Why Male Victims Should Never Be Sent to Services That Also Treat Abusers
30th August 2026
The Experience
A victim of abuse opens a door and sits down across from an intake worker. This is the moment they have been building toward for weeks, maybe years, and now that they are here they can barely speak. Every sentence gets weighed before it leaves, because underneath the whole conversation runs a quieter fear, that anything they say will be taken down, turned around, and read back to them as evidence of what they did rather than what was done to them, that if they describe the fight they will be treated as the one who started it. They came to be believed about the abuse they endured, and a large part of them is bracing instead to be arrested and not believed.
The person across the desk is not a villain, and their job is harder than it looks. They were trained on a model that treats abuse as something men do to women, so the story in front of them may not match the shape they were taught to expect. They know which programs their organisation is funded to run and which it is not, and they know the categories their supervisor will accept when the file is written up. Part of them is listening with real care to the person in front of them, and part of them is scanning for the cues that let them place this person in a bucket the system can manage. The barrier is being built in that moment, before either of them has said very much at all.
Today we are going to look at what actually makes a good service for a victim, and why placing victim support and perpetrator programs for the same gender inside the one provider breaks the very things a good service is supposed to do. For those of you new here, this is Stand Again, a national service for male victims of family violence and coercive control in Australia. If this content helps you, please like and subscribe. Let's get into it.
What the sector says a good service is
There is a settled answer to what a victim service should be, and the Australian family violence sector has already adopted it. It is called trauma-informed practice, and its foundations were set out by the United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHSA, in 2014. This is not an American idea imported from the outside. The Australian Institute of Family Studies, a federal government research body, describes the SAMHSA framework as influential on Australian practice and uses it as the scaffolding for its own guidance. When an Australian service says it is trauma-informed, this is the standard it is claiming to meet.
The framework sets out six principles that define good practice.
- The first is safety, meaning a person feels physically and psychologically safe in the service and in the way it deals with them.
- The second is trustworthiness, meaning the service builds and keeps a person's trust through openness and consistency. Alongside these sit
- peer support,
- collaboration between staff and the person, and
- empowerment of the person's own voice and choices.
- The sixth principle covers cultural, historical and gender issues, and it requires a service to move past stereotypes and offer care that responds to a person's actual situation rather than an assumption about them.
Underneath those six principles sit four commitments, known as the four Rs. A trauma-informed service is expected to
- to realise how widely trauma shapes people's lives,
- to recognise its signs,
- to respond by building that understanding into everything it does, and
- to resist re-traumatising the people who come to it.
That last commitment matters most here. A good service is required, as a baseline, to avoid becoming a place that re-inflicts the harm a person is trying to escape.
That is the standard the sector holds up for itself. It is a good standard. The question worth asking is whether it is being applied to everyone.
The Australian picture
Stand Again mapped the dedicated family violence services operating across Australia, sorting them by who they are built to serve and whether they also run behaviour change programs for people who use violence. The result shows how unevenly that standard is applied.
Look first at how many services there are. Australia has two hundred and thirty-seven dedicated services built for female victim-survivors, and five built for male victim-survivors. Before any question of design, a man is choosing from a field around one-fiftieth the size of the one a woman has.
Then look at what happens inside those services. What matters here is whether a provider that gives a victim dedicated, tailored support also runs a program for perpetrators of that victim's own gender. A dedicated service for female victims that also runs a behaviour change program for female abusers would be the example. If a provider is following the SAMHSA principles, that is unlikely to be the case, because the same service is then holding one frame for that gender as victims to be believed and another for that gender as offenders whose behaviour needs correcting, and a victim who walks in can be read through the wrong one. For female victim services in Australia, the principle holds.
Of the two hundred and thirty-seven services built for female victims, just one also runs a program for female abusers (0.42%).
The picture changes when you look at the services built for men.
Of the five dedicated male victim services in the country, three also run a behaviour change program for male abusers (60%).
So a female victim is almost never sent to a service that also treats her gender as offenders, and a male victim, more often than not, is.
That leaves two services built for male victims that do not also run a program for male abusers, and they are not the same kind of thing. One is primarily an advocacy and policy body that carries some counselling alongside its main work.
The other is the only provider in the country dedicated to directly supporting male victims and nothing else, holding them purely as victims in the way the standard requires. That sole provider receives no government funding and no government support.
The same tilt runs through the services built for everyone. Australia has fifty-eight general family violence services that take any victim. Around one in seven of them also runs a program for male abusers, while around one in twenty runs a program for female abusers. So even in a service meant for all victims, a man is roughly three times as likely as a woman to walk in and find it also treating his own gender as offenders.
Across every part of the system, the closer a victim is to being male, the more likely their service is also treating their own gender as offenders.
What a blended service does to a male victim
A service that holds a person only as a victim is the standard the sector has already proven, and a blended service is where that standard is set aside. To see why that matters, you have to understand what the abuse did to the man walking in. Coercive control very often runs on a single move, casting the victim as the real problem, the aggressive one, the unstable one, the one at fault in every conflict. His partner rewrites each disagreement so that he is the cause of it, and he comes to half-believe it, because that is what the tactic is built to do. By the time he leaves, the deepest thing the abuse installed in him is the belief that he is the offender.
Now put that man in a service that also treats offenders, where the structure holds him as a possible one until he proves otherwise. Walk that against the sector's own standard and it fails at point after point.
- It fails on safety, the first principle. Safety means a person is not placed in a setting that recreates the dynamic of their abuse, and a service that treats him as a possible offender reproduces the exact accusation his partner used to control him. The building becomes the abuse.
- It fails on trustworthiness. A victim discloses only when they trust they will be received as the victim, and a service structured to hold him as a suspect cannot build that trust, because its shape contradicts the reassurance its staff might offer.
- It fails on the sixth principle, the one covering gender. That principle requires a service to move past stereotype and respond to the person actually in front of it. A model that reads a male victim through the assumption that men are the ones who abuse breaches the precise thing that principle exists to prevent.
And it fails the fourth R, resist re-traumatisation. This is the framework's stated commitment to avoid re-inflicting harm, and a setting that re-accuses a man of being the aggressor does exactly that.
That is four parts of the sector's own definition of good practice, all broken by a single structural choice.
What it feels like from the inside
A man who came to Stand Again described what this does to a person. He had spent close to an hour on the phone with one of the Australian services that supports victims and also runs programs for people who use violence. He had done the hardest thing in getting himself to make the call at all, and then laid out in detail the abuse he had endured. When the reply came, it turned to his behaviour. He said his world collapsed in that moment, because it confirmed the thing he most feared, that he would never be believed, and that even presenting as a victim, the only thing they were interested in was working out how to classify him as a perpetrator.
That is not the failure of one worker having a bad day. It is what happens by design when a victim is routed to a service whose structure holds him as a suspect.
He often has nowhere else to go
The reason this keeps happening is that a male victim frequently has no other door to knock on. A frontline worker at one of the few services built for male victims described the trap to Stand Again. When a man at court needs support, the lawyers refer him to the one program available in the area, which is a behaviour change program for male perpetrators, because that is the only thing that exists for a man. He goes to the intake for that program and is turned away, deemed unsuitable, because he is a victim rather than an offender and the program is not built for him. And then he receives the same letter the court gives to a perpetrator who has refused to take responsibility, because the system has no category that recognises him as a victim. He tried to get help, was rejected for not being an abuser, and was documented as though he were one who would not change.
That is the position the scarcity creates. With two hundred and thirty-seven services for women and five for men, a male victim is often left choosing between a service that also treats abusers and no service at all. He does not walk into these places because he cannot tell the difference. He walks into them because there is nowhere else, and his presence at a service for offenders is then treated as confirmation that he is one.
Why we hold the line
That fear, of being read as the offender when he came for help, is not a symptom to be gently reassured away. It keeps any victim of abuse from help, and for male victims in particular it is one of the most commonly reported reasons for staying silent. What men name is a fear beyond the fear of not being believed that they share with women. It is the fear of being treated as the perpetrator, and research in 2019 found men describing exactly that, including one who was dealt with as an offender by the professional he turned to. A survey in 2026 showed how widespread it is, with close to half of the men in it holding back for fear their partner would falsely accuse them, and a similar number for fear a service would blame them or refuse to believe them. The fear is common because the treatment is common.
Without a clear door that meets him as the victim he is, that fear does its work, and a man does the thing the abuse already trained him to do. He does not disclose. He stays, because reaching out the one time and being met with suspicion told him there was nowhere safer to go, and staying carries its own cost. Some men reach the point of deciding there is no way out and no one who sees them, and they do not survive it. When he does reach a service, he does not tell the whole truth, because he does not know how it will be received. He leaves out his own mistakes most of all, the times he shouted back, the drinking, the thing he is ashamed of, afraid that those are exactly what will be used to cast him as the offender.
That self-editing is often read as narrative control, the story-managing that clinicians are taught to notice in people who abuse. In one sense it is a form of control, because he is shaping what the worker gets to see. What drives it is fear. He hides the flaws because he expects that a flaw laid bare is the thing that will tip a worker into reading him as the offender, so he offers a cleaned-up version and hopes it is enough to be believed.
Stand Again is a provider too, and we hold ourselves to the same six principles and four Rs, because these are the consequences a good standard exists to prevent. When a service treats him as a victim from the start, he can stop hiding things and say what is really going on, and that is what lets him get help. Whether he recovers can depend on how the first service he contacts treats him.
What has to change
The services built for women show what a good victim service looks like, and the answer is simple to state. Every victim needs a place built for them, organised around belief and safety, with nothing in the building quietly asking them to prove they are not the offender. Women have that. Men, in all but a handful of services, do not.
This is not only an Australian problem, and fixing it takes nothing away from women. Governments everywhere need to fund victim services built for men, and to keep funding them until every man who needs help has a service that was made for him. Until they do, men will keep turning to services that were never set up to help them.
Stand Again exists to fill that gap. We support men who have nowhere else to go, in Australia and wherever else we can reach them, until governments fund the services men need. The six principles that domestic and family violence services have adopted, in Australia and many other countries, point to something simple. Every victim of abuse should be able to walk into a service and be treated as a victim from the start. We are a long way from that. It is time we fixed it.