Summary: We feature highlights from the Intimate Partner Abuse of Men Workshop held on Wednesday 16 June 2010 in Perth, Western Australia. The workshop was aimed at service providers plus anyone who works with victims and perpetrators of family and domestic violence, and considered the implications for service providers of the Edith Cowan University Intimate Partner Abuse of Men research. In this, the third part of the workshop, Dr Greg Dear presents the results of the survey. Listen now (MP3) Dr Greg Dear: We surveyed - we aimed for 200 participants, services providers from across Australia, primarily in Western Australia who identified themselves as having an interest or responded to various advisements and other ways of reaching out to service providers, including mail outs; who identified themselves as having an interest in the topic and keen to put their perspective into our data. So again it’s - even though it’s a survey its purposive sampling as opposed to necessarily trying to be representative. Something very interesting to me at least, was that of those 198 service providers who responded and participated in the survey, 81 percent of them, 160, indicated having provided services to one or more male who reports being a victim of domestic violence in the last 12 months, not as in ever, but in the last 12 months. That was one of our questions because near the beginning of the survey, because obviously we want to hear from people about their experiences in providing a service to a male victim. Of those 160, 122, so about three quarters of them completed most of the survey or all of the survey rather than just the sort of demographic and opening sections. I’ll pick a few things out that I think are important to focus on, but the full details and table after table after table are in the full report. Okay, so by and large from counselling or what we referred to as referral services, so mostly information services that are the like gatekeepers in handing people on to identifying - working with people who approach them in order to identify the relevant service for that person. But a range of different types of service providers there. Overall looking at the 122 who answered these questions about their experiences of providing a service to one or more male victims, there was general agreement with the definitions of various categories of abuse. Now, the definitions that Emily presented, they come from our participants in the first phase of the studie. So in other words, that’s what the men, the significant others, etc, meant by physical violence, social abuse, etc. The labels we put on that as we analyse the transcripts of their interviews but in asking them the sort of broad question, “Well what do you mean when you say domestic violence or intimate partner abuse?” We tended to use the term domestic violence in interviews because that’s what particularly male victims were - that’s the terminology they were used to and used themselves. So the main addition to those definitions that came from our participants in study one that service providers emphasised was that you should include into the definitions power and control dynamics and fear and intimidation as necessary aspects of defining it as intimate partner abuse. There were a few, probably about three or four who - and really only two who significantly questioned whether male victims experience extreme fear and intimidation like female victims often do. In terms of the barriers to disclosure the service providers by and large and sometimes a majority and sometimes a minority of only about 30 or 40 percent. But that’s a sizeable minority of service providers recognising that in the man or the men that they have worked with in the last 12 months, that particular barrier was an issue that delayed or some cases prevented that man from disclosing. It was only sort of partway through engaging or providing services to this man on
