People who argue male victims of domestic violence are overlooked by police, the courts, and health services often quote a single, trusty statistic: one in three DV victims are male.

If this article brings up any issues for you, you can contact 1800 RESPECT

But what is meant by 'domestic violence' isn't always clear.

The term has historically been synonymous with men's violence against their intimate female partners. In Queensland law, for example, domestic violence originally referred only to intimate partner violence. In Tasmanian legislation, family violence refers only to partner violence. But when the advocacy group 'One in Three' claims that one in three victims of domestic violence are male, it's referring to domestic and family violence, and not only intimate partner violence. Other campaigners will often quote the 'one in three' without reference to family violence at all.

In recent years, some Men's Rights Activist groups (MRA) have become active in debates around domestic violence. While not all MRAs hold this view, some of them argue that men are victims of a conspiracy of silence around partner violence. One MRA group even advertises itself with an image of bashed man and the text 'It's amazing what my wife can do with a frying pan'.

During ABC TV's Hack Live: Is male privilege bullsh*t? in June, we took a closer look at claims about domestic violence. The founder of Men's Rights Sydney told Hack that "one in three domestic violence victims are men".

Audio Player failed to load. Try to Download directly (13.76 MB) Play Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

Supplied Image:

On the Hack Live TV show, 'anti-feminist' Daisy Cousens, supported by Adrian, quoted US statistics to argue that women and men had close to the same "lifetime victim prevalence" of violence against them in relationships.

This article is focusing on the claim that one in three victims of intimate partner violence are men. You can learn more about male victims of family violence through this Fact Check explainer, and the One in Three response.

Hack has spoken with experts in the fields of gender and domestic violence, as well as men working with male DV victims.

The picture that emerges is blurry in places; domestic violence happens out of sight and is difficult to measure with accuracy. This has allowed some MRAs to question the basis of the national effort to help the predominantly female victims of domestic violence, while also picking the data that fits the narrative of male victimisation.

Where does 'one in three' come from?

The figure comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) Personal Safety Survey (PSS), which is used extensively by domestic violence organisations. The last PSS was released in 2012 and was based on a survey group of about 17,000 men and women.

Respondents were asked questions like, have they experienced partner violence since the age of 15? Was the perpetrator a stranger? Were they male? Female?

In the 2012 PSS, about 33 per cent of people who had experienced domestic violence from a current partner in the last 12 months were men.

The ABS warns the estimate has a standard error of 25-50 per cent (meaning the real figure could be up to 50 per cent higher or lower) and "should be used with caution".

What does 'one in three' measure?

It measures violence, which the ABS defines as everything from being pushed or grabbed, to being shot or beaten with "an object that could hurt you".

That's quite a range of violence.

Dr Michael Salter, a senior lecturer in criminology at Western Sydney University, said it was important to understand domestic violence as a pattern of behaviour intended to humiliate and control the partner, and not just any act of violence within the home, or between partners.

The one in three figure doesn't account for this important distinction. It can't tell the difference between a woman's random slap and a man regularly beating his partner over several months.

"For men experiencing violence from a female partner, it's primarily self defensive or it's expressive in terms of a push or a slap," Dr Salter said.

In 2015, the NSW coroner reviewed all intimate partner homicides over the last decade and found no incidents where a woman killed a man because she was a domestic violence offender.

When women did kill their male partner, or ex-partner, it was defensive - he had a history of perpetrating violence against her.

Dr Salter said police and health services reports showed that when a woman was violent against their partner, she was typically either defending herself or her kids.

"There are forms of violence that, simply put, women don't do to men in relationships," he said.

"That includes strangulation, damage to property, the mutilation and killing of pets, and sexual violence in a domestically abusive relationship."

This was backed up by Michael Brandenburg, strategy manager at No To Violence / Men's Referral Service, the peak body for organisations and individuals working with men to end family violence in Victoria and New South Wales. He helps male victims of domestic violence.

"We probably need to get a bit better at defining what we mean by family violence in the context of power, the context of fear," he said.

"Our experience over the last 15-20 years is a lot of women's violence is linked to protecting themselves and protecting their children.

"It's not necessarily around a coercive pattern of behaviour."

Where are these male victims coming from?

Dr Michael Flood, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queensland University of Technology, with a focus on gender and masculinities, said that by focusing on the tiny proportion of violent women, the MRAs only shifted the focus away from the real threat: violent men.

The MRAs mis-diagnose the problem and therefore mis-prescribe the cure," he said.

According to the ABS, 89 per cent of males and 67 per cent of females who were victims of physical assault reported that the offender was male.

Michael Brandenburg said that, in his 25 years experience, where there was domestic violence against men, it tended to be perpetrated by other male family members.

"One of the challenges we're finding at the moment is men moving back home to live with elderly parents," he said.

"There's some violence occurring in those relationships."

Are men less likely to report being hit by a woman?

Some MRAs argue the one in three figure actually underestimates the number of male victims of domestic violence, because men are either too ashamed, too stoic, or too chivalrous to report being hit by their female partner.

Hack has heard from men who said they were too afraid to report violence by their female partner, or thought the police wouldn't take them seriously.

But apart from these anecdotal reports, there's only mixed evidence to back up this claim, with some studies showing men are more likely to report violence, and others showing they're less likely.

It's also possible many women are afraid to report domestic violence.

Dr Salter pointed out that men often testify to police about being the victims of violence, even though, like with being beaten up by a woman, this violence has been humiliating.

"Men can report degrading violence by men but somehow they're terrified to report violence by their female partner," he said.

"I don't think this is a logical argument."

Are women more likely to abuse men emotionally?

Some MRAs argue men are being emotionally abused by women and this isn't being picked up by the domestic violence stats.

According to the PSS, men are more likely to have experienced emotional abuse than violence (14 per cent had experienced emotional abuse by a partner since the age of 15, compared to 5 per cent who had experienced violence). Women are also more likely to have experienced emotional abuse than violence (about one in four compared to one in six).

Dr Salter warns against drawing an equivalence between emotional abuse and physical and sexual violence, which can be life threatening.

"We need to take emotional abuse very seriously," he said.

"But they're not interchangeable."

So are men being overlooked as victims, or not?

Last year, former Australian of the Year David Morrison warned against Australia becoming "a nation of bystanders comforted by a set of statistics". The point of challenging MRA stats isn't to diminish male victims, or encourage people to be bystanders to male suffering.

Men remain the primary victims of violence in our society.

But as the ABS statistics show, they're not being murdered by women. The violence against men is being perpetrated by men.

"Certainly there's a cohort of men who experience family violence," Michael Brandenburg said.

"In our experience a significant number of those experience violence not by intimate partners, but from other family members."

Two of the 227 recommendations of the Victorian Royal Commission related to male victims of family and domestic violence:

Government to promote the Victims Support Agency as the main source of assistance for male victims. Agency to provide online resources.

Victims Support Agency and other relevant support services should develop arrangements to ensure male victims get help.

It acknowledged men are victims too:

"The Commission concluded that, although resources should not be diverted from women and children, who constitute the majority of victims, the family violence system needs to respond more supportively to male victims of family violence."

Editor's note: This article has been updated from the version originally published.

Further information can be found here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/corrections/