writer: funding for mens' shelters not wanted

[Ironhold]

UNPOPULAR OPINION: Men's Domestic Violence Shelters Are a Misuse of Nonprofit Funding

A writer has argued that given the choice between having shelters for men who survived domestic violence and having more money for shelters for women, they'd rather the latter.

Yeah.

In the writer's eyes, there isn't enough money going to shelters to fund shelters for both genders, so men can just be out in the cold in order for women to get more resources.

Yeah.

 

[MoonlessNight]

Not really a surprise.

The most commonly used model used to combat domestic violence is the Duluth Model, which is explicitly designed to train men to be nonviolent, with women always treated as victims. For example, we see on the official site:

When women use violence in an intimate relationship, the context of that violence tends to differ from men. First, men’s use of violence against women is learned and reinforced through many social, cultural and institutional avenues, while women’s use of violence does not have the same kind of societal support. Secondly, many women who do use violence against their male partners are being battered. Their violence is primarily used to respond to and resist the controlling violence being used against them. On the societal level, women’s violence against men has a trivial effect on men compared to the devastating effect of men’s violence against women.

I.e., even if a woman does violently attack a man it can't be compared to a man attacking a woman, and the violence doesn't really bother men in any case, so it is irrelevant when considering domestic violence.

In fact if you go through that site you will never see a reference to a man being anything other than a batterer, and a woman being anything other than a victim.

 

[MoonlessNight]

And lest you think that I'm talking about an unrelated topic, compare the defense that the founders of the Duluth Model give:

The underpinnings of the Duluth curriculum do come from a historical analysis. When Europeans came to this continent, they brought religion, laws, and economic systems that institutionalized the status of women as the property of men through marriage. From the church to the state, there was not only acceptance of male supremacy, but also an expectation that husbands would maintain the family order by controlling their wives. Various indiscretions committed by wives were offenses to be punished by husbands. This system of male dominance (like any social structure where one group oppresses another) was perpetuated by: a) a belief in the primacy of men over women; b) institutional rules requiring the submission of women to men; c) the objectification of women which made violence acceptable; and d) the right of men to use violence to punish with impunity (Dobash and Dobash 1983).

The status quo of male domination remained fully intact until the early twentieth century when state legislatures began to make wife beating unlawful. However, the practice of men using violence to control women didn’t diminish. In the late 1960s,the Women’s Movement began challenging the state to intervene in domestic violence cases and women and some men began to confront the concept of male supremacy in the home. In the 1970s, the Battered Women’s Movement emerged as the voice of victims and advocates to challenge psychological theories about the causes of violence and explanations of why victims often stayed in abusive relationships.

Do all men who batter want to dominate women? This is a complicated question. Clearly, many men who batter believe that women should be submissive to men and there are others who share a variation of these sexist beliefs—“The man is the head of the household” or “You can’t have two captains of one ship.” However, there are other men who batter that don’t believe that their wives or girlfriends should be subservient because of their gender, but they still batter. These men use violence to control their partners because they can and violence works. Violence ends arguments. Violence is punishment—it sends a powerful message of disapproval.

to the discussion in the article:

Gender and its concepts and contexts are very important when talking about domestic violence. Whether the violence is perpetrated by a man, woman, genderqueer, or other non-binary person, domestic violence is always a gendered issue, and that needs to be taken into account. It is no coincidence that women are much more likely to be survivors than men. Interpersonal violence has strong roots in sexism and colonialism (see Incite's Color of Violence book for excellent discussion and illumination of these issues).

Domestic violence is one enactment of patriarchy where someone, most often a woman, is robbed of her personhood and treated like possession of her, most often male, abuser. We live in a culture where boys are advertised to by telling them a product will help them "get" girls, where objectification of women in advertising is still rampant, where black women — just by existing — are seen as simultaneously too sexual yet also sexless. When women still have to deal with so much harassment just walking down the street, it is clear that things are not equal, and domestic violence is yet another one of these problematic petals on patriarchy's gross flower.

No matter who the perpetrators or survivors are, toxic masculinity is always a part of domestic violence and I am skeptical that a shelter for men would spend time indicting the system that makes domestic violence so common (i.e. patriarchy) beyond dealing with the stigma that male survivors face.

The key for both groups is that patriarchy is always to blame for all instances of domestic violence. Thus if a man is attacked by his lover, what's really important is making sure that he realizes that it's entirely his fault that this has happened. This is literally the only value that the author of the article sees in having a shelter for men. If the shelter does anything else for a man; such as giving him a place to stay to avoid abuse or giving him legal advice, it's worth than useless for the author of the article.