💛 Help Stand Again support male survivors – Donate here
❤️ Wear your support proudly – Visit our shop
What is family violence?
Family violence is a pattern of behaviour used to exert power and control over a partner or family member.
It can take many forms — including emotional, psychological, covert, sexual, financial, and legal abuse — and often occurs behind closed doors. Here we introduce the "Blueprint" to help navigate and educate you on the different forms of family violence you may be experiencing.
"There's only two types of people who discourage others from learning manipulation. Naive people, and manipulators."
- Lucio Buffalmano
Family Violence Against Men Blueprint
A framework designed to expose the subtle, systemic, and often invisible tactics used to control, disempower, and isolate male victims of abuse. Abuse isn’t always physical — for many men, it takes the shape of psychological games, emotional sabotage, and reputational warfare.
This blueprint breaks down the architecture of coercive control into nine rooms of a house — because abuse doesn’t just happen behind closed doors, it happens through them.
Understanding these categories is the first step in reclaiming your reality, your peace, and your sense of self.
Mask & Hook
The abuser creates a false persona and uses emotional bait to fast-track attachment and lower your defences.
This is where it begins. The illusion of warmth, safety, and connection.
The charm. The love bombing. The flattery, the passionate sex and future-faking – all to build trust at a very fast pace.
It’s a whirlwind romance that feels like you’ve found something rare — a partner who truly sees you.
But the mask is temporary. The hook is hidden. And once you're hooked, the door quietly locks behind you
Tactics
Love Bombing & Idealisation
Intense affection, praise, and gifts to fast-track trust and emotional dependence.
Future Faking
Promising a glowing future (marriage, kids, security) to gain control, with no intention to follow through.
Trauma Bonding
Reinforcing control by cycling abuse and affection until emotional dependency forms.
Psychological Manipulation
Tactics that distort your sense of reality or memory to create confusion and dependence.
The bedroom should be a sanctuary. But here, it’s the stage for gaslighting, projection, and blame-shifting.
You’re told you’re the problem — unstable, abusive, imagining things. There is nothing you can do right.
Over time, your grip on reality loosens. You stop trusting your memory, your instincts — even your sanity. — so much so that you start relying on them to interpret your world for you.
Tactics
Hypercriticism
Constant correction, nitpicking, or put-downs to undermine self-worth.
Gaslighting
Making you doubt your memory, perceptions, or reality.
Accusation of Mental Insability
Suggesting you're mentally unwell, unstable, or weaponise terms like “toxic masculinity”.
Projection
Accusing you of their own behaviours (e.g., lying, cheating, manipulation).
Blame Shifting
Twisting situations so you’re responsible for their actions or outcomes.
DARVO
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – a tactic to avoid accountability – men are often disbelieved here as men are typically seen as the aggressor.
Devaluation
Sudden withdrawal of affection or support after securing control.
Emotional Manipulation
Actions used to create in the moment emotional reactions such as guilt, fear, or obligation.
The study is a place for reflection. But instead, it becomes a war zone of your own emotions. Where your feelings are weaponised. The abuser uses your triggers to elicit a Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn response.
You're shamed. Mocked. Told you’re overreacting or too sensitive.
If you raise a concern? You opinions and feelings a minimised.
If you react in pain? You quickly get painted as the aggressor.
It’s a real-time emotional rollercoaster — and it leaves you doubting whether you're even allowed to feel anything other than shame or guilt
Tactics
Rage & Anger
Verbal abuse as a form to punish and destabilise.
Insults, Contempt, and Mockery
Ongoing belittling to erode self-esteem.
Shame & Guilt
Using your values, past actions, or vulnerabilities against you.
Silent Treatment
Withholding affection or communication to punish or control.
Minimising Emotional Needs
Framing your needs as dramatic or selfish. Harder still as men are told to “man up” and this is exploited.
Reactive Abuse
Provoking you until you react emotionally, then using that reaction against you. `
Dismissing Your Ideas / Opinions
Undermining your voice and thoughts.
Control & Suppression
Overt efforts to dominate your decisions, voice, or identity through fear, criticism, or punishment
The hallway is the backbone of the house — and like a hallway, control runs through everything.
Your money is tightly controlled. You’re the provider, it’s hers to spend. Her money is her money.
Every decision or action you make needs a nod of approval from her. Your hobbies, your space, your rest — all become things you need to negotiate in order to enjoy.
Your very liberty, such as sleep, are deprived
Tactics
Financial Abuse
Controlling money, sabotaging your career, or expecting financial support without contribution. Harder still with gender norms where men are expected to be the provider.
Lack of Agency
Not being allowed to make independent decisions.
Acting Entitled and Superior
Justifying control through gender, status, or culture.
Surveillance
Checking messages, GPS, or interrogating daily movements.
Micromanagement
Controlling trivial or daily aspects of your life. Often dismissed as ‘nagging’ – and not seen as a tool for control.
Restriction of Space
Limiting your movement, personal space within the home, making the space uncomfortable. Gender norms on who defines the home spaces also play a role here.
Controlling Hobbies
Discouraging passions or activities outside their control.
Liberty Deprivation
Disrupting sleep, toilet breaks, rest time as a method of mental destabilisation.
Entrapment
Strategic restriction of your options, resources, or support to make escape feel impossible.
Where you're, naked, alone and vulnerable. In this room, you’re trapped.
Your isolated from your support networks, You're interrogated and broken down. You're pressured to ‘confess’ to things you didn’t do – usually to just make the conflicts stop. You begin to believe that the act of leaving this relationship would be selfish, harmful, or even dangerous.
You might hear threats of suicide. Of abandonment. Or ruining your reputation
And if you're a father, the maternal superiority myth is used to minimise your parental role — ‘You're not capable. You're a man, you wouldn’t know how to feed her. They're upset, they need their mum, not their dad.’
Men are often conditioned not to ask for help or admit confusion or fear — making them more susceptible to long-term control through guilt or parental threats.
Tactics
Isolation
Controlling who you see, speak to, or have relationships with.
Property Damage
Destroying or hiding belongings to create fear or punishment.
Interrogation
Repeated questioning to wear down boundaries or create fear.
Forced Confessions
Coercing admissions to things you didn’t do, often to create guilt or control.
Threats of Suicide
Used to maintain guilt-driven compliance.
Entrapment Threats
Used to create fear of leaving the abuser.
Maternal Superiority Framing
Weaponising societal bias that assumes mums are inherently better carers in order to isolate or disempower fathers. Using gender stereotypes (“You wouldn’t know how to do their hair/change a nappy/handle school stuff”) to diminish authority and confidence or using phrases like “they need their mother” to deny parental role.
Covert Behavioural Tactics
Indirect, subtle, or hidden forms of abuse that leave you doubting your instincts and unable to directly name it as abuse.
This room is quiet. Respectable. Here we see the old adage “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” because what looks calm and almost plausible on the outside, inside there is chaos and manipulation
Here, the abuse is subtle, plausible, and often invisible to outsiders. It's about manipulation that’s deniable, confusing, and psychologically corrosive.
The abuse is buried under smiles and excuses. Stonewalling. Fake forgetfulness. Passive-aggression.
They play the perfect, kind hearted, partner in public — and undermine you in private.
And if you speak out? You sound deluded – “what are you talking about, she’s so lovely” or bitter and hypersensitive “oh I think you’re missreading it”
This is the psychological fog — and you're drowning in it.
Tactics
Stonewalling in Conflict
Pretending not to hear, ignoring valid concerns.
Backhanded Compliments
Undermining you in the guise of praise.
Barbed Support
Undermining you in the guise of concern for you or support of you
Sabotaging Peace
Creating chaos or conflict just as things stabilise.
Baiting with Kindness
Intermittent niceness to confuse and control.
Feigning Forgetfulness
“Forgetting” promises, events, or needs as a control tactic.
Feigned Injury or Illness
Creating a narrative of injury as a way to make you perform a task
Weaponised Incompetence
Pretending to be incapable to force you to take over everything. Social stereotypes assume women are more nurturing or organised — this tactic preys on that, leaving men feeling like they’re failing if they don't take over the task.
Weaponised Sex
Withholding, forcing, guilt-tripping, or using sex as punishment/reward. Mocking sexual performance, shaming body image, or comparing to “real men.” Guilt-Tripped Consent – “If you were a good husband, you’d want to” — leveraging gender expectations of performance and duty.
Public vs Private Personas –
Charm in public, cruelty in private — making it hard to be believed. Abusers rely on the “charming wife, cold husband” stereotype to gain social sympathy.
Emotional Sabotage & Self-Doubt
Long term patterns of abuse used to erode your confidence and emotional stability.
This is the heart of the home - Where connection and joy are slowly dismantled.
These are longer-term, cumulative strategies used to dismantle your sense of self.
Here you're told you can’t possibly survive without them “after all I’ve done for you” The feeling of joy becomes associated with guilt.
You're accused of being selfish for needing peace. Your kindness is twisted. Your stories rewritten into weaponised labels of “toxic masculinity”.
Over time, you stop trusting in yourself. You stop feeling like a man. Or a father. Or a person who even matters.
Tactics
Creating Dependency
Reinforcing that you can’t survive without them.
Undermining Self-Trust
“You’re too sensitive / paranoid / dramatic.” Reinforced by external social disbelief “You sure you’re not the problem?”. “happy wife, happy life”.
Invalidating Boundaries
Repeatedly violating or dismissing your limits.
Inducing Guilt for Joy
Making you feel bad for enjoying anything without them. Men often feel guilt for taking any space or joy due to societal gender expectations “men have responsibility, why are they being silly or playing with the kids?".
Distorting Empathy
Using your kindness against you: “You say you care, but…”.
Controlling Narratives
Dictating how you describe the relationship or how the partner is perceived.
Masculinity Mockery
Humiliating or emasculating the man for showing vulnerability, crying, needing help, or seeking therapy. Using cultural masculinity norms “real men don’t complain” to silence or shame when abuse is challenged.
Mislabelled the “Angry Man”
Using any frustration, no matter how restrained, as proof of volatility or danger. “Toxic Masculinity” label.
Abuse by Proxy
Manipulating others to control, isolate, or discredit you without direct contact.
This is where the abuser invites outsiders in to take a seat at the dinner theatre
Family. Friends. Police, CPS, Teachers. Therapists. They are all weaponised against you with false allegations, triangulation, smear campaigns.
You're the villain in a play that you didn’t write.
And no matter what you say, by the time your dinner guests have taken a seat at the table, they have already drunk the kool aid.
Tactics
Triangulation
Comparing you to others or involving third parties to provoke insecurity or jealousy.
Flying Monkeys
Individuals such as friends and family that are manipulated into reinforcing the abuser’s narrative or harassing you. Can include false allegations, or distortions of the truth aimed at twisting the narrative.
False Allegations
Using fabricated claims to weaponise institutions, communities, and relationships.
Enlisting Legal Proxies
Enlisting lawyers, CPS, police, to manipulate or harm. Making false allegations of abuse. Men are more likely to be presumed as the abuser and face uphill battles in custody and support systems.
Undermining Parental Ability
Manipulating doctors or schools to believe you are incapable of parenting. Relies on societal bias that men are less involved or emotionally aware.
Parental Alienation
Turning your children against you through lies, guilt, or manipulation.
Spiritual Abuse
Using religion, culture, or morality to shame or coerce compliance. Includes exploiting traditional values of male protector/provider roles to instil shame or compliance.
Outdoor Patio
Post-Separation Abuse & Retaliation
Ongoing control tactics after you leave, often through legal, financial, or parenting-related threats.
Now you're finally out of the house — but not out of their reach.
Separation should mean freedom. But the abuse doesn’t stop — it just evolves and sometimes escalates.
They weaponise custody. Misuse the legal system. Spread false claims to schools and services. They weaponise your own mental health challenges as a survivor of abuse and have you mislabelled as a danger.
You're still being watched. Punished. Undermined as a father. Because in their eyes, leaving is the ultimate betrayal — and you must pay for it.
Tactics
- Hoovering – Trying to lure you back with apologies, promises, or emotional crises.
- Custody Interference / Legal Harassment – Using courts or systems to punish or exhaust. Often seen as a lesser crime when men are the target, with assumptions that “mums always know best”. Also uses the system’s tendency to default to women as victims to pre-emptively accuse or silence the male parent.
- False Claims to Institutions – Unfounded reports to CPS, police, or health services.
- Manipulating Gendered Services – Exploiting access to DV shelters, police support, and legal aid while the male partner is left unsupported or disbelieved. It’s very challenging for men to understand where to go for support, they feel invisible, unheard and unsupported.
- Reputation Sabotage – Smearing your name to community, schools, or professionals. Leverages toxic stereotypes (e.g., absent father, angry ex) to isolate and discredit the male survivor. Framing healthy boundaries as abusive or authoritarian because he’s male.
- Stalking / Invasion of Privacy – Monitoring or tracking you post-separation.
- Parallel Parenting Sabotage – Undermining your authority or sabotaging your role.
- Weaponising Mental Health – Claiming you are unwell to gain advantage or discredit. Abusers may point to male trauma reactions (panic, dissociation, frustration) as “dangerous” behaviour. Paint a man as unstable or jealous post-separation — especially effective if a man pushes back against parental alienation or false allegations.