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01-07-2025
SYDNEY/ MELBOURNE: One in three men (32%) aged 18 to 57 years report using emotional abuse towards a partner. One in ten (9%) say they have used physical violence.
These are some of the statistics from the latest report of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Male Health, the Ten to Men study.
The report also shows 2% of men have engaged in sexual abuse towards an intimate partner. Overall, among the 120,000 men surveyed, one in three (35%) said they’d used a form of violence towards an intimate partner in their adult life.
The findings give us important new insights into men’s use of partner violence. It is among the first Australian studies to explore the factors linked with men’s use of partner violence in a large, general community sample.
Being a longitudinal study which surveys the same men at different points in time also gives unique insights into the onset of intimate partner violence and crucially, it points to some key priorities for policy and programs to prevent this violence.
Which men use partner violence?
Young men (aged 18–24) reported the lowest rates of using violence towards an intimate partner.
As the report notes, this is not surprising, as younger men will have had less time in intimate relationships.
Importantly, the use of intimate partner violence increased over time for all age groups between the two surveys.
This suggests previously non-violent men can still start to use intimate partner violence later in their lives. However, it is worth noting that some men’s understanding and willingness to disclose use of violence may have also improved since the earlier survey.
A crucial result of the Ten to Men report is that men’s use of violence does not differ meaningfully according to demographic background.
It didn’t matter whether men were from culturally or linguistically diverse backgrounds, whether they had high or low incomes, whether they lived in cities or regions, and whether they were heterosexual or not. The overall rate of using intimate partner violence was the same.
This is a highly important finding as it shows us that we cannot assume intimate partner violence is more or less likely among particular regions, classes, sexualities or cultures.
What factors contributed to violence?
Perhaps the most important findings from the report are the crucial roles mental health, social connections and positive relationships with fathers and father-like figures, play in men’s risk of using partner violence.
While much research has shown that mental health is linked with men’s likelihood of using violence, this study goes further. Because it surveyed men at different points in time, it can tell us that men who were depressed or experiencing suicidal thoughts in the earlier survey (2013), were more likely to report the onset of using partner violence in the later survey (2022).
This was not the case for men with other mental health concerns, such as anxiety diagnoses, nor for measures of men’s overall life satisfaction.
Another important trend was found for social supports and connection. Those men who described feeling that they had social support around them “all of the time” in the earlier survey, were less likely to have started using intimate partner violence by the time of the later survey. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
