Doctors and nurses should be conscious of how they behave towards patients to avoid being attacked. Some patients at the emergency ward make threats or act violently if they feel insulted.
In order to say anything about gender and violence – apart from counting the number of men and women who abuse or are being abused – we need to look at the meaning behind the violence, according to the Norwegian researcher Hilde Jakobsen.
Men who receive help from crisis centres are mostly satisfied with the help they get. But they fear that nobody will believe that they’ve been abused by a woman.
The majority of men who use violence towards their partner struggle with serious mental issues. We need to look at more than just the power relations between the sexes to understand domestic violence, says researcher.