The men who walk into doors

Twenty-five years ago the activists who opened Ireland's first refuge for battered women found the climate of incredulity difficult to crack: "Politicians we talked to told us flatly that domestic violence did not exist," recalls Nuala Fennell, co-founder of Women's Aid.

A quarter of a century later, there is probably a greater struggle to accept that women too can be violent. Realisation is dawning that focusing solely on male perpetrators and women victims has overlooked the reality that some husbands are abused also.

"Traditionally portrayed as a women's issue, recent evidence shows that many men are suffering silently in abuse relationships," says Mary Cleary, co-ordinator of Amen (the A is for abused). "Culturally there has been a denial of the male victim, and the invisible barriers such as conditioning, rejection, ridicule and disbelief isolate him and make it difficult for him to speak out."

Founded in 1997, Amen has logged up more than 7,000 calls and letters from men, and from their mothers, sisters and children who have seen son, brother or father suffer at the hands of an aggressive female. Female violence undoubtedly exists. In a mid-1990s British MORI poll, 18 per cent of males reported abuse by their female partners, compared to 11 per cent of women who claimed abuse. British crime survey figures released by the Home Office in 1999 recorded 4.2 per cent of both men and women reporting physical assault from an intimate heterosexual partner.

Amen has recently conducted research into the nature of domestic violence as experienced by men in Co Monaghan. Their findings regarding its effect on health, work, self-esteem, damage to children, lack of support from social services and poor legal remedies are all too reminiscent of women's parallel experience. Some 70 per cent of men said they stayed for the sake of the children.

The full results of the survey will be given at Amen's second national conference in Co Meath this Thursday, entitled "It's Also a Crime to Beat A Man,". picking up on the Women's Aid campaign slogan "It's a crime to beat a woman" - "that slogan is unfinished, and almost implies that anyone else other than a woman can be beaten," says Mary Cleary, adding that Amen works well with Women's Aid and they refer clients to each other.

Female violence can still be difficult to get one's head around. We know, for example, that female bullying at school tends to be more emotionally snide than physically coercive. Women are not visibly violent. They don't often get into fights in pubs or become football hooligans, they don't follow strange men home to assault or rape them, are rarely involved in organised crime, are almost never serial killers. Women do participate in abductions, torture and murder, but typically as female accomplices such as Rosemary West and Myra Hindley. Women can be violent in killing abusive husbands or partners, but equally they often turn suppressed rage on themselves in self-mutilation, depression or eating disorders. So have we misread women, motherhood and apple pie? Is it time to rewrite the manuals of sexual politics? Are women not the carers after all?

"To encounter female abuse has not been in my clinical experience," says psychologist Marie Murray, "so this is new information, but I would have an openness to it. The fact that women can be abusive is anathema to our vision of gentle, nurturing motherhood and the idealisation of mother and child imagery," she continues. "However, to exclude it as a possibility from our minds, from research, from clinical and social concerns is a grave injustice to men."

Tracing the roots of adult aggression, she says that children who experience harsh, punitive and cruel discipline frequently go on to re-enact this behaviour in adulthood. But while male abuse has been widely researched, much less attention has been paid to the violent legacy carried by women: "It would be naive to think that women's negative childhood experiences emerge only in their relationships with children and not also in their relationship with spouses," she says, quoting from a study which shows that men who grew up with very violent parents were 10 times more likely to beat their wives than men raised in non-violent homes, while women raised by violent parents were six times more likely to beat their husbands.

"The causes of violence include personality factors such as perfectionism, obsessional behaviour, paranoid feelings of jealousy and inadequacy which often arouse dangerous suspicions about a partner's activities," she says. "At the helm of much marital violence are sexual problems. For women this can induce feelings of shame, rejection and anger."

One of the more interesting speakers at this year's conference is Erin Pizzey, who founded the world's first refuge for abused women in Chiswick, London in 1971, and is known internationally for her work with abused women. Has she experienced a Damascus conversion on the battle of the sexes? Not at all, it seems.

"I know personally about female violence. My mother was extremely violent, particularly to me, so when I opened the refuge in Chiswick, I wasn't surprised to meet female violence," she says. "We did a study on the first 100 women in Chiswick and 62 of these were as violent as the men they had left. The study was anathema to the women's movement, which wanted to portray women as innocent battered victims of a patriarchal society.

"One of my quarrels with the movement is that it has not insisted that women, too, should be responsible for their behaviour. The tragedy is that domestic violence was not addressed across the board. Anyone running a women's refuge is well aware that women can be violent too; it is an open secret. Violent-prone women are victims, victims of their own violent background, and that is what they need help to overcome.

"Violence is something we learn as children. It is a learned pattern of behaviour, which is why I disagree with people who talk about poverty and social conditions creating violence. We lived in a big house, we had servants, my parents were in the diplomatic service and waged their domestic wars across the world. I was in a boarding school and learned again at first hand how violent girls in a Catholic convent can be. A woman's size is no deterrent. My mother was four-foot-nine and quite lethal. At the age of two she was given away by her parents and never recovered from the damage."

Pizzey believes that a proportion of women who return to violent men again and again are violence-prone themselves, while women reared in less abusive homes are more likely to leave a bad marriage for a new life.

One of the problems for society in facing up to female violence is that a man is usually physically stronger than his partner, could retaliate and cause real damage: "Men can be physically stronger but may have no ability to hit a woman," says Pizzey. "Non-violent people are non-violent. Non-violent men, too, are shaken and frightened by violence. They may have the physical ability to strike back, but a man raised in a warm and loving home has no emotional ability to be violent."

"The other big problem for men is that to admit they are beaten is greeted with hilarity," she adds. The Amen files are indeed full of evidence of disbelieving gardai, judges, GPs, social workers, and relatives all wondering how a 14-stone male could be terrorised by an eight-stone woman.

Mary Cleary confirms that men face an uphill battle. In theory the law is there to protect them also, allowing them to proffer charges, or apply for a safety, barring or protection order. In practice, men still tend to be disbelieved: "one of the most common question is `what did you do to provoke her?' " says Mary Cleary. Often a wife is successful in taking out the barring order against her husband even though she, not he, is the abuser.

However, the climate of acceptance is changing in the courts, garda and professions. Thursday's conference is being opened by Mary Wallace, Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Funds have been allocated in this year's Budget for research into male victims of domestic violence, and this has begun.

"We need to look at how we create conditions in which people are safe and where all voices are heard, not just the voices of some," says Marie Murray. "Men are entitled to be recognised, understood, validated and supported if they are being bullied at home. It is a crime for men and women to hit each other. The problem is one for men and women to solve together.

"It is said that the family has two faces," she adds. "It may be a sanctuary and a place of love, security and validation. But the family may also be a source of enormous stress because it is such a common context for violence in society," she points out. "Domestic violence is not a gender issue, it is a social issue affecting men, women and children."

Amen conference on male victims of domestic abuse is at the Ardboyne Hotel, Navan, Co Meath, on Thursday. Amen helpline: 046-23718.