The Ben Mulroney Show - Intimate Partner Violence Impacts Men Too

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

On today's episode of "The Ben Mulroney Show," Ben welcomes Justin Trottier, Founder and CEO of the Canadian Centre for Men and Families. The Canadian Centre for Men and Families is a mental health and social service hub delivering programs and services for boys, men, fathers and their families. A recent report by Statistics Canada states that the overall past-year prevalence of intimate partner physical assault is equal between men (2.5%) and women (2.5%). If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube --⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at ⁠https://x.com/BenMulroney⁠ Insta:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok:⁠ ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Enjoy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Standard messaging and data rates may apply. Last week, we had a really important conversation about services for women who were leaving abusive relationships and intimate partner violence. And while that conversation was happening, Danny Vaughn, my producer, was fielding calls from men who wanted to highlight that this is not something that happens exclusively to women, that men do in fact find themselves in a raft of abusive scenarios. And she made a commitment in that moment to make sure that we could tell that story too. and I commend her and thank her for making this happen. I want to be very clear to our listeners. I am not somebody who will ever let anybody ascribe words to me or sentiment to me that I do not say.

And highlighting abusive relationships in the way that we are about to in no way minimizes or downplays the violence that women feel at the hands of the men in their lives. So I want to be clear on that. And I'm not going to say it again. But unfortunately, in 2026, you have to put that out there or you are pilloried. And so on that note, please welcome to the show, Justin Trottier. He's the founder and CEO of the Canadian Center for Men and Families. So Justin, welcome. Well, thank you very much.

And I would echo the same disclaimer. And that is certainly the way we operate as well from a very inclusive point of view, welcoming both men and women and anybody who has experienced trauma or abuse and providing them whatever support we can. So you're not just the CEO, but you're the founder. So what precipitated the founding of the Canadian Center for Men and Families? Well, just looking out there at the experiences of so many friends and family members and not just myself, but others around me who were instrumental in founding the organization, we discovered that there's a significant lack of supports for men, boys, fathers, and their families in crisis. Everything from mental health supports

to males who are struggling with mental health disorders, to family breakup, not a lot of support for the father in the context of, say, a separation or divorce, keep the father and child relationship strong, young males who both commit a disproportionate amount of violence, but also are on the receiving end of a lot of that violence in our community, not having the resources that they need when they're struggling. So throughout the age from birth to senior age, there are some serious gaps in supports for men and boys, and we wanted to help to do something positive about that. In popular culture, oftentimes abuse towards men is either a joke or it's played for laughs or it's minimized or it's a or or it is it's it's explained away by at least in in the pop

culture i'm thinking of this top of mind it's played as a reaction to something terrible the man did i have to believe that what you hear the stories you hear belie that completely yes i mean on a daily basis we operate two first of their kind emergency shelters for fathers and children who have suffered domestic abuse. There is really, other than what we provide in that space, very few options for these families. And as a result, we are inundated with calls for support because the reality is very different from what people believe about domestic violence.

So peel back the curtain for us. What is the reality? Well, if we look at, I don't want to just number crunch with you here, but if you look at Statistics Canada, we've known this since 1999 when the statistics candidate started asking as part of the long-form questionnaire questions about domestic violence. And we have found from 1999 through to 2024 the last time they did this, that roughly similar numbers of men and women have experienced not just any form of domestic violence, but even the more severe forms of domestic violence, that there is a similarity between the experiences

of men and women. Sociological, criminological research supports that as well. So from the scholarly point of view, we've known that for a long time. but the public consciousness of this and the policymaker consciousness of this, unfortunately, is quite a bit behind that. So there are similarities, but I'm not somebody who believes that the experience of being a man in society and being a woman in society are identical, I think. If everything works well, they're complementary, right?

So I have to believe that the impact of abuse on a man is different than the other way around. I have to believe that the reason someone leaves, the reason someone stays are probably different as well. There are certainly differences in terms of the modality of the abuse, but what we find, for example, is that while men being on average physically stronger than women may do more damage with their bodies, women end up using weapons more often than men. When you look at the outcomes, though, when you look at everything from PTSD experienced by victims to visits to the hospitals to physical injuries, they are actually quite similar between men and women. The differences are in the

supports that the genders get. There are no government supported shelters for fathers and children. So we're often actually separating fathers and their children in the case where they have to flee from a violent or abusive mother, they are often separated from each other, which is tragic and unnecessary. If we had more supports for that father-led family, we could keep those individuals together. And so we're trying to provide those sorts of solutions. But it must be difficult. You're pushing against a tide where, again, like I said, everything is so binary in the world that we're living in, that you pushing for those supports, somebody would, somebody

would say, oh, you're trying to minimize what is happening to women. How do you walk that line? And you must, by the way, have open lines of communication with groups that do what you do for women. Before we even opened the shelter, we actually worked with a number of women's organizations and even the Ministry of Community and Social Services, which supports women's shelters, to understand how women's domestic violence shelters operated and to find allies within the violence against women's sector. We have created advisory boards, we've created operational steering committees to support our work, and we draw women from leading feminist organizations to work with us. It's a very inclusive approach. And I also just say a lot of

mothers are the ones who make the contact first with our organization on behalf of male loved ones. So it's very inclusive in terms of the leadership, all the way to the clients themselves. It's not a women versus men thing. It's a women plus men thing. And that initial outreach, I've had enough conversations to know how hard it is for a woman to leave a relationship. And in a lot of cases, it comes down to a woman not having control over her money, staying to protect the kids, not having a plan, not having a place to land, not having a job, all that stuff, right? For men, and this is just a guess on my part, I think the initial outreach would be different. just because admitting that I'm in an abusive relationship and the woman in my life is the one abusing me is a pretty big mountain to climb. No, totally. And there's there's a different way that

we socialize men and women. You made a point earlier that men and women do have different experiences. One experience is we teach men, often we give them negative responses when they seek help. We say it's not manly to do that, take it like a man. Some cases men are calling police for help. The police are showing up and they're not believing the man. They're treating him. like the perpetrator. Give you one example, Blake Bibby. Blake Bibby, who is a man in Thornhill, who was calling the police on a regular basis for help.

The police didn't take it seriously. In one case, they actually took him to the hospital because he had injuries. Then they arrested him as though he was the victim. Blake Bibby ended up being murdered by his female partner. So domestic homicides, they do happen. They do affect women more often than men, absolutely. But there are cases where a man is being murdered

and tragically in that domestic context and then not having the support, the not being believed by the police or other agencies, it's a form of re-victimizing of these men. And where you must have, you must have the experience now to identify, somebody may reach out and then go back to their partner. Are you, do you check in on that person?

How does it work? If somebody comes in and says, I need some help, but next thing you know, they're back in that dangerous environment. what do you feel your organization's responsibility is towards that person? So it's very difficult, and that does happen a lot. That happens to female victims, of course, on a regular basis, too. We provide sort of non-judgmental, trauma-informed wraparound support, which not to get into the weeds too much,

but that means that once somebody becomes a client of ours, whether they move into our residential home or they get other supports that we provide, counseling or other legal supports, we provide ongoing case management. We track that family. We check in regularly. If there's any concerns, we will do safety checks to see how they're doing. We don't just leave them on their own.

We're very concerned and we continue to monitor that situation. Well, we're going to continue this conversation. It is an important one. So don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney show. Sometimes we get so focused on one aspect of a problem and we give it all of our attention that we don't pivot our perspective just a little bit to see how deep it is. And in my short conversation with Justin Trotier, the founder and CEO of Canadian Center for Men and Families, it's pretty clear that the intimate partner violence and violence in the home and, you know, it's broader than how we typically talk about it.

And Justin has stuck around and I thank him so much for doing so because we were talking about the concept of mutually violent couples. And you said that that is the source of a lot of violence in the home. Probably a majority of domestic violence takes the form of mutually violent couples. And so when we look at domestic violence purely through a gender binary lens, one gender does all the perpetration. The other one is purely victims. We miss the chance to intervene regardless of who on a given day is the victim or the perpetrator. We can break those cycles. Another kind of cycle I would mention is the transmission of violence between the generations.

Yeah. We know from research that if you've grown up in a violent home, you are just unfortunately and tragically more likely to end up as an adult either committing or being again a victim of violence in your own future home. Yeah. And so again, breaking that cycle, regardless of the gender today, it can it can have effects to reduce violence against men and women into the future. Talk to me about the work that you do with boys and men as it relates to violence and

it's intersection with so many of the other problems that have been identified for that gender, you know, higher rates of incarceration, drug use, mental health issues, suicide. That, I mean, I don't even know what my question is. It's sort of just a statement that I want to throw at you. No, but that is the big question, which is when we started the organization, we were very alive to the fact that these issues, these men and boys' health issues, they intersected in profound and complicated ways, and you've just named many of the big ones, we're very gratified to see the federal government currently undertaking Canada's first national strategy for men in Boy's Health and looking at how those deep social problems do intersect.

Male suicide is 75% of all completed suicides. Homelessness is a majority male. Drug and substance abuse, overdose deaths are largely male. Not entirely, but these are all cases where they disproportionately affect men. We often don't talk about social problems that disproportionately affect boys and man the way we do women and girls. But as you said, if we're going to deal with intractable social problems, we can't ignore any particular population or perspective. And to be fair, I don't think people are necessarily doing that on purpose.

Like I said, we've gotten on my show, whenever when IPV comes up, I have a certain thing in my head. And I get on that track. and I take that the conversation train to the conclusion. And I don't see out the windows. But unless you do, then you're not going to really solve the whole problem. And to your point, unless we recognize that there are unhealthy dynamics at play that go beyond the binary that you brought up, if we don't deal with those, those are left to fester and there will still be residual violence,

even if you do entirely deal with IPV from men perpetrated on women. No, no, exactly. You just, you can't leave any population unsupported and think that in a society where we all live and work on a daily basis together, that the problems of women are not going to affect men and children. The problems of men are not going to affect women and children. And that's why I should say our organization is highly inclusive. And in fact, many of the calls we get for support, they're from women. They're from female loved ones. They're from mothers or daughters or sisters or female friends who are desperate to find life-saving support for the, suffering men or boys in their lives. You know, I'm not, I'm accused of never saying anything positive about the liberal government, which is not true. But here's another example to disprove that theory. This is an idea whose time is absolutely common.

You talked about the first ever men and boys' health strategy. It's scheduled for release late this year, early next year. And the core objectives are to create supportive and safe environments, challenge harmful stereotypes, reduce stigma, and encourage men and boys of all. all ages to seek help. So I think this is this is a wonderful thing. But let's let's stick with that last one. Encourage men and boys of all ages to seek help. What are some signs? If there's someone listening right now, what are some things that that you would say if this is happening to you, or if you've seen signs of early warning signs of X, Y or Z, you may want to consider

seeking help? You know, I think there are some differences between men and women. We often hear that men act out with anger as, you know, kind of their go-to emotional response when they're in crisis. I think maybe that's overstated, but there's probably some truth to that. But I think a lot of the time the signs are similar, but we don't have in our mind the possibility that there could be a domestic abuse situation at home. So a man not showing up to work. If a woman missed work repeatedly, people might think if there's some kind of family crisis. We might not think that for men.

Obviously, if there are signs of physical injury, we might think a woman is being abused. We might not think that for a man. I'm not sure the signs are that different. I think our minds have to be a little bit different and open to that possibility. Well, you know, one of the things we hear often of the abuse of men is, you know, if they've got it in them, it's hard to kill that beast, right? And if someone, if a man finds himself in an abusive relationship, would it be recommendable for them to go to therapy first?

Or is it about taking yourself out of that situation? Yeah, I mean, here we get into areas of therapeutic recommendations, which I'm probably not and not terribly qualified to comment on. In general, though, you know, lifting yourself out of a situation where you are in a cycle that is harming you and maybe there's even a risk you might respond by harming others, that's probably an absolute necessity. Whether it means permanently separating is where therapy is helpful to determine if there is a healing process that involves your partner or doesn't. and it's so case dependent. Have you seen cases of people either mutually abusive or a woman on man, where they've found their way back to each other on a more healthy footing? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that's good. And in the women's or feminist sort of research community, which we're also very much a part of, there's more talk about maybe removing women, putting them into shelters and permanently disengaging from the family is not always the answer. Maybe we do need to look at healing paths that can rebuild that family, obviously, on a healthy footing where that woman is absolutely no longer in any kind of danger.

I think it's so dependent on the particular family dynamic, the history of abuse, whether it was a one-off versus this is how that individual routinely handles disagreements is through abuse and violence. and that's something that an individual has to decide for themselves what makes sense. I'm a best practices guy and I always ask the question, is there a model somewhere in the world that's doing this either best or better that we could emulate? In fact, we don't have to go too far for that. Quebec is further along than we are in Ontario or I would say in much of the rest of the country. There there's actually a network of shelters for fathers and children.

They're called Maison Oxygen Oxygen House. And they're all over the province. And in fact, the Quebec government did their own provincial strategy on men and boys' health. And I think it was maybe one of the motivations for the federal government to do what they're doing now. And they ended up assigning some significant funding to these shelters that I was describing and also to other more kind of mental health-focused supports for men and boys. So our next door provincial neighbor is actually a good model. That's good. Well, listen, I think we've covered a lot.

I wish we could talk more. And I hope you know the door is always open if you want to continue this conversation. Founder and CEO of the Canadian Center for Men and Families, Justin Trotty, thank you. If people want to find you, if people want to find you to support you, if people want to find you because they need your help, how can they do so? Websites the easy way to find us, which is men and families.org, and you can get the support that you need there or support us. Well, I thank you very much. A really important conversation, like I said, rounding out a larger problem. But unless you attack the whole thing holistically, you're not going to solve it entirely. don't think. So I thank you. And I thank you for the hard work you do. I can't imagine it's

happy work every day, but it must be fulfilling. We're making people's lives better and that keeps us going. Well, thank you very much. Hi, it's Alan Cross. Here to announce two more legs of my national speaking tour. November will be busy with stops in Halifax, Sydney and Truro Nova Scotia. Then it's Waterloo, Hamilton, St. Catharines, London, Oshawa, Montreal, Ottawa, and Kingston. In addition to the regular freewheeling audience Q&A, I'm going to conduct a live performance of my podcast, Uncharted Crime and Mayhem in the music industry. Music and the mob. It's something that we created just for this tour. Tickets at my website, a journal of musicalthings.com, under the heading speaking gigs at the top. But hurry, because some

dates are already sold out. Crime and Mayhem and the music industry on the road this fall. Hope to see you soon.