One in Three Campaign
One in three victims of family violence are male

Men's stories

MEN’S PERSONAL STORIES

If you are a male victim of family violence – intimate partner violence, violence from other family members, child abuse, elder abuse, sexual assault, or other forms of family violence and abuse – this page is available for you to tell your anonymous story. Please click here to tell your own story. If you feel like you need support, please click here. Stories are moderated to prevent the posting of spam, so it might take a little while for your story to appear on this page.

 

Alan’s personal story

I thought it was all my fault. My girlfriend is regularly emotionally and psychologically abusive towards me and I just can’t take any more. It has broken me down so much that I really don’t feel like I am worth anything or even care about myself. She tells me everything that is wrong is automatically my fault, I have to ask permission before I do anything, and if I do anything that she doesn’t like, she will make me pay. She regularly will start arguments with me when I try to go to sleep, telling me that I don’t talk to her and then she continually talks over the top of me and never lets me say anything. Once she gets started, it never stops, it always escalates.

She will yell at me late at night, sometimes for hours and I end up sleeping on the street and going to work on two hours sleep, she hits me or throws objects at me. She has tipped bottles of water over me when I am sitting down or lying down, pulled me out of bed when I am asleep, thrown food around the house and hit me with shoes or her fists. She used to take my glasses, phone and wallet off me and refuse to give them back. She threatens to ring my work and try to get me fired. The list just goes on.

I can’t take any more so now I just try and leave as soon as I see some of this coming, which is almost every night. If she sees me going she will stop me and stand in front of the door and hit me and grab me and refuse to let me go. If I do manage to get out, she often tries to bar the door and refuses to let me into the house. If I come back hours later to try and get a few hours sleep before going to work, she often assaults me again. And after all of this she tells me it is all my fault. Before I looked on the internet I didn’t think this sort of stuff happened to men, but I don’t know how to stop it and get away.

Twice I have left and both times she has threatened to call my job, my parents, the police, or threatened to harm herself if I don’t come back, and I have come back. But it is just getting worse. I don’t have any family or friends here to help me and I have nowhere else to go. It just feels like it will never end. If I tell her she is abusing me she just mocks me. I don’t know how to get away from her.

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