Earl Silverman

Earl Silverman (4 July 1948 – 26 April 2013) was a Canadian domestic abuse survivor, activist and men's rights advocate who founded the Men's Alternative Safe House (MASH), the only privately funded domestic abuse shelter for men in Canada, and the Family of Men society, which operated phone lines to assist victims. He also served as the Canadian Liaison for the National Coalition for Men. June 14 is unofficially "Earl Silverman Day."

Earl died by suicide on April 26, 2013, shortly after selling the shelter due to bankruptcy and ridicule.

He escaped his violent and abusive wife some time before 1991, but was unable to find a domestic abuse shelter that could take him in, While plenty of shelters for women existed, the only publicly funded services available for men were for anger management. "As a victim, I was re-victimized by having these services telling me that I wasn't a victim, but I was a perpetrator," Silverman told the National Post.

After leaving his home, Silverman had spiraled into self-abuse and alcoholism, attempting suicide due to helplessness.

Family of Men Society Silverman founded the Family of Men support society, and served as president and program coordinator for the organization. The society maintained a telephone crisis line for over a decade to assist men in matters of abuse. The society was founded around 1992, and it reportedly faced problems seeking funding from local governments.

Men's Alternative Safe House MASH4077 (Full form: Men's Alternative Safe House) was started in the early 2000s, in Earl's own house in Calgary, making it the only privately funded shelter for male victims of domestic abuse in Canada. It was listed in the SAFE (Stop Abuse For Everyone) list of resources as early as May 2004.

An erroneous claim that MASH4077 took in its first refugee in 2011, which appears on a number of other websites, is based on a misreading of Earl's announcement in 2011 on the NCFM website, not of the first time a male victim had been housed by MASH4077, but of the first time a male victim had been both referred by the local provincial government and funded by a grant (of $1,000) from them, thus making Earl optimistic that his decade's-long advocacy on behalf of male domestic violence victims was finally being recognized as legitimate.

"Family violence has gone from a social issue to only a woman's issue. So any support for men is interpreted as being against women," said Silverman in an interview with Beacon News. Silverman also wrote that he hoped his death would bring more awareness to the issue of male abuse. Men's rights publication A Voice for Men penned Silverman's legacy as "one of providing shelter and help to human beings that the rest of our society is content to see abused, homeless, and disregarded to their deaths."

Then Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith tweeted her condolences, stating she was "reflecting on what he spent his life fighting for."