Hundreds of thousands of American women beat their husbands punching, kicking, stabbing, clubbing or throwing things at them, experts say.

Yet it is one of the most underreported crimes in America, they add. Dr. Suzanne Steinmetz, assistant professor of individual and family studies at the Univ. of Delaware, said her research shows that 250,000 men are severely beaten by their wives.

"Unfortunately, while the horrors of wife-beating are paraded across the media ... the other side of this coin, husband-beating, is still hidden under a cloak of secrecy," she said. From a sampling of case histories cited by experts in interviews with The INQUIRER, the types of men who are victims of regular thrashing by their wives are:

       Men  who are smaller and weaker than their mates.

     Alcoholic men whose drunkenness lives them helpless at the hands of their pummeling wives.

     Men who's rather take a beating than leave hone because they don't want their children to be without a father.

     Men who are reluctant to retaliate because they realize they can severely  injure their wives if they fight back.

Dr. Anthony Pietropinto, Doctor of Mental  Health at the Lutheran Medictal Center in Brooklyn, said the problem is often covered up because men consider it "unmanly" to admit they were thrashed by their wives.

Dr. Murray Straus, professor of sociology at the Univ. of New Hampshire, in a study of 2,143 people funded 4.6 percent of wives regularly abuse their husbands.

"We are talking about severe violence," Dr. Straus said. "These are violent acts committed usually in rage and fury where the woman literally hits out as hard as she is capable of hitting."

Dr.Arthur Stillman, president of the Institute of Human Relations in Miami, who conducted his own study of husband-beating when we was director of psychiatry at New York's Post Graduate Center for Mental Health, said:"the problem is the tremendous rage, the murder- our rage and aggression against men... Invariably, it is based upon (the wife's) own family structure when she was a child... Women who have been exposed to mothers who abused their husbands invariable temed to lean in the same direction."

Experts told The ENQUIRER of the kinds of abuse suffered by husbands at the hands of violent wives: One athletic, 5-foot-9 woman regularly beat her husband, who was smaller and 20 years older, to punish him for getting drunk.

Ather woman, who married three alcoholics in succession, stabbed one in the arm with a knitting needle. She broke three of her second husband's ribs when she slammed him with a table leaf.

A man reported that his wife punched and kicked him, then bushed his hand with a baseball bat, breaking one of his fingers. Police refused to believe him --- and accused him of assaulting his wife.

Another man, according to Dr. Steimnetz, "lived in terror of almost daily attacks from his wife, who armed here self with knives and other objects. He said he stuck it out because as an orphan, he knew what it was to be without a father."

Why do men put up with repeated assaults from  their wives? Some confessed they were afraid.

Other said they were worried that the wives would attack their children if they left.

"SEVERAL MAN EXPLAINED THAT THEY WERE AFRAID OF LOSING CONTROL BECAUSE THY KNEW THEY COULD EASILY KILL THEIR WIVES" DR. STEIMNETZ ADDED.