Road Map for Ending Domestic Violence in California: A Life Course Approach to Prevention

Perhaps high school child development education might help put a figurative foot in the door of domestic violence by diminishing, and even eventually stopping, the descendant cycle of abuse.

After all, dysfunctional and/or abusive parents, for example, may not have had the chance to be anything else due to their own parents.

And our various news, entertainment and social media need to consistently tell boys, implicitly and explicitly, they don't need to be aggressive, the stereotypical 'real man', nor that they should conform to potential mates' attraction to the strong, silent type.     

Even in our ‘enlightened’ contemporary times, there remains a mentality out there, albeit perhaps subconscious: Men can take care of themselves against sexual perpetrators, and boys are basically little men.

I've noticed over many years of (mostly Canadian) news consumption that when victims are girls their gender is readily reported as such; however, when they're boys, they're usually referred to gender-neutrally as children.

It’s as though, as a news product made to sell the best, the child victims being female is somehow more shocking than if male.

It might help explain why the book Childhood Disrupted was only able to include one man among its six interviewed adult subjects, logically presuming there were very few men willing to come forward for the book? (I tried contacting the book's author on this matter multiple times but received no reply.)   

Could it be evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mindset?

After all, that relatively so few men suffered high-scoring ACE trauma is not a plausible conclusion, however low in formally recorded number they may be.