Now men are the silent victims of domestic violence

Fact: Liza Minnelli has had more husbands than we have battered men's shelters

Admit it. When you heard that Liza Minnelli has been accused by her husband, David Gest, of beating him up, you laughed. He says the Cabaret star beat him in the head so hard she caused brain damage. Even as I read this, I smirked. When I reached the passage explaining that he now has to take 11 prescription medicines to deal with the pain, and that he has developed a phobia of loud noises, I - far too late - stopped chuckling.

Domestic violence targeted at men is one of our biggest taboos. When it is forced into the public gaze, we react in a way that shames us. In EastEnders, Pauline Fowler reacted to the news that her husband was having an affair by beating him over the head with a frying pan. The nation cheered.

This is not a trivial issue, confined to the more freakish Beverly Hills mansions or the soapy drama of Albert Square. A BBC poll has found that 18 per cent of British men admit to being victims of domestic violence, compared with 13 per cent of women. These figures seem improbably high; but even the much lower rate found by the British Crime Survey of 2001-2 records the fact that one in five of all incidents of domestic violence is committed against a man.

Poor men, I can hear some people moan - at least now you know what it's like. The feminist writer Wendy McElroy has interviewed one typical victim of this aggression in the United States, and shows why this attitude is unworthy of the heroic feminist tradition. She explains: "During one confrontation with his wife, Stanley locked himself into the family car for safety. His wife broke in, shoved him face-first into the passenger seat [and] planted her knees in his back. She used a heavy cellular phone to club him repeatedly across the side of the head." When he approached the police to explain what had happened, they laughed and refused to record the crime.

Things are getting slightly better. This year, the British Government declared for the first time that battered men must be part of its strategy for dealing with domestic violence. This is in the interests of us all: children who grow up trapped in violent homes are far more likely to grow up to be violent criminals. Liza Minnelli, if she is guilty, will be a typical product of this environment. (This might be the first time Liza has even been described as typical.) Her mother, Judy Garland, often resorted to violence against men, especially her second husband, Sid Luft.

Yet places for battered men and their children to flee to in Britain are rare. Fact: Liza Minnelli has had more husbands than we have battered men's shelters. Men's Aid is struggling to raise funds for shelters in St Albans and Northern Ireland, but funding is hard to come by. (You can support them, or seek their help, at www.mensaid.org.) There are cheap legislative moves that could help battered men too, like granting them anonymity in the witness box.

The cause of battered husbands has, unfortunately, been picked up by some unsavoury individuals who put normal people off this otherwise noble cause. Growing numbers of "men's groups" have used abused men as a weapon in their testosterone-fuelled gender war. Too often, they seem to be motivated primarily by anger at growing equality for women, rather than concern for battered men.

These rather sad men angrily accuse feminists of deliberately downplaying this issue, or even suppressing evidence of it. Murray AStraus, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire who tries to draw attention to the plight of battered husbands, lambasted "women in the battered [women's] shelter movement" on these grounds. This is not a helpful attitude. Advocates for battered men should not set themselves up against advocates for battered women; they should unite in a common struggle against violence in the home.

But all women's advocates need to acknowledge that men confront a real problem too. The vast majority already do - callous, anti-male feminists are largely a misogynistic myth - but occasionally you will hear attitudes like that expressed in the classic domestic violence text The Battered Woman, by Lenore Walker. She says casually about one woman who committed violent acts against her husband: "There is no doubt that she began to assault Paul physically before he assaulted her. However, it is also clear from the rest of her story that Paul had been battering her by ignoring her and working late for the entire five years of his marriage." The unacceptability of these attitudes should now be obvious.

The situation for the men being smacked and burned as you read this might seem bleak, but it doesn't have to be this way. It is not so long ago that we reacted to all domestic violence with the faintly amused expression we now reserve for Pauline Fowler and other husband-beaters. In the 1960s, the nation's favourite avuncular copper, George Dixon of the BBC's Dixon of Dock Green, would respond to wife-beating with trite homilies about how it was not the job of the British bobby to intervene in "domestics". It will require a huge culture shift and many, many courageous men will have to brave the humiliation, break the silence and come forward. But one day, we will look back on our reaction to the Minnelli-Gest case with the incomprehension we now feel for the monochrome world of Sergeant Dixon.

j.hari@independent.co.uk