come closer. tell me more.

marion-nettle:

byker:

friendlyangryfeminist:

“I don’t see you guys fundraising or creating shelters for male survivors. I see you mentioning them as abstracts, as theories.”

You act like people can snap their fingers and make a shelter for men. You can’t, it takes time and money that most people don’t have. A successful shelter has tons of private donations and government funding. 

It’s very difficult to get people to support a men’s shelter. The government rarely, (if at all) fund men’s shelters, there’s only so many private donations, and those few people who are donating smaller amounts can only give so much.

If people are taught that women are the vast majority of domestic abuse victims (like they’re told by you and feminist organizations) they will give their money to a woman’s shelter, not a men’s. By depicting women are the only or the most victims, you’re doing a disservice to male victims and the few shelters there are.

Actually there was an attempt at a fundraiser for a mens shelter not that long ago.

http://www.indiegogo.com/geosafehouse

It didn’t go so well as you can see.

in my city, it is way way way way waaaaaaay easier for a man to get shelter than for a woman, whether they are in a dv situation or not. my city has 7 shelters: 3 take women with or without kids, 2 take families with kids, and 2 take single men only. in my 6-month tenure as a 211 specialist, i took 1-2 calls per day from people who needed emergency shelter - that is, they had nowhere to sleep that night. about half of the callers were parents with kids (mostly moms but a few married couples), and the other half was split pretty evenly between single men and single women.

i never had a single man denied shelter - the two men’s shelters had a much higher capacity than the women’s and family shelters. sure, the men were on cots in a dorm, but they had food and shelter. the parents with kids got shelter maybe 60% of the time, and if they couldn’t get it, we tried to get their kids into respite care. the single women got shelter maybe 20% of the time. there were just too many women who needed it and too few beds available.

for domestic violence cases, there is one shelter just for women, and that shelter was too often entirely full. when women in dv situations couldn’t get into that shelter, we tried the other shelters, which were also usually full. men in dv situations could always find shelter. not a men’s dv shelter, but shelter with food, clothing, a bed, case management, and support.