Tendai Ruben Mbofana
We build advocacy groups, launch awareness campaigns, and demand harsh penalties for perpetrators of violence.
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Yet, a glaring blind spot remains at the very heart of our collective conscience.
We treat abuse as an issue defined not by the malicious action, but by the gender of the person who suffers.
When a woman is battered or controlled, society rightfully expresses outrage.
But when a man gathers the courage to speak about physical, emotional, or psychological abuse inflicted by a woman, the response is tragically different.
He is met with laughter, skepticism, or outright mockery.
This dangerous double standard damages men, but its destructive reach goes much further.
Trivializing the abuse of men inevitably breeds indifference towards abuse against women.
Human empathy does not exist in isolated, self-contained compartments.
It operates on a foundation of universal principles.
Empathy relies on the shared belief that human suffering is inherently wrong, regardless of who endures it.
When society selectively grants compassion to one group while openly ridiculing the pain of another, it destroys the moral authority of the entire anti-abuse movement.
You cannot teach a culture to genuinely abhor violence while simultaneously teaching it that certain victims deserve to be mocked.
That hypocrisy corrupts the very concept of justice.
Consider the psychological impact on men who grow up in a culture that treats male suffering as a joke.
A young man who sees female-on-male violence turned into a punchline on television or social media internalizes a cynical lesson.
He learns that pain is not evaluated by its severity, but by the identity of the victim.
When his own experiences of maltreatment are dismissed, his emotional investment in societal causes naturally erodes.
Expecting men to remain fiercely dedicated champions against female abuse while society actively mocks male abuse is absurd.
Human reciprocity does not work that way.
When mutual respect breaks down, solidarity collapses into apathy.
This dynamic creates a toxic cycle of retaliatory indifference.
When men see that their suffering earns no public sympathy, a natural, defensive hardness takes root.
Indifference invites counter-indifference.
Men begin to view campaigns against female abuse not as genuine moral callings, but as one-sided political lectures.
The tragic result is a society where men withdraw their emotional support, becoming cold to the very issues women desperately need them to care about.
By dismissing male victims, society unintentionally creates the exact environment of male detachment that harms women.
The common defense for this double standard often relies on statistics.
Advocates point out that women suffer higher rates of severe physical harm and domestic homicide.
While those figures represent a horrific reality that demands urgent action, using statistical prevalence to dismiss male suffering is a dangerous fallacy.
A victim’s trauma is not lessened simply because others of their gender are statistically safer.
Pain is an individual, human experience.
Reducing moral compassion to a statistical competition teaches people that minor victims do not matter.
Once society accepts that some victims can be ignored, the door is opened to ignoring others whenever it becomes convenient.
Furthermore, ignoring female perpetrators hides the root causes of abusive behavior.
Cruelty, control, and violence are human traits, not exclusively male ones.
Women are capable of toxic manipulation, physical assaults, and psychological torture.
When society refuses to hold abusive women accountable, it sends a message that abusive behavior is permissible under certain conditions.
Normalizing abuse in any form weakens the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior for everyone.
Violence flourishes in environments where standards are flexible.
We cannot defeat abuse by practicing selective compassion.
If we want a society where women are truly safe, respected, and heard, we must build a culture that honors human dignity without exception.
That means taking male victims seriously.
It means shutting down the jokes when a man is raped, degraded, or trapped in an abusive relationship.
It means extending the exact same shelter, support, and validation to every victim of violence.
Demanding an end to violence against women while chuckling at the abuse of men is a hypocrisy that destroys its own objective.
Until we recognize that every human life possesses equal worth, our fight against cruelty will remain incomplete and broken.
It will ultimately remain ineffective.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com