Male Abuse Survivors

Back in September, as this issue of the magazine was starting to come together, I laid out all the wonderful, incisive stories the authors had generously contributed and got to reading. This is always an exciting stage of the editorial process for me; it’s a little like watching a relay race, as each article plays off the previous one, adding something familiar, but also new, to the conversational tapestry.

By the time I’d finished, I felt the way I usually do after going through an issue. I was moved, informed, and enlightened. But this time, for some reason, I also felt a little uneasy. Soon, I realized why: in the majority of case examples illustrating the impact of emotional abuse and coercive control, the perpetrators were men and the survivors women.

I’ll be honest: as a man, a large part of me wanted to shout, “Hey, we’re not all garbage! Plenty—dare I say most—of us are good partners, good fathers, and good people!” But in each of these pieces, I realized, was an undeniable truth: coercive control is about leveraging power. And in our patriarchal society, men hold power by default—and often wield it selfishly, recklessly, and aggressively. Even if the common narrative in this issue doesn’t give a full picture, it’s common for a reason, and all men have a responsibility to help turn the tide.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that only men have the capacity to be emotionally abusive. It’s well known that therapy is a tough sell for guys (70 percent of clients are female), and even those who do make it into a therapist’s office tend to downplay their suffering (thanks again, patriarchy). So I couldn’t help but feel like we may not be hearing about an equally important segment of emotional abuse survivors: men, including men of color, gay men, and transgender men.

How prevalent is emotional abuse for men? I wondered. What does it look like when a woman is the aggressor? And how can therapists help?

Suffering in Silence

Denise Hines doesn’t mince words when it comes to male survivors of abuse. “Across the board, they have a terrible time trying to get help,” she tells me just minutes into our interview. An associate professor at George Mason University’s Department of Social Work, Hines has spent over two decades studying family violence and sexual assault prevention, as well as intimate partner violence. And she says that, contrary to popular belief, men and women suffer emotional abuse at nearly the same rate.

“Surveys show that coercive control is pretty evenly distributed regardless of gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” she says. “It’s not really defined by the male perpetrator/female victim dynamic. That’s certainly one of the ways it manifests, but it’s not the only way.”

Hines points to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, last released in 2017, which polled roughly 15,000 women and 12,500 men about their experiences with IPV. The study found that roughly half of women and men surveyed had experienced psychological aggression from an intimate partner, including expressive aggression, coercive control, and entrapment. Between 20 and 25 percent of these men and women said a partner had monitored their whereabouts, demanded to know where they were and what they were doing, or destroyed something important to them.

But the problem for men is likely worse than we know. Hines adds that although abuse is underreported in general, men tend to report less, and polling questions are often worded in a way that discourages men from answering honestly. “You have to be careful how you ask questions so men aren’t perceiving themselves as victims,” she says. “If you use certain terminology, like violence, abuse, victim, or survivor, you get very low response rates. If you ask, ‘Has your wife ever monitored your time and whereabouts?’ they might say yes, but they won’t say, ‘My wife coercively controlled me.’ They might say, ‘My wife punched me,’ but they won’t say, ‘She’s violent against me.’”

Studies show emotional abuse is equally pervasive among Black, gay, and transgender men. According to a 2021 study of IPV among LGBTQ+ college students, published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, nearly 40 percent have experienced IPV, particularly verbal abuse. And according to an earlier edition of the aforementioned CDC survey, 56 percent of Black men have experienced psychological aggression from an intimate partner.

But these populations have unique challenges getting help, says Hines. “Black men face the perception that they’re criminals, so people tend not to believe them when they say their female partner is abusing them,” she explains. “And because people mistakenly believe that abuse is something men do to women, or that there are no power dynamics in same-sex relationships, it’s often miscategorized, even by the people in those relationships. I’ve heard them call the abuse mental illness, or say, ‘Well, that’s just how gay relationships are. Maybe they didn’t have healthy same-sex relationships modeled for them, but it’s really sad to think someone could feel that way, especially when the LGBTQ+ community has already experienced so much trauma and abuse just by virtue of who they are.”

A Different Kind of Abuse

Much of the emotional abuse directed at men looks the same as that directed at women—gaslighting, stonewalling, stalking, monitoring, name-calling, yelling—but to get a better sense of how it might also be different, I reached out to therapist Amelia Kelley.

“I’m thrilled we’re having this conversation,” Kelley says. As a trauma specialist who’s spent over 20 years working with abuse survivors—women and men—she says she’s often the one in media interviews to bring up the fact that men are also victims of abuse. “If we don’t talk about men as well,” she adds, “we’re not going to solve the problem.”

Most tools of abuse transcend gender, Kelley says. But there’s a unique element in emotional abuse directed at men, she adds, both in hetero- and homosexual relationships. Because men are often held to hypermasculine standards, a common form of abuse involves having their masculinity belittled or challenged.

“Abusers will often use toxic societal expectations to manipulate their male partners into feeling less-than,” she says, “especially if they don’t fit stereotypical roles, like ‘protector’ or ‘provider,’ that have historically put pressure on them.” The resulting effect is a blow to their self-esteem and confidence, and the shame this causes exacerbates their reluctance to seek help.

Other times, Denise Hines adds, abusers will control their male partners by threatening to injure themselves to lend credibility to the story that they are the victim. She says it’s a common complaint among the male survivors she works with. “Their partners will say things like, if you try to leave or do X or Y, I’ll call the police and tell them you’re abusing me.” False accusations of domestic violence are something female abusers use to keep male survivors in line, she says, because they know the man is likelier to be considered the guilty party.

Even therapists aren’t above making these false assumptions, Kelley and Hines say, particularly when it comes to gay male relationships. “We tend to detect danger pretty quickly when a woman is being abused,” Kelley says. “But when abuse is happening in a same-sex relationship, we’re less likely to intervene because there’s this misconception that the couple is more equitable. There’s a misconception about who holds power, this sense that men should be able to defend themselves against other men, and women against other women.”

Getting to Work

So what does the work look like with male survivors of abuse? In her own practice, Kelley says the first step is identifying that abuse is occurring. “For clients, it’s a huge aha moment to even come to awareness of that and begin to work through the shame.” But getting to this point requires understanding that the client might not be ready to name what they’re experiencing as abuse, not just because some men feel it challenges their masculinity, but because the words themselves can be triggering.

For instance, Kelley says some of the rape survivors she works with have a hard time using the word rape, since it carries so much association. “If my client isn’t ready to name it, I might ask, ‘Well, what would you consider to be abusive behavior?’ or, ‘What would be an indication to you that someone is being abused? What are some red flags?’ Or I can do some psychoeducation around adjacent terms.”

Hines agrees that naming abuse can be a delicate process. “I’m careful with male clients about labeling it for them,” she explains. “I want to help them come to that understanding on their own, because they need to realize that they don’t deserve to be on the receiving end of this behavior.”

Working with shame is another big part of male survivors’ healing process, says Kelley. One of her clients, for example, came to treatment convinced that he had a sex addiction because he wanted to kiss his wife but was constantly rebuffed. “He had incredible shame and issues of self-worth,” Kelley says. “But when I did the assessment for sex addiction, he didn’t meet a single aspect of the criteria.” Instead, Kelley learned—and helped him realize—that he’d been emotionally and physically cut off. “It’s another tricky way that men can be emotionally abused,” she says. “Of course, we need to consider the importance of consent, but there are also harmful ways of withholding affection that can be debilitating.”

Perhaps the biggest impact a therapist can make, Kelley says, is simply holding space for male survivors, especially if the therapist is a woman. “For male survivors who’ve been abused by a female perpetrator, it’s a corrective experience,” she explains. “For me, as a woman, to witness them without judging or belittling them for what happened? That’s huge.”

Turning the Ship Around

Clearly, the problem of male emotional abuse is pervasive enough to warrant our attention. But how do we even begin to turn the corner on a silent epidemic that’s girded by cultural stereotypes operating on a broad, systemic, and even global scale? For clinician, researcher, and professor Andreia Machado, it’ll take a radical rethinking of how we support men.

Machado has spent nearly 15 years studying barriers to support for male and female abuse survivors, and has conducted numerous meta-analyses on services for male survivors all over the world. What she found was sobering: across the board, men said that when they’d sought help, again and again, they were ignored or invalidated. And when they finally did get help, sometimes years later, it was painfully lacking.

“Globally, about a third of men are currently experiencing psychological aggression in their lives,” she says. “We’re dealing with an urgent phenomenon right now, and most people aren’t paying attention. We don’t realize that anybody can be a victim. Most services still focus on women, and when abused men look for help, they struggle with a system that wasn’t built for them. Services need to be gender-inclusive, gender-specific, and gender-sensitive. Right now, we’re failing men.”

Machado has seen this poor support infrastructure firsthand. She works at a handful of domestic abuse shelters in Portugal, where she lives most of the year, including at the country’s only shelter for men (there are 14 for women). She tells me that one of her male clients went to the police seven times before he was allowed to press charges. Again and again, he was dismissed. “You’re not a victim,” the officers told him. “You’re a man.” Entrenched cultural beliefs like these, Machado says, not only keep other survivors quiet, but contribute to secondary victimization.

These problems are deeply rooted and will take years to remedy, Hines, Kelley, and Machado say, but they also believe therapists can play a valuable role in finding a solution. Reports show that male survivors count therapists among their greatest advocates. “They’re the resource I most often recommend,” Hines says, “because they’re among those most likely to believe and validate a survivor’s experience. That’s what these men really want and need.”

I felt some trepidation when I first started asking about male abuse survivors. Despite my suspicions that they aren’t as rare as we’re made to believe, I wondered whether I’d find anything substantial to report on, even after talking to these experts. But by the end of each conversation, I felt a little more heartened and a little more hopeful. It turns out there are smart, capable, caring folks who’ve long recognized this problem, and are working tirelessly to help turn the ship around.