Summary: Dr. Greg Dear is Senior Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Western Australia. Greg is the co-author, along with Professor Alfred Allan and Emily Tilbrook, of Intimate Partner Abuse of Men, a research project commissioned by the Men’s Advisory Network and released on 26th May 2010. In this in-depth interview with Greg Dear, Greg Andresen discusses the findings and implications of the ECU research. Listen now (MP3) Greg Andresen: I’m speaking with Dr. Greg Dear, and Greg is the Senior Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Greg is the co-author, along with Professor Alfred Allan and Emily Tilbrook of Intimate Partner Abuse of Men, which is a research project commissioned by the Men’s Advisory Network and released on the 26th of May, 2010. Greg, thank you for talking with us today. Greg Dear: Sure, no Problem. GA: First of all, can you tell our listeners about the aims and objectives of the research? GD: Well, I suppose in broad terms, the aim was to collect men who report being victims of intimate partner violence, to collect rich data about the nature of their experiences. In other words, what sort of violence they experience from an intimate partner, or have experienced, how it has impacted on them, and more specifically, what sorts of factors have influenced their decision to disclose that abuse, or not to disclose that abuse to other people. We were particularly interested in understanding the difficulties that men have in disclosing abuse to service providers in a range of categories. GA: Okay, so it was very much a qualitative project. GD: That was certainly the first part of it, and I think the important part of it. The second stage was a survey of service providers where we sought to quantify, I suppose in some way, their views on the data that we had collected in the first stage of the study. In particular, the degree to which they recognised in men who they’ve worked with, the types of barriers to disclosure that we identified in the first phase of the research. GA: Well, let’s talk a bit about stage one of your research, the qualitative interviews with the male victims, but also with significant other people in their lives and some individual service providers, I believe, who had helped male victims. What different forms of abuse did you unearth in stage one when you talked to these people? GD: One of the questions that we asked in the interviews was a broad open-ended question about, “when they say they’ve been victims of abuse, what did they mean by that?” How do they define abuse? What are the sorts of experiences they’ve had? And then we’ve thematically analysed the conversation that followed from that opening question. I make that point because we were quite deliberate in not wanting to give a sort of checklist of the definitions that exist in the literature or the way that intimate partner violence is categorised into emotional abuse, or social abuse, or physical abuse, etc. We really wanted to just get a free flowing conversation of what do the men, and family, friends, significant others of men who reported abuse, what do they mean by that? What is it that they have experienced? What are the behaviours that have been done to them? And what’s their understanding of, more broadly, what abuse might entail, so it would be beyond just what they’ve experienced. And when we analysed those data, they fell very nicely into the same sorts of categories and definitions as exist in the literature already, so all of the social abuse, financial abuse, pretty much the same way that these are defined in the literature. And an additional category that emerged, and when I say additional, there is some limited research on this and discussion in the literature, but it’s not universally recognised in
