Barbara Kay: Male victims of domestic abuse continue to suffer in solitude

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last week, on the eve of becoming homeless as his house passed into its new owner’s hands, Earl Silverman of northeast Calgary hanged himself in his garage.

Silverman briefly hit the news a month ago, when he closed his Men’s Alternate Safe House (MASH), the only privately funded shelter for male victims of domestic violence in Canada, for lack of funds. For three years, MASH had temporarily housed about 20 men and a few children.

As I wrote in a March 27 column, “This story did not light up the switchboards, metaphorically speaking, of the media and government ministries.” The fact that men suffering from abuse now had exactly nowhere in Canada to turn for publicly funded shelter was the catalyst for a cavernous collective yawn — and exactly one letter to the Post editor, scolding men for their failure to become activists in their own behalf as women did.
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It’s an easy fix to honour Earl’s last wish: Acknowledge the reality that men suffer from their intimate partners’ violence almost as frequently as women do, and almost as consequentially. Offer funded shelter and counselling to both men and women who need it. And while we’re at it, offer funded anger management to women who need it — there are many — as well as to men. We will then see male suicide rates go down. It’s that simple. If we care.'