ABSTRACT
Societies respond to abuse in three stages: recognising and defining the topic, collecting evidence to refine understandings and causation, and developing legislation, policy and intervention to address the problem (Gelles, 2010). In my PhD thesis (Bates, 2017), I observed that, with regard to honour-based violence and abuse (HBVA), we have largely bypassed the second stage – collection of evidence to understand the problem – and jumped straight to formulating policy and law responses. This is nowhere truer than with male victims, where there remains a lack of empirical data and understanding of the nature, dynamics and profile of HBVA. This book is thus timely and this chapter presents new empirical data on male victims of HBVA to help develop a solid evidence base to inform interventions, law and policy-making.
