- guardian.co.uk, Sunday June 15 2003 10.00 BST
The plight of 'battered husbands' - men attacked by violent partners - is to be officially recognised for the first time.
Men in abusive relationships are just as entitled to protection as women, the Government will announce in a major crackdown on domestic violence.
Ministers want to help lift the stigma from males afraid of being considered weak if they admit to suffering.
The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, and Solicitor General Harriet Harman will unveil long-awaited proposals for tougher anti-stalking injunctions against offenders and plans for moves to encourage victims to testify.
Although police in England and Wales receive a 999 call every minute about violence in the home, conviction rates are still alarmingly low.
But while the paper will make clear that women are still overwhelmingly more likely than men to be victims, it will warn that attacks occur 'regardless of gender or sexuality'.
The British Crime Survey of 2001-02 found 19 per cent of those claiming to have been victims of domestic abuse were men, of whom about half were attacked by female partners and the rest by other men.
'The important thing is that we don't ignore that this happens to men as well, even though it is majorly women who suffer,' said one Whitehall source.
While campaigners have long argued that there is a desperate shortage of refuge places for women fleeing abusive relationships, there is currently no domestic violence refuge at all for men in the UK.
One survey in 1999 found while most male domestic violence victims were bigger than their attackers, women were more likely to use weapons such as knives or household scissors to make up for their lack of strength. The subject is, however, highly controversial with women's groups, who say many male victims of domestic abuse are gay men attacked by male partners rather than by women.
Women's Aid points out that a report from the Scottish Executive last year found that men who had been attacked in the home were less likely than female victims to be repeatedly assaulted, less likely to be seriously hurt - and that many of those who said that they had been victim also turned out to be perpetrators of domestic violence in the first place.
This week's White Paper on domestic violence will promise better co-ordination between different agencies such as police, the courts, social services and the NHS to protect adult victims and their children.
Breach of non-molestation orders is expected to be made a criminal offence to stop repeat offenders stalking their ex-partners. Officials have been redrafting molestation orders to ensure that in future they will apply to gay as well as heterosexual couples.
Victims could also be granted anonymity in court in the same way as rape victims, to encourage them to come forward and testify.
A register of offenders convicted of domestic violence is also likely, but women will not be able to use it to vet new partners. Ministers will not publish the names for fear of exposing the victims to whom perpetrators are married, or of encouraging vigilante justice.
Ministers are also backing statutory 'murder reviews' in cases of domestic murders, to establish whether the couple were known to have a history of violence and whether more could have been done to prevent the killing.
