It’s a myth in our society that a man cannot be a victim of cruelty and domestic violence. It’s only women who can become victims of cruelty and domestic violence. In fact, on very few occasions, we will hear or learn about a male victim of cruelty when someone very close to you has faced it or either you have read it in any newspaper. Is it the general perception of a common man that only women can be the victims of domestic violence and cruelty, and men will be the perpetrators? Because for us, men are supposed to be stronger—emotionally and physically in comparison to women.
If this is so, then why does a colleague of a soldier who gets martyred at the border become emotional while carrying his dead body? Why does a father cry when one of his children meets an accident? All this happens due to emotions.
Emotions do not see who is male or female. Emotion is a feeling that one perceives from their surroundings. The medical text never said that men cannot feel pain or that it’s only women who can feel pain, so why do we have this biased perception towards men? Our ancestors told us that men are strong and they cannot be victims of domestic violence. If this is so, then we have to see the current NCRB report, which was released in August 2022.
This year, it has been noticed that the total number of suicide cases has increased in comparison to last year. Male suicidal cases are high in comparison to females. This shows the psychological conditions of the men who were forced or bound to take this step to end their mental agony. The most common reasons for suicide are financial issues, career issues, illness, and family issues. Even in the study, it was found that depression is the main cause of suicide, and in most of the cases, the patients were not even aware of their mental health conditions.
Coming to the point that a male is the victim of cruelty or not, I would like to cite one of the reports of the survey, which states that “approximately 52% of men report having experienced violence from the intimate partner/spouse at least once in their lifetime. A pan-India study reported that 98% of Indian men had suffered domestic violence more than once in their lives. However, factually, almost 95% of men and women experience violence from a male perpetrator”.
On many occasions, Bollywood movies have been considered a reflection of Indian society as we can relate ourselves to the characters, e.g., Baghban, Two States, etc. Here I would like to discuss one such movie, Aitraaz, which was released in 2004. The main theme of the movie was that a male can become a victim of sexual harassment in the workplace. During that time, there were no acts related to sexual harassment in the workplace. But now we have the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition, and Redressal) Act of 2013, which focuses solely on female victims.
It’s time to reconsider our existing laws, which are not gender-neutral but gender-specific. Our law considers males as perpetrators and females as victims only, and because of this mindset only, male victims do not come forward to report their crimes. They just stay silent, and slowly they become patients of depression. In many cases, the husband accepts the spouse’s cruelty, whether mental or physical, in order to protect his and his parents’ reputations and prevent the wife from filing false complaints against them because no one will believe his suffering at first. This is another concern that needs to be addressed.
In the 21st century, when we are talking about women’s empowerment, we have to accept the bitter truth that women too can be perpetrators. It’s high time to make our law gender-neutral and not gender-specific. Emotions are feelings that everyone has to have to be alive. Only a dead person doesn’t have emotions. Then why are we creating this myth against men that they don’t feel any pain? As responsible members of society, we have a responsibility to provide a positive environment for all people, regardless of gender, where they can freely discuss their problems. Even in this field, more research is required in order to obtain accurate data on the male victims. There are many families who lose their sons’ lives due to domestic violence by their spouse. We have to stop it through legal provisions. Everyone’s lives matter to us.
Dr Pyali Chatterjee is HOD of Faculty of Law at ICFAI University in Raipur, Chhattisgarh.
