Sixteen Years - What the CPS's own case, published about a male victim called Adam, actually shows

The CPS calls him Adam. That's not his real name, but everything else in this case is exactly as they published it.

Adam was in a relationship with his wife for sixteen years. For more than seven of those years, following her dependency on alcohol, he was subjected to a sustained campaign of abuse. He described watching her whole mood change. She called him names, swore at him, and degraded him constantly. Photographic and video evidence shown in court documented injuries from repeated physical violence: kicking, punching, scratching, and biting. She used household objects as weapons against him, destroyed parts of their home, and in one instance stubbed out a cigarette on him. She also deprived him of sleep, often allowing him only two or three hours a night, and isolated him from his family, at one point taking his phone specifically to stop him contacting them.

The case didn't come to light through a report Adam made himself. A family member called the police after he told them, on the phone, about one specific attack, shortly after it happened. His wife was convicted of controlling or coercive behaviour and two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm. She was sentenced to more than two years in prison, with a ten-year restraining order attached.

Adam chose to let the CPS publish his story. The stated reason was straightforward: to give other men, and women, currently experiencing abuse the confidence to come forward.

The CPS published Adam's case as part of a new Male Victims Statement, launched on 4 December 2025. It builds on the CPS's first-ever statement on male victims, published in 2017, and was co-produced with survivors, male support organisations, and victim advocates. It covers male victims across a wide range of crimes: domestic abuse, rape, sexual offences, stalking, forced marriage, honour-based abuse, child abuse, prostitution, human trafficking with a focus on sexual exploitation, pornography, and obscenity.

Graham Ritchie, the CPS's Deputy Director of Strategy and Policy, said male victims and survivors have long suffered in silence, and that the feeling “there is no way out,” or that men and boys can't be subjected to abuse the way women are, is a conversation the CPS has had to have one too many times. He described the new statement as putting the CPS on the front foot in shifting a societal issue within prosecutions and beyond, and framed it as being about changing culture and improving trust as much as changing policy.

The response from organisations working directly with male survivors was consistent. Mark Brooks OBE, Chair of The ManKind Initiative, welcomed the statement as something that would give more men the confidence to come forward and improve the legal system's understanding of what they face. Duncan Craig OBE, Chief Executive of We Are Survivors and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse himself, spoke about visibility meaning more than simply being seen, that it means being valued, and said the CPS had involved survivors in shaping the statement in a way that felt genuinely collaborative rather than symbolic. Solicitor General Ellie Reeves MP and Victims' Commissioner designate Claire Waxman OBE both framed the statement as a step toward challenging the harmful misconceptions, including around masculinity, that stop male victims being taken seriously.

The scale involved is larger than most people assume. CPS data for the year ending June 2025 shows that of 58,052 domestic abuse-flagged charges, 9,393 were recorded against male victims, over three in every twenty. Of 5,940 rape-flagged charges, 532 involved a male victim. Ten of 88 honour-based abuse charges, and 1,744 of 8,686 child abuse charges, were recorded against male victims. Across all crime types, 85,969 of 216,961 charges last year involved a male victim.

Worth noting, because precision matters here too: the CPS's own data notes that these figures are likely understated. Victim data is only recorded where a case is handled by a Witness Care Unit using the relevant management system, and not every case goes through that route, early guilty pleas and some serious or sensitive cases often don't. The real number of male victims within these charge categories is probably higher than what's officially recorded.

This is exactly the gap I wrote about earlier this week: survey data suggests men make up a much larger share of domestic abuse victims than the charge figures alone would suggest. Adam's case, and the barriers described in the CPS's own statement, help explain part of why. With expectations placed on men in society, many survivors don't recognise their own experience as abuse. Shame, fear, and disbelief all contribute to under-reporting, and that's before a case even reaches a courtroom.

The CPS has also committed to specific changes, not just a statement of intent. Prosecutors will receive new training on the unique issues male victims face, guidance is being updated to identify specific misconceptions and assumptions prosecutors may hold, and this sits alongside the National Operating Model for adult rape cases, already being rolled out nationally, which directs prosecutors to focus on a suspect's actions rather than a victim's. The CPS says it will also strengthen its relationships with organisations like The ManKind Initiative and We Are Survivors to keep informing how this work develops.

This is why training professionals to recognise these cases matters as much as supporting the individual men living through them. It's the whole premise behind Workshop Two, which I'm running on 19 September specifically on this kind of recognition gap.

Sixteen years is a long time to wait for something to have a name. The least any of us, professionals and ordinary people alike, can do is get better at recognising it sooner.

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