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 second part of the workshop, Emily Tilbrook presents the results of the interviews. Listen now (MP3) Emily Tilbrook: As Greg mentioned, I’m Emily Tilbrook, and today I’m going to be talking about the stage one research findings from the research that Greg’s just introduced. So we had 15 male victims in the study, eight service providers and five significant others. Greg just said that I’ll fill you in on the significant others, so I’d better do that. There was one participant who was a son of a male victim who lived in the household obviously with his father and his mother. He’s now an adult who experienced that when he was a child. There was, as Greg had said, a sister-in-law and a sister. There was also a current partner, a non-abused and non-abusive current partner, and a non-abused and non-abusive ex-partner, as well. So we would have liked more significant others in the sample obviously, but that was a group that was difficult to get a hold of. So, within stage one, there were five core categories in the findings: these were forms of abuse, targets of abuse, perceived etiology of abuse behaviour, impacts of abuse, and disclosure of abuse. Within the core category ‘forms of abuse,’ you can see there were seven subordinate categories. Within targets of abuse there were no subordinate categories. Within the core category ‘perceived etiology’ of abuse, the subordinate categories were perpetrator issues and victim issues. Within ‘impacts of abuse,’ this was on... the subordinate categories were on victims and on others. And lastly, the core category of ‘disclosure of abuse’ – the subordinate categories were barriers and facilitators to disclosure. So, participants reported that men were subject to seven forms of abuse, that are similar to those reported by other victims of intimate partner abuse. Some men also appear to be subject to multiple forms of abuse. The pattern of abuse often started with abuse such as verbal, financial, and psychological abuse, and it stemmed to other forms of abuse which became increasingly more violent, such as physical and sexual abuse. Physical abuse is the first subordinate category within the ‘forms of abuse’ category. The behaviour in this subordinate category reported by participants included violence against the person and property of victims, abuse against the person ranged from punching, biting, scratching, spitting, to throwing objects at men, and to spiking their drinks. Damage to property was such a strong theme that it could have arguably been made a subordinate category of it’s own. However, we followed the tradition in some of the literature, which put it in the category of physical abuse. So damage to property included breaking into houses and breaking personal objects that belonged to the men. So, psychological abuse was the next subordinate category. Participants reported perpetrators putting men down and humiliating them. They also reported that men felt threatened and even stalked by the behaviour of their partners. The most common form of psychological abuse reported was that men felt that they were disempowered by their female partners who controlled them and their circumstances either directly or indirectly. The next subordinate category was verbal abuse. Participants reported that verbal abuse took the form of yelling, shouting, screaming, and swearing. The next category was sexual abuse. They reported that – this is the victims – reported that they felt pressur
