When Policy Becomes Protectionism | How Scotland’s Domestic Abuse Policy Fails Male Victims

When Policy Becomes Protectionism: How Scotland’s Institutions Fail Male Victims

Scotland’s domestic-abuse law recognises that abuse is a crime of power, not gender. Yet our public institutions, funding models, and advocacy networks continue to behave as though the only victims worth serving are women and girls.

This article examines how Scotland’s official strategy, Equally Safe, creates structural bias against male victims, why this persists, and how to reform it without diminishing women’s protections. The Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 criminalises patterns of coercive and controlling behaviour irrespective of the victim’s or perpetrator’s sex. In law, Scotland has achieved what many jurisdictions have not, a gender-neutral definition of abuse grounded in behaviour, not biology.

That legislative clarity should have ushered in equality of compassion. It did not. The framework that guides Scotland’s domestic-abuse policy, Equally Safe, explicitly defines the issue as a form of violence against women and girls (VAWG), “predominantly perpetrated by men.” That language sets the tone for everything downstream, who is funded, who is trained, who is believed, and who is ignored.

The contradiction is profound: we legislate for neutrality, but we fund partiality. Institutional Incentives: Protect the Budget, Protect the Narrative

In 2003, legal scholar Linda Kelly warned of what happens when advocacy frameworks become economically dependent on a single narrative. In Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Violence: How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State (Florida State University Law Review, Vol. 30), she wrote:

“If we acknowledge the existence of battered husbands, then the funding designated for programs to assist battered women will be cut further because monies will be directed at programs for battered men. Thus, many radical feminists have fought for years to keep battered husbands closeted so that the small amount of money that was available for wife abuse would not be jeopardized.”

Kelly was describing an American context, but the logic is universal. When entire funding ecosystems, and the careers built upon them, depend on preserving a gendered narrative, acknowledging male victims becomes not just inconvenient but threatening. The Scottish system mirrors this precisely: service networks aligned with the Equally Safe framework are financially incentivised to frame domestic abuse as a one-way gender crime.

The Data Scotland Doesn’t Want to Talk About

Official statistics consistently show that men are a minority, but a substantial one, among domestic-abuse victims.

Police Scotland recorded that approximately one in six victims of domestic abuse in 2018–19 were male.¹
Independent surveys suggest under-reporting is significant: men are less likely to report due to fear of disbelief or ridicule.²
Despite this, the overwhelming majority of refuge spaces, advocacy services, and outreach programmes are reserved exclusively for women.³

Abused Men in Scotland (AMIS), the only national helpline dedicated to male victims, operates on a fraction of the funding routinely granted to large women’s organisations such as Scottish Women’s Aid or Rape Crisis Scotland. That imbalance is not a reflection of need; it is a consequence of institutional design. The message to male victims is clear: you exist, but you are not our priority.

The Moral and Political Failure

To criticise institutional bias is not to attack women; it is to hold public systems to the ethical standard they profess. A society that claims to value equality cannot maintain a funding structure that excludes one set of victims because acknowledging them might “dilute” another’s budget. Every man who suffers violence or coercion, and is denied help because the system has already decided what a “real victim” looks like, is a casualty of moral cowardice. Every policymaker who hides behind the VAWG framework to avoid difficult conversations about fairness is complicit in the quiet discrimination that results. Compassion that is contingent on gender is not compassion at all.

A Policy Blueprint for Integrity

Reform need not come at the expense of women’s services. It simply requires honesty, data, and moral courage.

Establish a male-victims “by-and-for” funding stream. Create a permanent, ring-fenced grant structure for male-specific services such as AMIS. This ensures parity without cannibalising VAWG budgets.⁴

Mandate transparent reporting. All local-authority contracts for domestic-abuse services should publish annual, sex-disaggregated statistics: who seeks help, who receives it, and who is turned away.⁵

Commissioning standards. Any organisation claiming to offer “support for all” must demonstrate evidence of male-victim pathways, staff training, housing provision, counselling, and advocacy.⁶

Signposting parity. Police Scotland, NHS Scotland, and government websites must list male-specific helplines (AMIS, Men’s Advice Line) with equal prominence to women’s services. Visibility is validation.⁷

Independent review of Equally Safe. The Scottish Government should commission an external review to assess whether Equally Safe’s gendered framing is consistent with the 2018 Act’s neutrality and with the Equality Act 2010.⁸

The Ethical Principle

Justice loses meaning when filtered through ideology. If Scotland’s domestic-abuse law recognises that anyone can be a victim, our public institutions must embody that truth. Empathy is not a finite resource, and compassion is not a competition.

Until funding, policy, and language align with the law, male victims will remain unseen, not because they are few, but because acknowledging them is politically inconvenient.

That is a moral failure unworthy of a civilised nation.

References

Discuss on X with @AccusedScots

← Scotland’s Broken Justice System: How Innocent Men Are Being FailedThe Machinery of Male Guilt: Scotland’s Drift from Justice →