What Abuse Against Men Actually Looks Like: The tools, the tactics, and why it stays invisible

When most people picture domestic abuse, they picture one thing: a man hurting a woman. Decades of campaigns, coverage, and cultural conversation have shaped that image, and for good reason. Women make up the clear majority of victims, and they face the worst of the violence. But majority is not the same as only, and the abuse men experience doesn't stop being real just because it's smaller in scale and harder to see.

That's the conversation this piece exists to have.

Abuse Is A Set Of Behaviours, Not A Gender

Abuse isn't defined by who's doing it. It's defined by what's being done. Physical violence, coercive control, emotional manipulation, financial control, isolation, sexual coercion, digital surveillance, and the weaponising of children are the same behaviours, and cause the same kind of harm, regardless of who's behind them.

According to the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 3.8 million people in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2025. Of those, 2.2 million were women and 1.5 million were men, a prevalence of 9.1% of women and 6.5% of men that year alone. Put another way, roughly one in six to seven men will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.

The disclosure numbers are just as telling. According to the ManKind Initiative, 21% of male victims in 2022/23 didn't tell anyone what was happening to them. That's a real improvement on 2017/18, when it was 49%, but it still means one in five men suffering in complete silence, often for years.

This isn't about competing for the worst statistic or ranking whose suffering matters more. Every victim, whoever they are, deserves to be seen and supported. The purpose here is simple: to raise awareness and share knowledge, so that more people recognise abuse when they see it, and more victims know they're not alone. When policy, services, and public conversation are built around only one part of the picture, the rest becomes invisible. And invisible victims don't get help.

The Tools Of Abuse

Workshops on this subject tend to start in the same place I will here: abuse rarely looks like a single dramatic incident. It's usually a pattern, built from a specific set of tools, refined over time. Recognising the tools is the first step to recognising the pattern.

●        Physical abuse. Often dismissed for male victims with some version of "he could have stopped her." Size and strength are not the point. Fear, unpredictability, and repeated harm are.

●        Emotional and psychological abuse. Sustained degradation, humiliation, and undermining, delivered privately, that slowly erodes a person's confidence and sense of reality.

●        Coercive control. A pattern of control rather than a single act, isolating someone from friends and family, monitoring their movements, dictating what they wear, who they see, and how they spend their time. It's been a specific criminal offence in England and Wales since 2015, yet it's still routinely misread as "just a difficult relationship" when the victim is a man.

●        Financial abuse. Controlling access to money, running up debt in someone else's name, or sabotaging their ability to work, all of which make leaving harder, sometimes impossible.

●        Sexual coercion. Frequently overlooked entirely for male victims, despite being a well-documented form of abuse.

●        Digital abuse and surveillance. Tracking a partner's phone, location, or social media, or controlling who they're allowed to speak to online.

●        Weaponising children. Using access to a child as leverage, or turning a child against a parent over time, a tactic that sits at the heart of parental alienation.

●        The threat of false allegations. One of the most effective tools of control precisely because it doesn't need to be carried out to work. The threat alone, "if you leave, I'll tell everyone you hit me", is often enough to keep a man silent and compliant.

The Manipulation Playbook

Beyond the broad categories of abuse, there's a specific set of psychological tactics that show up again and again in coercive relationships, techniques designed to keep a victim confused, off-balance, and unsure whether their own perception of events can be trusted.

●        Gaslighting. Repeatedly denying or twisting events the victim knows happened, until they start doubting their own memory and judgement rather than their partner's honesty.

●        DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The abuser denies what happened, attacks the person raising it, then recasts themselves as the real victim of the conversation, often in a matter of seconds.

●        Love bombing and hoovering. Overwhelming affection and attention early on, or reintroduced right after a blow-up or a serious attempt to leave, to pull the victim back in and reset the cycle.

●        Triangulation. Bringing a third party, real or invented, into the dynamic, an ex, a friend, a stranger online, to create jealousy, doubt, or a sense of competition that keeps the victim anxious and trying harder to please.

●        The silent treatment. Withdrawing communication entirely as punishment, leaving the victim to guess what they did wrong and scramble to fix it, often without ever being told.

●        Weaponised incompetence. Deliberately performing tasks badly, or refusing to learn them, so responsibility quietly shifts entirely onto the victim, framed as simply "how things are."

●        Threats of self-harm to prevent leaving. Using the threat of suicide or self-injury specifically at the moment a partner tries to leave, turning the victim's compassion into a trap.

●        Smear campaigns. Pre-emptively telling friends, family, or colleagues a distorted version of events, so that if the victim ever does speak up, they're already discredited before they start.

Why Men Don't Report It

The barriers to reporting are structural as well as personal. There are far fewer organisations set up to support male victims, and the ones that exist are often smaller, less funded, and less well known than their counterparts for women. That gap isn't an accident, it reflects decades of a public conversation that assumed male victims barely existed, so the infrastructure was never built to find or support them.

Layered on top of that is the fear of not being believed, or of being recast as the aggressor the moment abuse is reported. "How could a woman hurt you?" and "why didn't you just leave?" are questions male victims hear often enough that many decide it's simpler not to say anything at all.

The Cost Of Staying Silent

Abuse doesn't just leave bruises. According to ONS data for 2022/23, 5% of male victims of partner abuse, compared with 2.8% of female victims, said they had considered taking their own life because of it. That is not a small number, and among many contributing factors to male suicide, it deserves to be part of this conversation, not left out of it.

If you're struggling right now, please know support exists. Jonathan's House Ministries UK runs a free, confidential helpline, available 24/7: 0800 52 44 202.

Why This Matters

Recognising male victims doesn't erase or diminish anyone else's suffering. Domestic abuse isn't a competition, and treating it as one helps no one. Better policy, better services, and better public understanding all depend on seeing the whole picture, not just the parts that are easiest to look at.

I write and speak about this because I lived it, and because I've spent years since talking to other men who did too. The tools described above aren't theoretical to me. They're the shape of what I, and many of the men I've since met through this work, actually went through.

Support This Work

Leave No Man Behind is the movement I run to get books like these into the hands of men who need them, in libraries, men's sheds, waiting rooms, and support groups, often for free. It's funded entirely by people who believe this work matters.

If this piece has informed or challenged how you think about abuse, you can support that mission directly: gofund.me/18d970145

Every pound goes straight to getting the right book into the right hands, at the moment someone needs it most.