Domestic violence against men: Why society often laughs instead of listening

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’.

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

Read: Are you an abused man? Here's where to find help in Kenya

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.