To ask what about victims of male on male violence

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Many men are victims of violence by other men. The majority of men are murdered by other men, very often their friends or acquaintances. So, if that isn't being talked about enough, I created a thread right here, for that specific issue.

I have helped run a women's centre for almost 40 years. In that time we have discussed male needs, a male service, but have never had any local interest from LA or mens groups

About 7 or 8 years ago mainstream funding criteria changed and, despite our charitable status being single sex and female, we had an added imperative, we MUST support male victims in some meaningful manner. Not just us, this seems to be sector wise.

So we had to set up a male centre. Set it up, staff it, network it, get it funded and look for a male committee to run it - we don't think men should be forced to a mixed sex environment either, though we do have ongoing services that are mixed sex, as well as single sex groups, all are well used.

Anyway... It took us years to staff it and even longer to find men to run it. Even now, about 8 or 9 years on we still do the boring admin (like funding) because no man has stepped up.

Is the male service well used ? Not for DV, no. So, in order for it to survive and for us not to potentially lose funding for our far too busy female centre, it is now loosely incorporated with other male services, networked with the Men's Shed etc. It's a very, very different service and is wholly designed, protected, supported by women - not always with good grace as it is not a voluntary arrangement.

So you may not get the response you expect from women on a mainly female forum.

@ntmdino But you wouldn't actually know if any of the women in your friendship group had been attacked would you? They would be unlikely to share stories about that - even if it had ended in hospitalisation. That's not to derail the thread - but you are the one who started trying to compare. I have been on much more threads about male on female violence and there is usually several male posters trying to derail by talking about male-on-male violence. Now there is a thread about male on male violence and you are here trying to derail it by talking about how male on female violence isn't a problem. Its one thing not to have any constructive suggestions, or even to argue that there is nothing "we" can do as others have. But it seems like you just really really don't like any discussion at all ever.

This is very telling.

Yes - I don't think direct comparisons work very well. There is an idea that to be "fair" mirror images of female services should be set up for men. But male victims of violence aren't "mirror images" of female victims. They are much more likely to be victims of friends or strangers than their partners for a start.

I don't think I was expecting any particular responses really. I wanted space to think about it/discuss it that wasn't on any of the feminism boards or threads about male-on-female victims.

What exactly are women supposed to do about male on male violence?

Yes. Perfectly aware. We did a lot of research, spoke to a lot of male centres and didn't assume that what worked for women would be in any way suitable for men at all.

The original set up was based on other male centres, with some of their wish list services included. We knew when it opened that it would have a very different life, need very different counselling skills and medical networks.

Even with all of that support and expertise to guide us, help finance it, it does not really do what the funding for our female centre requires and, in every funding round, it takes fucking ages to explain the same issues over and over again. No matter what new thing we try, who we link up with, it remains a generic mens health hub.

We don't want to do it. We are forced to do it. We cannot afford to lose funding again.

@SamphiretheTervosaurReturneth I didn't mean you didn't know.
I meant that the pressure from higher up was motivated by a need to create a mirror image that didn't actually match with needs on the grounds. And I do think its motivated by some of the "what-about-men"ing pressure that doesn't actually come from men who care about male victims particularly, or who have much practical experience. It becomes a wild (end expensive) goose chase.

r. And even men feel safer walking through an area where there are women around than an area where its just groups of men hanging around

yet another example of men using women as shields to protect them against men

I'm not derailing anything - I was simply talking about my lived experience, in answer to a question about it. Funnily enough, discussions about this have come up in each of the instances I talked about, because we're friends and we show up when one of us has gone through something traumatic.

I'm not comparing, merely supporting my point that men do take precautions to avoid conflict, when so many commenters here are asserting that men don't because they don't need to.

I haven't once said that male on female violence isn't a problem. I'm actually starting to wonder about your reading comprehension at this point, because your response here bears almost no relation to anything I've actually said.

Your story's depressing, @SamphiretheTervosaurReturneth! Maybe not that surprising - though I am surprised (perhaps I shouldn't be) to hear women's centres are coerced into setting up and running men's centres. That's "What About The Menz" written very large indeed.

Wrt to the general issue of men's seeming nonchalance about violence, I sometimes wonder if it's a bit like the disinterest faced by early feminism? I remember the resistance against consciousness raising. Most women, and nearly all men, just felt things are the way they are - it was difficult to see the point in picking over a woman's life to highlight the pain spots. And there were so many! Groups rang to the sound of "Oh, my god! You too?!"

That was, of course, the point. Women were able to name the hundred ways their lives were crappy and, more importantly, to see this was actually normal. They started to wonder why they were all putting up with it. Eventually it led to changes being called for and, bit by bit, achieved. It's not a quick process: this was 60+ years ago and it's still ongoing.

Men don't really do this. You could write essays on why not (summary: patriarchy) but they do boil down to things are the way they are. Consciousness-raising initiatives exist. They're currently small, sparse and targeted to abusers. I think some of their teachings leak out, as feminist ones did, and there is hope of the improved awareness that leads, eventually, to change.

Should women be helping with this? In a general sense, I'd say so, if only because we now have the skills to identify pain spots and examine solutions. And also, quite obviously, because a safer society makes women's lives easier.

I'd like to think that there are threads on male forums discussing violence against women. If not, why not? That would be the start of solving something. If women are powerless to stop violence against themselves, what are they going to do about male on male violence.

You're barking up the wrong tree, OP.

Because women are well-placed to query social constructs of masculinity.

You referenced the fact that several of your male friends had been hospitalised and that Only one of the women I know has, through domestic violence.

Usually when men are attacked by strangers on the street they are beaten up. When women are attacked they are often (not always) sexually assaulted. This isn't a tiny thing that happens to a few women. Many women have been raped and sometimes it leads to hospitalisation. Sometimes it just leads to severe trauma. Lots and lots more women than that are sexually assaulted in smaller ways. There is absolutely no way out of your friendship group of 60 women none of them have had negative experiences of this. Absolutely no way whatsoever. It is also really unlikely that they would tell you if they had. That is my point. You described it as your "lived experience".

Did you necessarily know the woman was in a bad relationship before she was hospitalised for example? Because she would have been a victim of violence multiple times at that point and you wouldn't have known.

But sorry if I misunderstood your intentions. What do you think would reduce male-on-male aggression?

To be fair, if you look at sites like piston heads etc, there are threads on bad news stories about e.g. domestic violence murders etc. There will be people going "shocking" etc and also a few men saying "what about the men." But interestingly, I think that derailing happens less on male dominated spaces than in female spaces. I think some men are more comfortable with other men discussing male violence than women. It makes them less defensive. Even if what is being said is a lot harsher. Or possibly its because the conversation is more specific than about patterns of behaviour so its less threatening.

Awful isn't it. Men are so violent

@ntmdino The friends of yours who were attacked on a night out/walking home alone were arguably more at risk of that happening because they were more likely to be walking home alone late at night by themselves whereas women would be less likely to do that. (Not denying your point about men taking precautions. But women do too and more.) I don't want men or women to be in a position of having their freedoms restricted as a solution to violent people though. So I hesitate to say that the fix is "don't walk home alone" at night. I suppose restricting alcohol consumption would reduce the number of drunk, violent men but I don't think that would be fair on the people that aren't violent.

Nice attempt to condescend. You're trying it on with the wrong person.

For years a few feminist friends and i have spent IWD tweeting about women's issues, including of course stats on Male VAWG. And every year we were inundated with "what about da menz" "well, WE don't get a day" "nobody does anything for men's day" etc etc

Except that we had already been tweeting on 19th November about men's issues. Mostly men's mental health issues, general health issues, signposting where to get help, and so on and so on. Lots of retweets by women. Not so much from men. And the usual "meh, nobody did anything for us".

So we started bookmarking the IWD complainers and a few days before International Men's Day we copied them into tweets about our activities, asked them what they wanted us to focus on etc etc. Crickets. Nothing.

What they wanted of course was to whine and moan about IWD but do nothing at all for men's day. Indeed they wanted US to organise things for them

So lately i do a couple of posts about CALM, Andy's Men's Shed and getting your prostrate checked and leave it at that. They don't want to help themselves. They don't even want us to help them help themselves. They want us to fix everything while taking no action themselves.

So again: i will centre women and children and men? they can start shifting their bleedin' arses, and only then might i sign something and retweet things.

i would like you to go on a male forum and word that about women. And see what happens.

Four of the guys have had hospital stays through being attacked, three on nights out and one walking home from work in the dark

did anyone - including the police - at any point when they heard about this make the slightest intimation that it may not have been wise walking alone at night? Which is a ROUTINE comment for women who get attacked.

@Brefugee and did anyone at any queasiness what they were wearing?

@Brefugee *question-not queasiness

So sad the "Not my problem" mentality on here. If you love your sons, dad or any other man in your life it fucking should be. Why is there so little talk about men being attacked whilst on a night out.? Where's the Sarah Everard level of disgust when a young black boy is found stabbed to death? I think both men and women need to make some noise on the issue because frankly few people seem to give a shit about protecting men

Hun were busy protecting the women from your husbands, sons, dads, uncles.

No fucking way will I put men’s safety above women’s.

Not a friendship group of 60 women. I said it was "60-40", implying percentages. The extended group is probably closer to 25-35 people depending on other halves, marriage etc, but slightly more women than men. Does that make more sense?

The woman in question was beaten exactly once, at which point she went to the police and ended the relationship immediately. There were extensive and brutally honest conversations between all of us, and I trust when the women said they hadn't been victims of abuse. One of them even confessed that she thought she "might" have been abusive to one of her exes in her younger days (not that I expect you to believe that, since you don't seem to want to believe much else that doesn't fit your world view).

Note that I'm not trying to extrapolate those proportions to the rest of the population (although they do very-roughly stack up with the statistical proportions), given that it's hardly a statistically-significant sample size. All I'm giving are actual facts based on the people I know, what I've been directly told and my own experience. I leave it to everybody else to insert fabrications and suppositions.

For what it's worth, in case you're drawing a conclusion here, I'm a woman in a same-sex relationship; the only horse I have in this race is that I care about a number of men and boys, I abhor violence and I really wish society could find a way to move forward without blaming the blameless.

As for what would help reduce male-on-male violence...I don't know, but I do know two things:

1 - Men mostly don't respond to the same approaches to support that works for women. If they did, there would be more take up for men's support groups (as noted by @Brefugee ).

2 - It will likely be a fix on generational timescales; this is entirely gut feeling, but from what I've gathered and been told...the people who are violent rarely change, and usually had a shitty upbringing where violence was commonplace and accepted; that's not me trying to excuse it - simply that it seems like there's a correlation, and the results are deeply-rooted enough.

3 - As I said, excluding women from the conversation by saying "Not women's problem" won't help, because both men and women can have useful and valid things to add to the process. This is society's problem, regardless of who's to blame, so - as with most things on such a scale - society needs to change to solve it.

Actually, yes, repeatedly. "What did you do to avoid it? Why on earth were you there? What did you do to provoke them?" etc.

Is there any explanation as to what prompts male on male violence as opposed to male against female violence?
Not excusing it and having worked with women in a shelter environment, is it perception of threat, is it power, need to exert dominance, inadequacy?
Not as said an excuse but why?