Now is a time to act.

Oncefa2 · 2022-06-06T13:36:34+00:00

I've been sharing variations of this comment around Reddit when it seems applicable. Just trying to raise awareness and let people know what resources are out there available to them.

Friendly reminder that half of all domestic violence victims are men, and they are rarely taken seriously.

Most men are not celebrities and most men do not have the money and fame to fight this the way Johnny Depp has.

False allegations affect 1 in 10 people, including 1 in 7 men.

False allegations are a form of domestic violence known as administrative abuse: courts in Nebraska and Delaware have formally established a legal precedent for victims to pursue their abusers in criminal court.

As many as 1 in 3 men who are victims of domestic and sexual violence remain silent because of overt threats that their abuser will simply say that he raped or hit her.

One victim recounted this:

‘She said “what are you gonna do? I’ll start screaming rape and you’re up in court tomorrow, do you think they’ll believe anything you’ve got to say?’’'

This is eerily similar to what Amber Heard did, and almost got away with.

False allegations don't leave bruises but they do ruin lives and lead to suicide. They are also intimately related to the wider problem of domestic violence, and progress towards gender equality.

If you are a male victim of domestic violence or false allegations, there are resources at r/SupportForTheAccused, the left wing men's wiki, r/mensupportmen, and this sub's sidebar.

TheLWMA · 2022-06-06T03:54:32+00:00

The Prim Reaper made two excellent videos about male victims of domestic violence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zvO6AWBkt4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6NFk_LtN7k

rochesterslim · 2022-06-06T04:27:47+00:00

well yes and no. time to act. but OFF THIS SUB. This has 11k members and it’s preaching to choir to share on here only. Got to go public.

DistrictAccurate · 2022-06-06T13:47:22+00:00

I believe people might want to keep their expectations at bay.

Whilst there is no doubt that public cases can generate a lot of opportunities for talk, that is not magic.

Unfortunately, biases persist on avg. even when people observe violence against men or their suffering. Look at bystander behaviors in videos, look at the thousands of reactions to those videos posted online, look at the way (if at all) articles talk about it, look at the legal consequences, look at how it is dealt with throughout modern media, ... you name it.

It is not like people would act in an egalitarian manner if only they saw what is happening. One of the most pressing issues might be how they commonly react when they do.

If we agree that the perception of seriousness and severity are biased, then people reacting equally toward what they perceive to be equally serious incidents would still be biased. Same goes for external vs. internal attributions, for example. If the attributions of guilt, responsibility and causality are biased, then treating as equal what is perceived to be equal would be biased.

Even if there were barely any biases present: If we agree that there will still be some differentials in avg. bystander and perpetrator behaviors - like laughing - and we then agree that even a single person who seems sufficiently associated with two fighting individuals can shift other bystander's evaluations toward "play fight" or a lower assigned severity, which in turn leads to behaviors that reinforce each other(†), then even such slight differential - a difference in a single person - may result in vast differentials of behavior in practice.

† Maybe it would suffice to make others react less distressed than expected. However, now it is not only one person laughing but also the fact that others do not act as distressed as would be expected in case of an emergency. Both explicit reasoning ("Maybe they know more than I do and that's why they don't intervene", "maybe he was the agressor and others unfortunately accept if not encourage self-justice and retribution" etc.) and subconscious processes in perception, evaluation, emotion and so on may be at play here. As the mood shifts from serious to jokey, maybe some bystanders start to act accordingly and laugh or joke about it. If that was the case, others are now again not only affected by the prior observations, but also by the behavior and overall expression of those who were pushed over their personal threshold for a change in behavior or expression as well. There are countless opportunities for chain reactions from explicit reasoning to (perhaps most commonly) subconscious processes that are not associated with such explicit reasoning at all. In fact, if one would then evalute the option of intervening, one may now expect a whole group of people to oppose that. Of course, all of this is mainly for purposes of getting the point across and not nearly as complex as reality should be.

And don't forget how this affects the story told afterward. Suppose the victim got hurt. Would it be the traumatized victim of a life-threatening assault one may have talked about had they witnessed widespread distress and maybe even an arrest in response to calls for police (that is, depending on how long the perpetrators stay around, given that assaults - which are euphemistically called fights if the victim is male and dares to try to survive or if victim and perpetrator are female - usually end extremely fast). Or would it be the one who attacked someone and "bit off more than he could chew"? The one who got accidentally hurt in a play-fight? And if it would be called assault, what about evaluations of severity? Would there be the same emotional investment and empathy?

You see, even if we dismissed all the biases that would directly affect this individual's perception as well as how such events are recounted and talked about regardless of how it was perceived when it happened (which, in reality, would almost certainly also be subject to those biases, though), many of these biases may - to some degree - persist indirectly even if they weren't present in almost all individuals, which would be an implausible premise to begin with.

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