Male domestic violence survivors are less likely to seek help than female survivors. A study of 1,200 men finally asked why, and the answer reframes how the problem should be addressed
For decades, research on why male victims of intimate partner violence do not seek help has pointed in one direction. Men fear they will not be believed. They are ashamed to admit they have been victimized by a female partner. Social norms around masculinity make disclosure feel like a threat to their identity. These assumptions have driven public health messaging, shaped support service design, and framed how the problem is discussed in clinical and policy settings.
A new study published in Psychology of Men and Masculinity, an American Psychological Association journal selected as that publication’s July 2026 editor’s choice, has examined the question across one of the largest and most racially diverse samples of male survivors assembled to date. Its primary finding does not fit the standard explanation.
Researchers at George Mason University recruited 1,200 men who had experienced intimate partner violence perpetrated by a female partner. The sample was deliberately constructed to include Black, Latino, and White men in roughly equal proportions, allowing the team to test whether barriers to help-seeking differed across racial and ethnic groups, a question prior research had rarely addressed systematically.
Across all three groups, the most commonly identified barrier was not shame. It was not fear of stigma. It was not worry about being disbelieved or dismissed.
Men consistently reported that they viewed what was happening to them as a private matter. Not something requiring intervention. Not something that crossed the threshold where outside help was appropriate. Simply a private situation between themselves and their partner.
That single finding reshapes the assumption underlying most current interventions for male domestic violence survivors.
What viewing abuse as private actually means
The distinction between shame and privacy matters more than it might appear. Shame is an emotional state: a feeling that one is diminished, exposed, or at risk of social judgment. Privacy is a cognitive category: a belief that a situation belongs within a particular boundary and should not cross outside it.
A man who does not seek help because he is ashamed knows, at some level, that what is happening to him is a problem. He wants help but is prevented from seeking it by anticipated humiliation. Interventions built around this model focus on reducing stigma, normalizing male victimhood, and communicating that help is available without judgment.
A man who does not seek help because he considers the situation private may not be experiencing shame at all. He may not have categorized what is happening as something that rises to the level where external resources are relevant. The question is not whether he can access help without shame but whether he has decided that the situation calls for help in the first place.
“Viewing the abuse as a private matter was the most commonly endorsed barrier across all three racial and ethnic groups,” said lead researcher Lyric Russo of George Mason University. “This suggests that many male survivors may not conceptualize what they are experiencing as something that warrants external intervention.”
The implication for public health messaging is direct. Campaigns that focus on reducing shame and stigma are addressing a real barrier, but possibly not the primary one. The more fundamental step may be helping men recognize intimate partner violence as a category of experience that is not simply private, but is something for which help is both available and legitimate.
How barriers differed across racial and ethnic groups
While the privacy finding was consistent across all three groups, the study identified meaningful differences in secondary barriers that varied by race and ethnicity.
For Latino men, shame emerged as a more prominent secondary barrier than it did for Black or White men. The researchers connect this to cultural norms around masculinity that are particularly strong in some Latino communities, where male identity is more tightly linked to stoicism, strength, and the protection of family reputation. For these men, disclosing domestic violence to an authority figure or formal service carries specific cultural weight beyond the general social stigma around male victimhood.
For White men, difficulty identifying what was happening to them as abuse was a more commonly reported barrier than for the other groups. This pattern is consistent with prior research suggesting that the cultural scripts available to White men for understanding intimate partner violence are more narrowly defined, making it harder to categorize experiences that do not fit the most visible images of domestic violence.
For Black men, distrust of formal systems, particularly law enforcement and social services, emerged as a more prominent barrier than in the other groups. This finding sits within a documented history of differential treatment of Black men by criminal justice and social service institutions, which creates rational grounds for avoiding formal help-seeking even in situations where support is needed.
“These differences suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to outreach and intervention will be insufficient,” Russo said. “Campaigns and services need to be tailored to the specific barriers that are most prominent in the communities they are trying to reach.”
What the numbers reveal about the scale of the problem
Intimate partner violence is consistently underreported by male survivors, but population-level surveys have documented its prevalence. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that roughly one in four men in the United States experiences some form of intimate partner violence during his lifetime, including physical violence, stalking, and psychological aggression.
Despite this prevalence, male survivors are significantly less likely than female survivors to seek help from formal services, to report to law enforcement, or to discuss their experiences with friends or family. The result is a population of men experiencing significant harm with little institutional contact and minimal representation in the data that shapes policy responses.
The 1,200 men in this study were recruited specifically because they had experienced violence perpetrated by a female partner. Their willingness to participate in a research study does not mean they had sought formal help, and for most of them, they had not. The barriers they reported were retrospective accounts of why they stayed silent during or after the abuse.
The racial diversity of the sample is one of the study’s most important methodological contributions. Prior research on male survivors has drawn overwhelmingly from White, college-educated populations, which limits how generalizable the findings are and makes it difficult to identify whether barriers differ meaningfully across communities. By recruiting roughly equal numbers of Black, Latino, and White participants, this study provides a more complete picture of the landscape.
What this means for how services are designed
The domestic violence support system in the United States was built primarily around the needs of female survivors. Shelters, hotlines, legal advocacy programs, and clinical services were developed within a framework that took female victimhood as the default and male perpetration as the norm. This framework has served millions of women and represents one of the most significant public health infrastructure developments of the past half century.
It has also, in most cases, left male survivors without services designed specifically for them. The hotlines that exist often have female-specific framing. The shelters that accept men are rare. The clinical training that prepares providers to recognize and respond to intimate partner violence has historically focused on female survivors.
The practical consequence is that even men who do cross the threshold of seeking help frequently encounter a system that is not built for them. This creates a feedback loop: male survivors do not seek help because the system is not designed for them, and the system is not designed for them because male survivors do not seek help.
Breaking that loop requires addressing both the cognitive barrier the study identified, helping men categorize their experiences as something that warrants outside support, and the structural barrier of services that are not accessible or welcoming to male survivors.
“Understanding the specific cultural and psychological hurdles that different groups of male survivors face is crucial for developing more inclusive, trauma-informed support services,” Russo said. “This is not a population that is well-served by current systems, and that gap has real consequences for the men involved and for their families.”
The limits of what this study can establish
The study’s sample, while large by the standards of research on male survivors, was recruited through online platforms and may not be representative of male survivors broadly. Men who are willing to participate in research about their victimization may differ from men who are not, potentially in ways that affect which barriers they identify and how prominently they report them.
The barriers were measured through self-report, which means they reflect participants’ conscious understanding of what stopped them from seeking help. Some barriers may operate below the level of conscious awareness, meaning the privacy categorization the study identified may itself be a rationalization for shame or other emotional states that men are less able or willing to articulate directly.
The study focused specifically on violence perpetrated by female partners against male victims. The barriers facing male survivors of same-sex intimate partner violence may differ substantially and were not examined here.
What the study establishes clearly, across 1,200 men from three distinct racial and ethnic communities, is that the dominant assumption in the field, that shame and stigma are the primary barriers to male survivors seeking help, needs revision. The most common answer was simpler, more fundamental, and arguably more challenging to address: men did not see what was happening to them as something that belonged outside the private sphere.
The study “Barriers to Help-Seeking Among Male Victims of Female-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence: Insights From Black, Latino, and White Men” was authored by Lyric N. Russo, Jennifer L. Mezzapelle, Chiara Sabina, Kerry A. Lee, Emily M. Douglas, and Denise A. Hines at George Mason University, Rutgers University, and Bryn Mawr College, and published July 1, 2026 in Psychology of Men and Masculinity.
Source: George Mason University. DOI: 10.1037/men0000560
