Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

When the Abuser Dies: What New Hampshire Police Owe Widowed Male Survivors

An abused husband who outlives his wife inherits two roles in one hour: suspect in her death, survivor of her violence. The state trains officers for the first. Nothing prepares them for the second.

Open the New Castle Police Department’s webpage for domestic violence victims and the town tells you, as of this weekend, that “ninety-five percent of the victims of spousal abuse are women.” Drive an hour west to Amherst and the police department’s page says exactly the same thing, word for word, then adds that abusive men are the single best predictor of adult criminality in the next generation. The federal government’s own survey data say about one in three American men experience contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. A New Hampshire man weighing whether to call his local department can read, before he ever dials, that the system does not expect him to exist.

This piece is about the men who never call, and about one man in particular: the abused husband who outlives his abuser. When an abusive wife dies, the surviving husband takes on two roles at once. He is the default focus of her death investigation, because that is how unattended spousal deaths are worked, and rightly so. He is also a domestic violence survivor at the most disorienting moment of his life. New Hampshire law enforcement is trained, equipped, and required in writing to work the first role. The second one goes unassigned. The state’s own documents show exactly how to fix that.

One paragraph, copied across town websites

The New Castle line is not a fluke. It is boilerplate. The identical block of text, down to the estimate that three to four million women are beaten each year in this country, sits on the Amherst Police Department page and on other New Hampshire municipal sites built from the same template. Amherst’s version keeps a companion sentence calling abusive men the best predictor of juvenile delinquency and adult criminality, and pairs it with the Duluth power-and-control wheel, a graphic that names the abuser “him” and the victim “her” throughout. The statistics in that paragraph trace to advocacy material from the 1990s. They have been sitting on town police pages, unrevised, ever since.

Not every department runs it. Some New Hampshire towns link straight to the state coalition’s current language, which describes services for “women, men, youth and families.” So the contradiction is not the state’s; it is local, and it is fixable in an afternoon. But a man reads what is in front of him. When the page that is supposed to help him opens by telling him that victims are women, he closes the tab and files the lesson: this is not for me.

The numbers the doorstep never learns

Start with the scale. The CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reports that about one in three American men experience contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner over a lifetime. Nearly one in four men experience some form of contact sexual violence. About one in fourteen are made to penetrate someone. Roughly one in seventeen are stalked. Among men who experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, 97 percent reported only female perpetrators. The reported impacts are fear, concern for safety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. That comes straight from the CDC’s own page, not from advocacy literature.

Underreporting sits on top of all of it. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, cited in New Hampshire’s own protocol, counted an average of nearly 600,000 unreported nonfatal domestic violence victimizations a year between 2006 and 2015. About a third of victims who stayed silent cited the personal nature of the incident; roughly a fifth said they wanted to protect the offender, a fifth called the crime minor, and a fifth feared reprisal. Those are the general figures. For men, the stigma the same protocol describes stacks on every one of them.

New Hampshire’s own caseload runs through its twelve crisis centers: 11,805 victims of domestic and sexual violence served in 2023, per the state coalition, and more than 20,000 domestic violence victims served in 2018–2019, per the state’s fatality report for those years. That same reporting found domestic violence was a causal factor in 77 percent of New Hampshire’s murder-suicides from 2009 through 2019, and that 38 percent of the state’s domestic violence homicide victims were over age 50. Hold that last number. New Hampshire’s domestic violence caseload skews older, and older marriages end at a funeral home far more often than in a courtroom.

What happens when he calls

The research on male victims and police is consistent and grim. In a study of 302 American men who sought help after sustaining partner violence, police and domestic violence agencies rated among the least helpful supports the men tried, per Douglas and Hines in the Journal of Family Violence. In a four-country study that included the United States, police responded to only 27 percent of the calls the abused men placed, and when officers made an arrest, in three cases out of five they arrested the man who had called, per Lysova and colleagues. Buzawa and Hotaling found officers significantly less likely to tell male victims than female victims about available services, including restraining orders.

A 2022 peer-reviewed interview study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence organized abused men’s expectations of police under a subtheme the researchers took straight from the men’s mouths: “I knew they would take me away.” One participant in that study was arrested five times while, by his account, he was the one being beaten.

Every one of those failures writes a record. The man miscoded as the aggressor on a 2019 call is the same man standing in his kitchen in 2026 when the officers arrive for an unattended death. His file testifies against him before he says a word.

New Hampshire’s rulebook already knows better

Here is the part that should embarrass the doorstep: the state’s written standard is good. The Attorney General’s Model Protocol for Law Enforcement Response to Domestic Violence Cases, fourth edition, 2020, sets a presumptive-arrest policy and carries a dedicated Male Victims section. It names the stigma, the fear of not being believed, and the denial of victim status that keep men silent. It warns officers that a man may look financially independent and in fact hold far less power in the relationship than his partner. And it closes with a sentence every New Hampshire officer should be able to recite: “Interpersonal violence is a crime, regardless of gender, and it is never the victim’s fault.” The protocol says male victims may use the same protective orders and the same crisis center advocates as anyone else.

Read that factor list closely, because it cuts both ways. Applied with care, it is how an officer sees past the surface: past who is crying, who is bleeding less, who is bigger. Applied lazily, “strength and size” becomes the shortcut that puts the 200-pound victim in handcuffs. The protocol is emphatic on one point that gets lost on a chaotic scene: the lethality screen is a safety tool for the victim and must never be used to decide who the aggressor is.

The protocol also spells out what arresting the wrong party costs, and it puts the list in a box: the perpetrator learns the system can be worked and is emboldened to escalate; the real victim can be threatened with re-arrest or with losing custody; an arrest record can strip a victim of housing, jobs, and access to shelter and services; and the victim, disbelieved once, stops calling, which the protocol warns can end in more serious harm or death. The state wrote all of that down. The question is whether it survives contact with a Tuesday-night call.

The protocol imposes affirmative duties too. Officers are to advise victims of their rights and the services available to them, in writing, every time. High-danger victims get a Lethality Assessment screen and a warm handoff, on the spot, to a crisis center advocate. None of that language excludes men. All of it depends on an officer deciding, first, that the man in front of him is a victim at all.

The screen that could help him, and the one that won’t

New Hampshire runs the Lethality Assessment Program, the Maryland-built model the Attorney General has adopted and urges every department to use. An officer who believes a victim faces serious danger runs a short screen; a victim who screens in as high danger is connected, on scene, to a crisis center advocate before the officer leaves. The AG’s office collects quarterly data from departments on how many screens they run, how many victims screen in as high danger, and how many go on to speak with an advocate. It is a strong system, and it is built to catch exactly the person most likely to end up dead.

Here is the catch for the abused husband. The screen is a tool for the person the officer has already identified as the victim. Misidentify him as the aggressor, and he is not screened; he is booked. The one instrument designed to read his danger never gets pointed at him. Whether New Hampshire’s departments are running these screens on men at all is not a matter of opinion. It is data the Attorney General already holds, and it is public.

Then the abuser dies

Most abusive marriages do not end in homicide. They end in divorce, or they end the way most marriages end, with a death certificate. A heart attack. Cancer. An overdose. A suicide. When the abuser is the one who dies, three things happen to the surviving husband in the same week, and New Hampshire has no protocol for any of them.

First, he becomes the investigation. Any competent department scrutinizes the surviving spouse in an unattended death, and it should. But that scrutiny lands on a man whose own police file may already misname him the aggressor from the calls that went wrong years earlier. The truth is now his worst evidence: telling investigators that he was the one being hurt hands them a motive. The better he documented his abuse, the more he looks like a man with a grievance. A system that never believed he was a victim will have no trouble believing he is a suspect.

Second, the exits close. A protective order under RSA 173-B is a civil order against a living defendant; with the defendant dead, there is nothing left for it to restrain and nothing left to enforce. There will be no charge, no prosecution, and no victim-witness advocate attached to a case, because there is no case. New Hampshire’s formal architecture of victimhood runs through a defendant, and his defendant is gone. So is the one venue where he might finally have been believed. Advocates who work with survivors after an abuser’s death, including Nebraska’s state coalition in a piece published last month, describe that closed door as its own loss: the chance of ever being heard or vindicated dies with the abuser.

Third, the grief hits sideways. Clinicians who treat survivors describe the death of an abuser as relief, guilt, anger, and numbness arriving together, a mourning the people around the survivor cannot read. The casseroles show up for a marriage the neighbors never saw the inside of. The widower is expected to grieve a woman the town believes he was lucky to have, and he does grieve her, which shames him, and he feels free, which shames him more. He will not call a domestic violence line, because in his mind the domestic violence is over. The county will call him a widower. Nobody, at any point, will call him a survivor.

Here is what still exists for that man, and what an officer at the scene could tell him in one sentence. New Hampshire’s twelve crisis centers serve every victim and survivor, the statewide helpline at 1-866-644-3574 answers around the clock, the services are free and confidential, and the coalition that runs them says plainly that you do not need to be in crisis to call. A dead abuser does not cancel a living victim’s standing to walk through that door. The state’s own protocol says the services are his. Whether anyone at the death scene says so is the entire question.

What the badge owes the widower

None of this asks an investigator to go soft. Departments owe five specific things, all cheap, most already written into the state’s standards.

• Run both checklists at the death scene. Investigate the surviving spouse fully, and screen him as a victim with the same rigor. Suspicion and referral are parallel tracks; clearing a man of homicide while leaving him alone with the aftermath is half a job.
• Make the aggressor call on evidence, never on build. The protocol’s factors are injuries, fear, history, control. Size and strength are one factor among many. A department where they function as the whole list is manufacturing the miscoded files that poison a man’s next decade of police contacts.
• Hand over the written notice, every time. The protocol requires written notice of rights and services to victims. A dead abuser does not erase a living victim. Put the crisis center number in his hand and document that it happened.
• Build a path to fix the record. A survivor should be able to attach a statement or correction to old reports that misnamed him the aggressor, before those reports shape how a death investigation reads him. Right-to-Know gets the records out of the building; correcting them is on the chief.
• Count him. The new Fatality Review Committee’s first public report lands in October. If it reports victims by sex, and if it examines what happens to the surviving spouse after every death it reviews, New Hampshire will finally own its numbers instead of borrowing national ones, and the town-website problem fixes itself from the top down.

And yes, the webpages. Municipal departments should read their own victim-resources pages this week. Any page still telling the public that 95 percent of spousal abuse victims are women is contradicting the CDC, the Attorney General’s protocol, and the state coalition whose helpline sits a few lines below the claim. New Castle and Amherst are two examples; the template reaches further. Take twenty minutes and fix it.

The stakes are not abstract. A man who spent years absorbing violence he could not name learned one lesson from every system he brushed against: nobody is coming, and calling makes it worse. Then his abuser dies, and the state finally shows up at his house, in numbers, with questions. If the last official interaction of that man’s ordeal is the one where New Hampshire at last finds him fully believable, but only as a perpetrator, the system failed him twice over, and it signed the second failure.

A survivor who outlives his abuser deserves better from the last officers he will ever call. The state already wrote down how to do it. Now do it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

If you are a man being hurt by a partner in New Hampshire, or you were and it has not let go of you, the statewide domestic and sexual violence helpline is 1-866-644-3574. It is free, confidential, staffed around the clock, and it is for you. If any of this lands close to home, that line is a good place to start.

Fact check

Editor’s note: This is an analytical accountability piece. Statistical claims are drawn from the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s 2020 Model Protocol and its Lethality Assessment Program materials, the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, and the peer-reviewed study by Dim and Lysova. The New Castle and Amherst police department pages are quoted from their live text. Graphics were produced by Granite State Report from those sources. No individual case is named; the widowed survivor is a composite drawn from documented patterns, not a specific person.