Men suffer abuse, too

THE EDITOR, Sir: OUR PSYCHOLOGISTS need to tell the entire story. It is not only women and children who are being attacked and whose character is being maligned. Men, too.

So often, like on Sunday, April 2, 2017, I heard an advertisement on radio of a seminar that would be addressing the issue of counselling for women and children who may have been the subject of abuse (by whom I don’t know) and another seminar that should address helping men to find their right place in society.

The conceptualisers of these programmes have gone down the wrong road, assuming and concluding that men, because they are ‘misguided and unfocused,’ are the source of the safety problems that women and children have.

Let me get straight to the point and declare that men often undergo abuse from women, too, and on many occasions the bad experiences that some women and children endure are the backlash of blackmails gone sour.

The difference is that men respond to the abuses in different ways to the types employed by women. Sometimes men stay away from home for as long as they can because of this abuse. Word is not just wind; and worse, women’s words can be so piercingly final that a lot of men try to avoid hearing them by staying at the club or anywhere that is not home. And that is sad.

Unfortunately, there are those men who decide not to back down from words from women, hence the confrontation could become tragic. Now, I am not for one moment supporting abuse by any party, so we must, therefore, be balanced in our approach to problems if we are desirous of arriving at solutions that will work. A’LERROY BROWN llbrown00@gmail.com