Male violence against women is both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality, in this country and across the world. It is right and essential that official bodies strive to reduce and eliminate such offences, as an end in itself and as part of a broader strategy to combat gender-based injustice.

The Crown Prosecution Service has just published its annual performance review titled Violence Against Women and Girls: Crime Report. This year, for the first time, tucked away in parentheses on the front page, are seven new words: “(Inclusive of data on men and boys.)”

Tacking men and boys on to women’s issues is the polar opposite of a genuinely gender-inclusive approach

Readers might wonder how crimes against women and girls can include men and boys. The answer lies in a curiously bureaucratic definition. Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) doesn’t necessarily mean violence against women and girls. It means a subset of criminal offences that have been categorised as VAWG crimes – rape and sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking, forced marriage, etc – and the victims of these crimes are not all female. As the introduction makes clear, one in six victims described in the report are in fact men and boys. In the largest category, domestic abuse, exactly 16.7% of victims (where gender was recorded) are male. Elsewhere, the figures are higher; almost a quarter of victims of so-called “honour crimes” are male, and in the category of trafficking and prostitution, a full 40% of victims are men and boys.

But it is in the most sensitive areas of sexual violence and child abuse where the situation is most troubling. Here, the CPS’s data collection is so inadequate that it is impossible to officially state the gender ratio of victims, they are simply assumed to be female. In fact, the limited data that is available in the appendix shows one in eight rape victims and more than a quarter of child abuse victims to be male.

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Those who work with male survivors of these crimes testify that issues of gender and sexuality are often central to trauma and recovery, with survivors dealing with a sense of emasculation or isolation, feeling that due to being the “wrong” gender, they barely exist as victims. It is not difficult to see how government bodies categorising these (often young and deeply vulnerable) men as “women and girls” is tantamount to another abusive act. Furthermore, male survivors’ charities and campaigns are desperately frustrated by the lack of reliable data, which they urgently need to make a fair and compelling case for funding, support and donations.

These issues are not restricted to the Crown Prosecution Service. As we have been reminded just this week, services to address violence against women are in crisis. One of the few lifelines is the government’s Violence Against Women Fund, worth £80m over five years. Every penny (and then some) is desperately needed by women’s organisations. And yet when charities working with male survivors of rape or domestic abuse need their own support, this is the fund to which they are told to apply. This is abhorrent; it takes precious funding away from women’s causes, and it makes male survivors invisible, treating them as an afterthought or an irrelevance. Perhaps worst of all, it pits male and female survivors against each other in an ignominious competition for funding.

There might be a temptation for some to simply strip away the gender politics from intimate crimes, to describe them and address them as gender-neutral or even gender-free. From discussions with friends and colleagues in both the men’s and women’s sectors, it is clear this is something almost nobody wants. Just as there is a political and social context to violence against women and girls, there is a different but no less relevant context to intimate violence against men.

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Male victims have gender-specific issues and needs that can be fundamentally different to those of women. No one is helped by ignoring or wishing those contexts away. In recent years, men’s charities have begun to refer increasingly to “gender-inclusive” policies, meaning policies that acknowledge and address the relevant gender issues in both survivor support and reduction strategies. Government bodies need to learn that just tacking men and boys on to women’s issues like an awkward appendix is the polar opposite of a genuinely gender-inclusive approach.

It is good and necessary that government bodies quantify and describe violence against women and girls, accurately and fully. Efforts to reduce and ultimately eliminate such crimes should be assisted and applauded. These efforts are hindered, not helped, by clumsily bundling men and boys into the statistics and the strategies. Male survivors are entitled to recognition and support of their own. Those men and boys, and their representatives in campaigns and charities, did not ask to be treated like this, they were not consulted on this, did not consent to this and have repeatedly pleaded with government bodies not to treat them in this way. To continue to do so is contemptible and cruel.