Oasis' former director Patricia Overberg, says she has seen men travel hundreds of miles for services because nobody would help them. She states in this declaration (pdf) that she was subjected to "continuous abuse" by other shelter directors for helping men .
Angelucci believes hundreds of other California fathers and children could join the class-action lawsuit. The current plaintiffs are from Los Angeles, Sacramento, Grass Valley and Sherman Oaks.
- STATISTICS ON MALE VICTIMS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
"[A]pproximately 1.5 million women and 834,732 men are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States" (which means at least 36% of the victims are men), according to the National Violence Against Women Survey, co-sponsored by the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control.
The Sheriff's Department of San Bernardino County, California confirms the above figure on its website and also documents how female DV is serious and is usually not in self-defense.
As for men seeking shelter services in California, this official California government (pdf) report from the California Research Bureau shows, on pages 12 and 14, that at least 4,649 men sought shelter-based domestic violence services in 2003, and one shelter in Los Angeles reported even more male victims than female victims seeking services.
California State University maintains an online bibliography summarizing over 100 studies/analyses which found: "women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners." One of them is the most comprehensive analysis of existing research on DV ever done, which confirmed that women initiate DV as often as men, and also found that 38 percent of physically injured victims are men and that self-defense does not explain the female violence. (Prof. John Archer, "Sex Differences in Aggression Between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review, Psychological Bulletin," November 2000. v. 126, n. 5, p. 651, 664.
In a University of Pennsylvania emergency room survey, 12 percent of men reported being physically assaulted by a female partner within the previous 12 months, often with weapons or hard objects, and the male victims were disproportionately black males with no health insurance.
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