Ron Collins
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

Unfortunately, emotionally abusive relationships are far more traditional than we would like to believe, and young women are especially at risk of experiencing it.

While this may be true in its way, and I’m not in a position to dispute the claim numerically, your use of “especially” leaves rather broad margins for the reader to conclude that the highest risk or the greatest numbers of abused partners are to be found among young women.

Maybe, maybe not. It isn’t a competition: abuse is abuse.

But what this rather exclusive language tends to uphold, intentionally or not, is the idea that the primary area of concern needs to be toward what women and especially younger ones experience.

As so many other factors also do, and through no fault on the author’s part here, this overall tilt in discourse toward women in abusive relationships obscures the incalculable numbers of fathers who decide for themselves that they can and must endure whatever terms and conditions the mothers of their children care to demand of them, or face losing any place at all in their children’s lives. This is not only abusive of fathers, but also of children, reducing them to their mothers’ hostages, game-pieces and essentially, their property.

Again, my point in raising this matter here is not to go stat-for-stat with anybody. Playing the childish game of “who has it worse?” benefits no one and doesn’t save or protect anyone from anything. But the matter of countless fathers stuck in relationships in which every form of abuses imaginable are committed against both themselves and the children, is meriting of recognition to say the least.

When I see language like “especially young women” or “the vast majority of victims are women”, I feel compelled, both having endured and ultimately escaped such conditions myself at the horrific cost of total loss of contact with my children, and in behalf of all the men still enduring them for their children’s sake, to take issue with it.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s