditional feminist views to which many modern feminist scholars object and distill the uniting principles of this new feminist or “neo-feminist” scholarship. Using the lens of domestic violence law and policy, the article demonstrates how neo-feminist theorists continue to prioritize women’s empowerment, despite their critique of certain law reforms associated with traditional feminism. For example, many of today’s domestic violence scholars reject mandatory arrest and prosecution policies in favor of recognizing battered women’s autonomy and addressing reluctance to separate through socio-economic reforms.^

This article doesn’t address the large number of studies indicating gender symmetry in the perpetration of domestic violence.^ This article doesn’t directly recognize that domestic violence policies have been central to the development of U.S. mass incarceration. Instead, it suggests that domestic violence policy hasn’t served well female victims of domestic violence. It argues that supporting a harshly punitive, gender-biased approach to domestic violence isn’t necessary to keep feminism alive. That’s the sort of scholarly argument that’s acceptable in elite legal discourse.

The long, brutal scholarly battle over domestic violence shows little shared movement toward truth and reconciliation. Consider, for example the Blackwell Companion to Criminology. This prestigious scholarly volume, published in 2004, is part of the Blackwell Companions to Sociology. That series describes itself as an “authoritative series” for “those studying sociology at advanced undergraduate or graduate level as well as scholars in the social sciences and informed readers in applied disciplines.” The preface to the list of volumes in the series states:

Essays in the Companions tackle broad themes or central puzzles within the field and are authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research and reflection on the questions and controversies that have activated interest in their area.

Within the Blackwell Companion to Criminology, a scholarly article entitled “Managing ‘Men’s Violence’ in the Criminological Arena” begins:

When men’s violence against women and children is made the object of analysis — say, the focus of scholarly attention or the focus of an undergraduate criminology module — all hell breaks loose. Even calling men’s violence “men’s violence,” thereby pushing home responsibility for that violence to men, can provoke uproar. It has even led to some sections of the academy in the United States, and now in the United Kingdom, to argue that, contrary to feminist claims, women are equally if not more violent than men and that there is a “sexual symmetry in marital violence”^

To the phrase “sexual symmetry in marital violence” the author appended a dated scholarly reference (from 1992) to a scholarly article supporting gender stereotypes in partner violence. The situation at the time of his writing was actually even more disordered. By 2004, at least 155 scholarly articles had found that women were as physically violent or more physically violent towards their partners than men were.^ By 2010, that count had risen to at least 271. Moreover, these scholarly article ranged far beyond the United States and the United Kingdom.^

The scholarly author in Blackwell Companion to Criminology displayed intense anxiety about what he apparently perceived as overwhelming, hostile symbolic forces besieging him and his most cherished values. He declared:

One thing’s for sure – naming men as the main perpetrators of most forms of violence, especially violence against women and children, is still not culturally permitted in non-feminist forums. Saying, without qualification, that men have responsibility for most forms of serious violence in Western jurisdictions is tantamount to declaring war on the civilized discourses of erasure and denial in which criminology and related disciplines couch the question of men’s pervasive violence against women and children. … The task at hand is to combat the discursive wizardry of the apologists as they try to flee again from the overwhelming evidence of men’s widespread and extraordinarily brutal violence against women in the “civilized” world.^

This analysis highlights men perpetrators of violence, effaces men victims of violence, and highlights men’s violence against women. Men in fact account for the majority of victims of violence. Moreover, the share of men victims is higher for more serious forms of violence.^ While ignoring men victims of violence, the scholarly author in Blackwell Companion to Criminology deploys broad martial imagery and fighting language: “declaring war,” “combat,” and the symbolic enemy fleeing. He seems to be a man engaged in violence against men. That’s the most common sexed pattern of violence.

Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse, a book on intimate partner violence published in 2003, has a more irenic orientation. But it also describes enormous harm:

What is appallingly apparent is that we have refused to address the role of women in the dynamic of intimate violence. The reasons for this are numerous. Perhaps the most important is that some feminists fear that talking about and addressing these issues reinforces the stereotypical assumption that women are somehow to blame for the abuse inflicted upon them. In my view, the research on women’s violence and the numerous studies that have clearly indicated that women are no less physically violent or emotionally abusive toward men than are men toward women creates an opportunity. It allows us to address women’s responsibility in the dynamic of abuse without blaming them for the violence inflicted back.^

Responding domestic-violence scholars aggressively placed this book in the context of battering and abuse. A law review article, entitled “Surviving the Battered Readers Syndrome…,” declared that the book’s author is “singularly ungenerous to her opponents.”^ While the book’s author identifies herself as a feminist, another law review article declared that the book’s arguments are very similar to those of “men’s rights groups and the pseudofeminists.” The review’s author fretted that the book’s author “who has a bona fide record of work with battered women, represents a potential opening to the battered women’s movement for these groups.”^ Another domestic-violence scholar asserted that Insult to Injury “reflects an inadequate understanding of feminist theories, research and policy proposals.” He warned, “her book will definitely be used and promoted by neo-conservatives, as well as members of the mainstream media.”^

The vicious scholarly battle about domestic violence mirrors failures in public communication. Since the early 1990s, false claims that domestic violence in the leading cause of injury to women in the United States have been prevalent in public discourse. In her book Framing the Victim: Domestic Violence, Media, and Social Problems, a professor-author observed:

One of my students who was taking my domestic violence class said that at the beginning of the semester he wondered how we could ever spend the whole class talking about just domestic violence. How complicated could it be? He said that he found out that there was so much more to the problem than he ever realized. I hope that this book helps others to realize how complicated social problems are and that media stories do not give us the whole picture.^

This book largely frames domestic violence through anti-men gender stereotypes and political abstractions. It illustrates the problem it describes. Taking a semester-long college course dedicated to domestic violence is not necessary to learn that domestic violence is a complicated social problem. Taking a semester-long college course isn’t necessary to learn that domestic violence policy has systematically failed to serve fully truth and caring for human hurt.

Good facts and good arguments for not viewing domestic violence through gender stereotypes have been readily available for decades. They have had little public effect. Instead, grotesquely false domestic-violence factoids supporting criminal suspicion of men have been prominent in public discussion of domestic violence. More domestic violence research and more education about domestic violence aren’t likely to solve the underlying social-communicative problem.

While vicious scholarly controversy has raged about domestic violence since the late 1970s, anyone can easily recognize that many men suffer serious injuries from domestic violence. A wide range of acts are labeled domestic violence under domestic violence law. Serious domestic violence injury here means domestic violence that physically injures a person to the extent that the victim goes to a hospital emergency department for care. According to a U.S. nationally representative, high-quality government survey, men made an estimated 230,000 U.S. emergency hospital visits for domestic violence injuries in 2008. That’s about 40% of total men’s and women’s emergency hospital visits for domestic violence injuries.

“I was writhing, crying in the corner … I couldn’t get up for two hours … she kicked me in the groin at least 12 times.”^

Regardless of their genders, persons in close relationships are vulnerable to each other. A person who destroys his life can cause intense pain to those who love him. Persons who share common assets and have common liability can destroy each other financially. Persons who are physically intimate can transmit to each other deadly diseases. A person can make a home a dangerous, hostile place for a cohabitant. Humans’ tool-using capabilities and intimates’ exposure to each other makes stereotypical sex differences in physical strength have little relevance to violent victimization among persons living together. The problem isn’t just self-hatred, accidents, imprudence, or negligence. Persons in close relationships sometimes intentionally hurt each other.

“She spit at me, pushed me, and when she couldn’t get a reaction, she hit me in the head with a cutting board. I don’t want to be hurt any more.”^

Claims that men are a minority of domestic violence victims are often used to justify domestic violence gender stereotyping. Domestic violence authorities commonly show no concern for injuries to men. They ignore scholarly controversy about domestic violence, ignore credible, publicly available data on hospital emergency department visits, and assert that many times fewer men than women are victims of domestic violence. That’s wrong. Moreover, ignoring or trivializing domestic violence against men because men are a minority among those injured is heartless and sexist.^

They {domestic violence agency} asked how much I weighed and how much she weighed and hung up on me … I was told by this agency I was full of BS.

{a domestic violence agency} told me that women don’t commit domestic violence — it must have been my fault.^

Expanding domestic violence services beyond the model of a man battering a woman faces serious obstacles among domestic violence shelters. Consider, for example, the primary provider of services to victims of domestic violence in Sacramento County, California. Like many domestic violence shelters, it opened in the 1970s to serve women. It’s called WEAVE. At its founding, WEAVE stood for Women Escaping a Violent Environment. WEAVE has admirably attempted to expand its service model to encompass mutual couple violence, domestic violence against men, and domestic violence in homosexual relationships. Doing so has required a deep rethinking of WEAVE’s values and services. The Director of Programs at WEAVE explained:

Victim services are presently intertwined with the issue of gender, but, as the complexity unravels, it is apparent that either party in a couple, either heterosexual or gay, can experience a power differential that ignites violence. The abuse is not necessarily related to gender but can be. In order to welcome and serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) victims, a philosophy other than one that is gender-based needs to evolve. The question is how to acknowledge the aspects that are related to gender and serve all victims regardless of gender in the most effective way. In the last five years we have worked to create a program that acknowledges the gender issues that arise without creating an unfair bias toward one or the other.

How to evolve from being a grass-roots, feminist-based organization to a professional, clinically sound model while honoring the best of both worlds is a challenge with which we have struggled. The internal conflict has created an opportunity to develop a new paradigm. There are strengths and drawbacks to each modality. The underlying question that must be asked is: Does serving male victims exclude feminist theory?^

Domestic violence service providers are acutely concerned to reconcile feminist theory and feminist global understanding of gender with the reality of specific, beaten men seeking their help. That’s a telling constraint.

“J tried to access the limited resources available in his area in an attempt to initiate couples counseling. Reaching out for help left J feeling further abused; he was treated with suspicion, disbelief and thinly veiled accusations that he was a ‘batterer.’ {DAHM (Domestic Abuse Hotline for Men) confirmed. The first response of the agency supervisor was, ‘Why would a man call a helpline if he were not the abuser.’}”

“She stabbed me with a knife, and I didn’t even defend myself, and after I got out of the hospital two weeks later, the court tells me to go to a group they say is for victims. It turns out to be for batterers and I am expected to admit to being an abuser and talk about what I did to deserve getting stabbed.”^

“I called eleven different numbers for battered women and got no help.”^

Prospects for men receiving equal protection from domestic violence are poor. Among persons in the U.S. ages 15 to 44 in 2010, men suffered 31% more injury-related visits to hospital emergency departments than women did. Men suffered 59% more injury-related visits from violence than did women. Nonetheless, men have been largely missing from the U.S. national injury research agenda. Injuries to men matter little in public discourse.^

Lack of concern for injuries to men is deeply entrenched in domestic violence victim services. U.S. federal funding for domestic violence services since 1994 have been provided under a law entitled the Violence Against Women Act. In Woods v. Shewry (2008), a California Court of Appeal ruled:

We find the gender-based classifications in the challenged statutes that provide programs for victims of domestic violence violate equal protection. We find male victims of domestic violence are similarly situated to female victims for purposes of the statutory programs and no compelling state interest justifies the gender classification. We reform the affected statutes by invalidating the exemption of males and extending the statutory benefits to men, whom the Legislature improperly excluded.^

Such rulings, like Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma (1948), uphold important ideals of equal protection. Unfortunately, actual social change is much more difficult. The Woods v. Shewry opinion stated:

the only evidence that some state-funded programs discriminate against men is the declaration of Dr. Susann Steinberg that 85 percent of agencies funded by DHS {California Department of Health Services} provide services to men, from which we presume the other 15 percent do not.^

The sex-disparity in domestic violence services is much greater than that superficial analysis indicates. One might laugh with Professor Black to avoid weeping.^ Domestic violence victim services historically developed with an exclusive focus on women victims. For two decades, highly exaggerated claims about domestic violence against women have been prevalent across public discourses. At the same time, the few persons who have dared to state that domestic violence against men is a serious social problem have encountered intense personal hostility. Deeply rooted, pervasive discrimination against men in agencies and programs addressing domestic violence is as obvious as the social pressure to avoid acknowledging the problem.

Men are greatly under-served as victims of domestic violence. Credible but highly contested scholarly studies indicate that domestic violence victimization is roughly equal between women and men. National representative, general-purpose U.S. surveys of hospital emergency department visits indicate that men account for about 40% of U.S. adult victims of acute domestic violence. Men suffer hundreds of thousands of incidents per year of domestic violence injures that send them to hospital emergency departments. Apart from medical care for those specific injuries, domestic violence services for victimized men are separate and far inferior to those for women.

Domestic violence shelters historically arose to serve women. Women began opening domestic violence shelters for women in the early 1970s. By 1990, about 1000 such shelters for women existed. By 2004, about 2000 domestic violence shelters were operating in the U.S. Almost no one opened a domestic violence shelter for men. The executive director of a domestic violence shelter in California from 1990 to 1998 declared that men traveled long distances to her shelter because other shelters refused to provide services to men. According to this knowledgeable person, her shelter was the only shelter in the country available to battered men.^ In 2000, the first and only U.S. helpline for men suffering from domestic abuse opened.^ It has now closed. Domestic violence services for victimized men have similarly lagged in the U.K.^ In Canada, Earl Silverman struggled for years to open a domestic violence shelter for men. Driven to despair by the dominant women-centered domestic violence interests, Earl Silverman committed suicide in 2013.

Domestic violence shelters are women-dominated. Among U.S. domestic-violence programs providing shelter services to women about the year 2008, 73% reported being willing to provide shelter services for men.^ However, the median numbers of domestic violence victims served were 16 men and 800 women across the agencies surveyed.^ The first national census of domestic violence services, conducted by an organization advocating for domestic violence services, indicated that men accounted for only about one-half of one percent of domestic violence victims receiving emergency shelter or transitional housing in 2006.^ Analysis that advocated more funding for domestic violence services wrongly claimed that a 4% share of men victims is consistent with hospital emergency department data.^ Subsequent domestic-violence service censuses stopped reporting victims served by sex. Among the 117,436 victims of domestic violence served through federal domestic violence grant programs about 2009, only 8% of the victims served were men.^ These shares of men served are far less than men’s 40% share of acute domestic violence injuries as estimated from hospital emergency department visits.

Domestic violence services are often unhelpful towards men who are victims of domestic violence. In large, nationally representative crime victimization surveys from 2001 to 2005, men domestic-violence victims reporting receiving help from non-police agencies were less than half the share of that among women domestic-violence victims. Smaller, but more specific surveys from about 2008 show that 64% of male victims calling domestic violence helplines were told that the helpline helps only women. Among men victims who sought help from a local domestic violence program, 95% reported that the program “gave impression that they were biased against men.”^

Many domestic violence shelters treat men and women differently. Domestic violence shelters provide shelter for almost exclusively women and their families, excluding men in the women’s families and the women’s teenaged boys. Men and teen-aged boys sometimes receive motel vouchers. A scholarly study of domestic violence shelters justified domestic-violence gender stereotyping and housing segregation:

Although a small percentage of shelter respondents were men, female pronouns are used for linguistic ease and because domestic violence residential services for men are most commonly provided through motel vouchers or safe homes, and not through formal “shelters”, which were the focus of this study.^

The study also explained why domestic violence shelters exclude teenaged boys:

Because adolescent boys may be physically strong, some look much like adult men, and shelters have experienced incidents where teen boys have become violent toward other residents or made them fearful, many shelters have adopted policies of not accepting teen boys into shelter. Staff usually make efforts to help the survivor find other housing for the boys affected.^

As victims of domestic violence, men receive unequal service from domestic violence shelters. As non-victims of domestic violence, teen-aged boys are excluded from domestic violence shelters because they look like men or because they are stereotyped as violent persons.

Arguments against accommodating men and teenaged boys in domestic violence shelters would also justify not hiring men and not accepting men volunteers in such shelters. Whether rigidly sex-segregated domestic violence shelters are necessary is far from clear. Nonetheless, domestic violence shelters appear to be largely de facto sex-segregated. Highly unequal domestic violence victim services for men and women is an obvious and widely ignored outcome.

Separate and unequal domestic violence victim services have roots in decades of gender stereotyping domestic violence. Public discourse has supported highly exaggerated claims about domestic violence against women. Violence against men, in contrast, has relatively little public salience. Separate and unequal domestic violence victim services reflect the unequal justice that also generates highly disproportionate imprisonment of men.