Two principal strategies emerge from analysing male violence in recent history: legitimising and denying. In legitimising, male violence is not hidden in any way: it is visible, but as it is legitimate, it is not defined as violence. When men commit it in the context of the family against those people (women and children) that they consider their property, these actions and toleration of them are often codified in laws. Outside the family some male behaviour, such as using people in prostitution, is accepted by society, even when it takes the most hateful forms.

Denying is necessary, when struggle and social development have made legitimising extreme forms of violence unacceptable and other methods are sought to hide it or not take a position on the subject. We can identify various forms of denying. The most direct form consists simply of not seeing the violence and its consequences. It has been and still is widely practised by those close to the victims: members of the family, acquaintances, health and social workers, police officers and magistrates. Another method consists of attributing another meaning to what has happened: something has happened, but it is not violence. Thus rape is not violence but seduction, passion, hot sex and so on. Denying may take even more complex and sophisticated forms, particularly in socio-historical contexts like the present, where it becomes difficult to avoid seeing the violence or consider it legitimate or distort its meaning systematically with impunity. It comes into operation when the victims recognise what has been inflicted on them as violence, find allies and may thus ask for protection, compensation and justice. As we have already seen, various tactics take over in these cases in order to discredit the victims and those supporting them, hide the identity of the abusers or at least their responsibility, shift responsibility from the abusers to the victims or their supporters and finally rehabilitate the abusers and show them in a good light.

Legitimising and denying are different strategies, each of which seems prominent in different socio-historical contexts. Still, as we have just mentioned, these strategies may also coexist and often are part of a continuum: when legitimising is no longer possible, denying is put into operation. For this reason some examples, such as exercising patriarchal rights over children, ending in incest and murder, will be discussed within both strategies.