In 2016 we began campaigning against the Home Office’s policy of including crimes against male victims/survivors within the national strategy on Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls. We call for efforts to prevent intimate crimes against men and boys, and to support survivors, to be managed instead through a parallel, complementary and proportionate strategy for male victims and survivors.   

Along with every organisation in the UK supporting male victims of sexual and domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, stalking, so-called honour based violence and forced marriage and other intimate and gender-based crimes, we consider the current policy to be actively damaging to male victims/survivors.  

It is an inadequate and profoundly inappropriate response to our unique gender-specific needs, it regularly causes misunderstandings and confusion within statutory services across national and local government and introduces needless complexity and frequent confusion for official statistics and data.  

The policy also forces male victims/survivors and their representatives into spaces and conversations which should rightly be reserved for female survivors and the women’s sector, thereby undermining the essential work being done to tackle violence and abuse with female victims/survivors. For that reason and others, our campaign also has widespread support from our friends and colleagues in organisations such as Rape Crisis, Safelives and Respect UK.    

For more information, you can:

Read our Briefing Paper