“The entire system is not designed for men”: how America silences and fails to help Native American men who survive domestic violence

Four in five Native American men have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime, a National Institute of Justice report found. Shutterstock

By Norma Hilton
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

Photographs of the backs of scratched hands, bloody lips and bruised eyes cover campaign posters and Facebook newsfeeds in October, domestic violence awareness month. The domestic violence experienced by Native American women makes headlines. It captures the attention of national and international law and policymakers.

But a 2016 report from the National Institute of Justice found that 4 in 5 Native American men have experienced some form of domestic violence in their lifetime, too. That’s more than 1.4 million men in the U.S. This kind of violence can be insidious for both men and women - creeping from a foul word to severe physical violence and sometimes death. Still, many press outlets neglect to report on this phenomenon.

“As recent research on family violence points out, domestic violence is not a gender problem. It’s a human problem,” said Alexandra Lysova, associate professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University.

The lasting mark of colonization

This kind of violence originated from colonization, according to Lori Jump, executive director at StrongHearts and Citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Native American men’s lack of facial hair, their use of body adornment, their sharing of household duties and property with women were deemed weak by colonizers. This difference in customs led to the belief that Native Americans were inferior to them. With the arrival of more European colonizers, came the enforcement of European gender roles.

“It really was through colonization that the Europeans brought in the idea that women were property, and you could do with them what you will,” Jump said. “And then I think the other biggest impact came from the boarding school era where our children were taken from us and they were raised in institutions. So, they weren’t raised in a family that modeled healthy relationships. And so, we’ve lost that for generations.”

Pupils at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. 1900. Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.

Since the boarding school era, researchers have found a vicious cycle in Native American communities. Native Americans experience higher rates of child abuse than the general population. A 2014 study found one in 30 children under the age of 14 were abused. Surviving abuse or witnessing intimate partner violence in the home increases their risk of experiencing intimate partner violence.

“And our people who experience that still don’t talk about it,” Jump said. “And until you really acknowledge what has happened, what’s happened to you, what you’ve been through and the impact of that, we can’t really heal.”

For many Native Americans, it’s difficult to heal from the lasting marks of colonization and cultural abuse. Even now Native Americans are belittled, hearing racist stereotypes directed at them. To make matters worse, almost 90% of sexual violence experienced by Native American men is perpetrated by an interracial partner. It can be incredibly traumatic and isolating. On average, Native American men reported rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, at triple the national average. Exposure to domestic violence, specifically sexual violence, has also been associated with increased anxiety symptoms among Native American men between 1997 and 1999.

“Cultural abuse happens more often than is reported,” Jump said. “And there’s really been a lack of education around that. And I think people don’t know what to do about it.”

“Men don’t cry, men don’t get hurt”

Some experts argue the gender paradigm, which is threaded throughout every aspect of modern society, plays a great role in how domestic violence shapes lives. Women are seen as victims. Men are seen as perpetrators. The medial grey area is lost to stereotypes.

Beyond that, many men have internal barriers that make it difficult, if not impossible, to reach out. In a 2020 study conducted by Lysova, men mentioned four main reasons for not seeking help: They said they were “blind to the abuse”, they were adamant on “maintaining [the] relationship”, they were concerned about their “male roles” and they made “excuses” for the abuse they faced.

“The men I interviewed during the study told me, ‘Oh, they tried. See what happened to them? They were arrested. Their children were taken away. They lost their homes,’” Lysova said.

One of the men in the study, Rory, experienced domestic violence at the hands of his wife. Of the 11 participants from the U.S. he was the only Native American man in Lysova’s study. He said even when things deteriorated, he stayed with his wife for one main reason -- his son.

“[I was] trying to stay in the situation for my son and because I told this woman I loved her and I wanted to stay married to her,” he said.

He was also part of a group of men who had a desire to fix their relationships. In the study, he said, “I thought this woman has been through twenty years of therapy about problems with her father when she was a kid, so if we can make it work, if I can help her, we can have a wonderful life."

StrongHearts was established in March 2017 as a solution to what was seen as glacial strides in the Native American community to address domestic violence against men. A domestic, dating and sexual violence helpline, the organization offers culturally appropriate support and advocacy for American Indians and Alaska Natives. They received more than 4,000 phone calls in the last fiscal year.

Men made just 16% of those calls.

Jump says this was most likely because survivors were sheltering in place with their abusive partner and it was difficult to reach out. In reality, she thinks the violence probably worsened.

“Very low rate of contacts that identify as male reach out to us, which I think is not unexpected,” Jump said. “I think for men to reach out, the stigma around that is still so high, so it’s not unusual that for the past year, that’s what the rate was.”

This kind of data in the Native American community is new. Native Americans in the U.S. have been described as the “Asterisk Nation” because “an asterisk, instead of a data point, is often used in data displays … on American Indians and Alaska Natives.” Domestic violence surveys and police data do not show the number of times Native American men have been victimized. This is particularly troublesome – many survivors continue facing repeated bouts of violence from early childhood to teen years to adulthood.

“So many people still subscribe to the notion that ‘men don’t cry, men don’t get hurt, men are strong,’ right?” Lysova said. “All of those ‘male’ traits that people encourage in their young boys make it hard to reach out when the men are in a bad situation or when they do need help.”

“The entire system is not designed for men”

Most studies, too, exclude male survivors of domestic violence. This is because academics, law enforcement and even friends and family tend to perpetuate what Professor Lysova classifies as the gender paradigm.

“Even to study this violence against men issue is difficult. Many researchers feel discouraged to work on this topic because they anticipate many barriers. They may not get grants. Publications may be rejected because the reviewers simply don’t want to see this work. They may get ridiculous questions…one reviewer asked us, ‘when you talked to the male victims in your study, how did you make sure they did not lie to you?’”

When survivors reach out for help, they are met with ridicule, disbelief and bias. In a 2010 study, almost half the men did not find reaching out to a domestic violence agency helpful. Almost all of them believed the agencies were biased against men. Even worse, some of the men were accused of being the batterer in the relationship. This pattern repeats in the mental health sphere. A 2004 study found, ‘psychologists rated male perpetrated behaviors as more abusive and severe than a female’s use of the same actions’.

“This is a form of re-victimization which makes it less likely men will come forward again,” according to Justin Trottier, national executive director at the Canadian Centre for Men and Families. Lysova agrees. In law enforcement, the gender paradigm affects both self-reported surveys and police data.

“For the incident to be reported to the police, it should be seen as a crime. And men don’t see what happens to them as a crime. They often don’t even call it abuse…When it’s a man who’s killed by an intimate partner, people tend to think, ‘what did he do to deserve that?’ rather than, ‘what happened in that relationship?’...The entire system is not designed for men.”

There are other complex external barriers for male survivors. Taking an abuser to court can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 in the U.S. For many Native Americans, who experience rampant rates of poverty — twice that of the national rate and highest of all races or ethnicities — it is extremely difficult to acquire legal help. And it’s rarely successful.

Current research found that ‘men were less likely to receive a protection order from their female partner’. And if they are successful in leaving with their children, there’s generally a negative attitude towards them.

“This is the classic Catch-22 for male victims who are fathers,” Trottier said. “If these men leave their abusive partner, they are forced to leave their children behind. Their children may then be themselves subject to abuse, and the fathers may lose all access to their children given the biases in our family courts.”

“The bottom line is: no. They haven’t done enough.”

In 2020, the Department of Justice awarded over $103 million to Violence Against Women Tribal Government Programs. The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians received $900,000 – the largest amount awarded last year. So did Arizona, California, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Nebraska and Michigan. The 574 federally recognized tribes are being served by just 58 tribally centered shelters.

“Colonization and the on-going oppression of Native Americans has made it very difficult to reach out to government funded programs,” Jump said.

So, has the U.S. government done enough?

“The bottom line is: no. They haven’t done enough,” she said.

In 2019, the U.S. government spent 28% of their spending on OVW programs. This rose to 39% in 2020. Source: Department of Justice.

A lack of coordination between federal, state, local and Native American authorities also means there are issues with jurisdiction and eventually, prosecution. The 2013 Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, covers domestic and dating violence. The law does not cover crimes committed outside of Native American lands; crimes between two non-Native Americans; two strangers, including sexual assaults or crimes committed by a person who ‘lacks sufficient ties to the tribe, such as living or working on its reservation’.

In certain states like North Dakota, where incidents of domestic violence on Native American lands are not recorded. In others, like Alaska, where Alaskan Native Americans face extremely high rates of violence, just one tribe meets the legal definition of ‘Indian Country’.

Of the 574 federally recognised tribes, just 27 tribes meet the requirements to prosecute under the extended jurisdiction.

And while this law can extend to cover men facing sexual violence, individual organizations have not been successful in obtaining equal coverage for men.

“We know that jurisdiction has complicated things. If you’re a non-Native perpetrator who harms someone in Indian country, tribes have not had the ability to prosecute those cases,” Jump said. “So, there’s no deterrent. If there’s nothing they can do to you, what’s to stop you from continuing?”

Depending on where the crime happened, the victim, the perpetrator is and what type of crime occurred, a different agency takes jurisdiction – usually the FBI or Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) refer incidents to the U.S. Attorney's Office (USAO), who decides whether the matter should be prosecuted or the case can be declined.

In 2019, about 61% of declinations involved physical assaults, sexual assaults and sexual exploitation. Most of these were brought forward by the BIA. These numbers have been fairly consistent throughout the last two decades. In fact, they’ve been steadily rising. Between 2005 and 2009, USOAs declined to prosecute half of over 9,000 matters. Two-thirds of them were of a sexual nature.

But this jurisdictional labyrinth leaves gaping holes for survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence. “One of the things we’ve been pushing for is the inclusion of sexual violence in that restoration of jurisdiction,” Jump said. “That’s not likely any time soon. But that is what we’re fighting for. It’s a fight to get that to Congress.”

“Having education out there that’s coming from journalists and investigative pieces”

Part of that fight includes battling many people’s idea of domestic violence. Journalism is one way through. But sometimes the coverage can take an indolent approach.

“There is a bit of a vicious circle here. Media portrays domestic violence as exclusively female victimization,” Trottier said. “Governments then use this as cover for funding only women's programs. The existence of programs exclusively for women fuels media coverage that can then easily and safely ignore other victims.”

Organizations like StrongHearts try to break that cycle. But their reach is limited. Since starting in March 2017, the organization has spent just one year on a specific sexual violence helpline. Jump says it takes a long time for someone to become a trusted resource for Native Americans.

“We certainly do our best to get out there to let people know that services are available. But the other piece of that is having education out there that’s coming from journalists and investigative pieces. I think that’s critical,” Jump said. “I really want our people to know that they’re not alone.”

This story was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that seeks to inform, educate and empower Mississippians in their communities through the use of investigative journalism. Sign up for our newsletter.