We don’t hear the words ‘systemic discrimination’ applied to men, but when it comes to the one-sided collection of sexual and domestic violence statistics, I struggle to find a better word to describe it. Did you know domestic abuse data is heavily based on police reporting statistics – so those who don’t report their abuse (which is often men) fall through the cracks of data collection? Did you know that sexual violence data frequently skips over the hundreds of thousands of men who are sexually assaulted in the prison system? Perhaps more shocking – did you know that highly gendered legal definitions of ‘rape’ exclude men raped by women? Yes, in the eyes of the law it’s impossible for a woman to rape a man, meaning these men are classified into other categories, and often forgotten. These are just some of the ways that men go missing from the numbers. If you point to these missing men, or highlight how so many are erased from the records, you will naturally draw cries of misogyny and other such silliness, and I guess that makes the point crystal clear. We don’t care about these men. We don’t want to talk about them, we don’t want to hear about them, we don’t want to see the numbers or listen to the stories. We are comfortable now with our ‘9 in 10’ and ‘vast majority of victims are women’ statistics, until we realise what’s missing. Until we are shown the uncomfortable gaps in how we measure, record, report or categorise our data. For you can’t count what you don’t see, and all too often, what you can’t see – are men. ~ Sources Mankind, Reporting Abuse  Domestic Homicide Domestic Abuse Related Suicide FBI 40% missing Vox When Men are Raped, Slate N+1 Prof Lara Stemple, Prison Sexual Assault Images by Steward Mclean, Caseen Kyle Registos, Kenrick Mills from Unsplash. #domesticviolence

2022-11-28