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I guess, abused men will be able to take themselves and their children to a shelter when enough men get busy and organize shelters for this purpose. The impetus for women to organize and get shelters arranged came from the critical need of getting themselves and their children to a safe place, a place where they could reorganize and rebuild their lives……. The work that women have done in looking at the patterns of codependency and the cycle of abuse has been ground breaking over the past decades. It is wonderful that you and other men are doing this work now too.
Yes, men need to get busy organizing shelters for abused men and their children – nobody else can do it for us. And there are probably lots of insights that can be learned from studying women’s shelters.
Besides volunteer work, it’s also important that government grants are divided fairly between women’s and men’s shelters. However, at this point I’d be happy if governments starting recognizing that battered men even exist, and starting giving any kind of funding to this issue. Once this phenomenon is on the political agenda, then you can no longer ignore the problem.
I agree that the psychological research about codependency and cycles of abuse likely applies to battered men too, and that male shelters can apply those insights.
According to radical feministic theory battered men dont exist. (men beat women to sustain their power; ergo women dont have power so they dont beat men.). So what we need for battered men to be recognised as victims for spousal abuse is a separation between gouvernment and feminism; a better understanding from society that feminism does not represent: 1. equality and 2. women, but just one (gynocentric) perspective out of many.
The gouvernment need a bigger and more objective perspective on equality than what feminism can provide. Once that is achieved, all laws, grants and gouvernmental actions must be genderneutral and “tried for the individual need”. (Sorry dont know the english term; behovsprövat).
And that is all that is needed for male suffering to be as cared for by the state as female suffering.
Yes, ideology needs to be replaced by facts.
Given the available research, or even the biased statistics that are much better known by politicians, it is unacceptable to have no funding for male shelters.
It is very easy to be swayed by one’s own experience and beliefs when discussing gender issues, so it’s crucial that we allow the available research to guide our decisions.
Once this phenomenon is on the political agenda, then you can no longer ignore the problem.
Women’s advocates know this and it scare the hell out of them. They don’t want abused men to get help because acknowledging that men can be victims of abuse is a small bit of proof that men are not as all powerful as they claim and women are not as weak as they claim.
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