He is bruised, he is afraid, but he is still expected to ‘be a man’

By  Dorcas Muga-Odumbe

Gender & Health Editor

NMG

What you need to know:

• Men facing domestic violence often fear ridicule and disbelief more than the violence itself, leaving many to suffer in silence.
• Kenya’s laws protect victims regardless of gender, but social attitudes can make abused men afraid to seek help.

A man walks into a police station and says it plainly: “My wife beats me.” Sit with that for a second before moving on. What actually happens next?

Maybe the officer writes his statement the way he/she would if a woman had said the same words. Or maybe there’s a pause first. A look passed between two desks and a snigger. A question that isn’t really a question; ‘how does a man his size end up bruised by his own wife?’

Push the scene further. The man shares this with his friends. By the third retelling in the WhatsApp group chat, has it become a joke? He tells his mother, and she wants to know what he did to deserve it. He tells his pastor, his brother and his boss. Somewhere in this list, people stop believing him. He stops being a man who survived violence and becomes one who failed at being ‘a man’.

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‘My wife beats me’, these four words don’t sound like much, but they lead somewhere much bigger.

Nobody sensible disputes that women carry the heaviest weight of domestic violence in this country. So does every case that ends in a death. That is why, for years, most of the reporting and campaigning has focused on women, and rightly so.

I am not trying to argue otherwise. But there is another story that rarely gets told alongside it: men get beaten too, and when they do, almost nobody has thought through what happens next.

Speak to enough men who have lived through this, quietly and off the record, and the story remains the same.

The men who’ve been hit, or controlled, or humiliated by a partner don’t usually start by describing the violence. They start with what they were afraid people would say. Not fear of another beating; fear of being laughed at and becoming the punchline instead of the survivor.

That fear comes from watching what happens to the men who do speak. It could be a politician mocked for years after reporting an assault by his wife, or public figures torn apart online, more recently, for admitting the same thing. Men figure this out fast, from watching what happens to others. Stay quiet, and life goes on. Speak up, and you become the joke of the week.

There is a harder question. Most people would rather not ask it, but I will. If the abused man makes it to the police station, what’s waiting for him? Is it a shelter for that night, if he needs one? Or a counsellor who’s actually dealt with this before, rather than treating him like a curiosity? A system that knows what to do with him, or one that was only ever built with a different kind of victim in mind?

None of this is meant to take anything away from women. Recognising that men suffer too does not lower the scale of what women live through, and it does not excuse the men responsible for either.

The two truths sit side by side, not against each other. Women are still, disproportionately, the ones being killed by partners, and nothing here changes that. If anything, recognising both makes the whole argument stronger. A society that only recognises violence when it happens to one kind of person will always struggle to end violence in general, because it has already decided, in advance, who deserves to be believed.

Violence does not ask permission based on who the victim is.

The law, for what it’s worth, is not really the problem here. Kenya’s domestic violence statutes don’t care about the gender of the victim. What’s harder to fix is an old belief underneath all of it—one no law can touch; that a man who admits his wife hurt him has already lost something bigger than his safety. His standing. His claim to the word “man.”

Until that changes, until the first instinct is concern rather than disbelief or a smirk, men will keep reaching for the cheaper story. He fell off a motorbike, he walked into a door, among many other lies.

Anything but the truth, because the truth comes with an audience, and the audience has already decided whose fault it was.