The Male Victims New Hampshire Doesn’t Count

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Nearly half of American men report psychological abuse by a partner, federal data says the partners who assault or stalk men are usually women, and New Hampshire law now names coercive control for what it is — yet the state still treats a battered man as a punchline.

Nearly half of American men, 48.8 percent, have been on the receiving end of psychological aggression from an intimate partner at some point in their lives. That is the federal government’s own figure, from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The number for women is 48.4 percent. The two are, for every practical purpose, the same. One of them gets read into legislation, printed on brochures, and repeated at rallies. The other sits in a CDC table almost nobody opens.

New Hampshire spent the last year widening what its domestic-violence law will recognize as abuse. Since July 2, 2026, coercive control, the slow and deliberate work of monitoring, isolating, humiliating, and controlling another person, has been written into RSA 173-B. The statute is indifferent to the sex of the victim. The world around it is not. A man being hollowed out by a controlling partner in Laconia or Franklin can walk into the same courthouse, cite the same law, and win the same order as anyone else. Most never will, because everything outside that courthouse has told him he is either lying or a joke.

This is not a claim that men have it worse. They do not. Women are harmed more often, more severely, and with far deadlier results, and the numbers below say so without flinching. It is a claim that a system built to see one kind of victim has trained itself not to see the other, and that the price of the blind spot is paid by real people in this state.

The number nobody repeats

Start with the scale. More than one in six men in the United States, about 20.7 million, have been subjected to contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, according to the CDC’s most recent survey data. Roughly one in seven men have faced physical violence from a partner. About one in eight men have survived that kind of abuse and carried at least one lasting effect from it: injury, fear for their safety, a night in the hospital, symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Then the piece the public conversation skips entirely. When the CDC asks who is doing this to men, its own answer, in category after category, is women. Roughly one in fourteen men has been forced to penetrate someone against his will; of those men, 79 percent reported only female perpetrators. Among men who were sexually coerced, 82 percent named only women. Among men who suffered rape, physical violence, or stalking specifically at the hands of an intimate partner, 97 percent had only female perpetrators. These are not talking points from an advocacy shop. They are the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

None of it erases the larger truth that women bear the heavier load of intimate-partner violence. Both facts fit in the same sentence. A man can be a rare kind of victim and a real one at the same time.

What coercive control is

The 48.8 percent figure is not about bruises. The CDC files it under psychological aggression, which it splits into two halves. First, expressive aggression: the name-calling, the humiliation, the being made small in front of other people. Second, coercive control, the behavior meant to monitor, isolate, and dominate. Cutting a partner off from friends and family. Tracking his phone and his money. Deciding where he can go and who he can see. Threats held over his head to keep him compliant. It is abuse designed to leave nothing a camera can capture.

Faced with a partner like that, the instinct is to reach for a label — she’s a narcissist, he married a sociopath. This is where accuracy earns its keep. “Sociopath” is not a clinical diagnosis; the manual calls it antisocial personality disorder, and most people who abuse a partner do not have it. The strongest recent research is more careful and more useful than the pop-psychology version. A 2025 study in the journal Personality and Mental Health by Nicholas Day and colleagues found that pathological narcissism was only weakly tied to coercive control and not directly tied to abuse at all. What moved the needle was the severity of personality dysfunction: among partners already high in narcissistic traits, the more disordered their functioning, the more coercive control and violence appeared.

Translation: no diagnosis reliably predicts an abuser. What predicts harm is the pattern of control itself, and deep personality pathology raises the odds without being the whole story. That pattern is not a male trait. Women run it too, and the CDC data on who abuses men says they run it often.

The law caught up. The state started counting.

On paper, New Hampshire has already fixed the part it can fix. House Bill 1522, signed by Governor Kelly Ayotte on July 2, 2026, took effect that day as Chapter 230. It made coercive control a factor courts may consider in weighing “abuse” under the state’s civil protective-order law and, for the first time, defined the term in statute.

The wording matters. The abuse definition reaches conduct by a current or former partner or a household member, and the chapter opens by declaring that “any person” may seek relief. There is no filing fee. A judge can order no contact, order the abuser to stay away from home and work, order firearms surrendered, and set temporary custody, with a final order lasting up to a year and enforceable in any state. A man qualifies on the same terms as a woman. He always did; now the statute names the specific harm most likely to be used against him.

Be honest about the friction, too. The definition will be tested case by case, which is how new law usually works. And for anyone bracing to argue that recognizing male victims throws open the door to fake claims: the same chapter makes filing a petition with false allegations of abuse a crime. The guardrail is already in the text.

Why men don’t call

The law is the easy part. The reason those 20.7 million men are largely invisible has almost nothing to do with statutes and almost everything to do with what happens when a man opens his mouth. Research on male victims, led in the United States by Denise Hines and Emily Douglas and echoed by studies out of the United Kingdom and Europe, keeps landing on the same wall. Men are less likely than women to seek help at all. Shame, fear of ridicule, and the drilled-in belief that a man should be able to handle his own house keep most of them silent.

When they do reach out, too many are treated as suspects. In studies of men who sought help, participants described being asked what they had done to provoke the violence — the assumption sliding, before anyone checked, from victim to instigator. A man who calls for help and gets interrogated learns the lesson fast: stay quiet.

The damage is not abstract. In Hines and Douglas’s U.S. sample of men who sought help for partner abuse, almost 60 percent scored above a clinical cutoff for post-traumatic stress disorder. Their work and a 2025 research review link male victimization to depression, high blood pressure, heavier drinking and drug use, and suicidal thinking. The review found the deepest wounds ran through fatherhood — men describing false accusations of abuse, or being cut off from their children as a tactic of control. And the culture keeps the wound open by treating a battered man as comedy, which teaches the next one to keep his mouth shut.

This is not a zero-sum fight

None of this takes anything from women. The federal picture is unambiguous that women are the majority of intimate-partner-violence victims and absorb the worst of it, and any honest account has to say so. Recognizing male victims does not move one dollar, one shelter bed, or one advocate away from the women who need them. New Hampshire’s twelve crisis centers already provide free, confidential services to all victims and survivors. The statute already protects everyone. The gap is not in the law or the funding. It is in the reflex.

It is the officer, the neighbor, the friend who hears a man say his wife controls the money, tracks his phone, and screams him down until he apologizes for things he did not do, and files it under “henpecked” instead of “coerced.” New Hampshire changed the words in July 2026. Whether anyone listens when a man finally uses them is the next test, and it gets answered one courthouse, one crisis line, one returned phone call at a time.

The state finally has a word for what is being done to these men. The men are still waiting for the rest of us to use it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the primary source named in the fact-check table before publication; items marked ATTRIBUTED reflect peer-reviewed findings or reporting by another outlet, credited in place. National prevalence figures are national, not New Hampshire-specific; the 48.8% psychological-aggression figure comes from the 2010 NISVS Summary Report and is presented as a 2010 estimate. This piece is built entirely on documentary and published sources; it carries no on-the-record New Hampshire interview, which is the single thing that would lift it from a strong analytical piece to reported accountability — a Lakes Region advocate or a New Hampshire family-law attorney on the record would do it. This article discusses abuse, trauma, and suicide; if any of it describes your life, the help numbers are in the story. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.