The Scottish Government is facing calls to change the definition of domestic abuse to include male victims and people in same-sex relationships.

Law lecturer Brian Dempsey said that the law, passed as recently as 2000, defined domestic abuse as a crime committed against women and rendered other victims "invisible".

He said ministers should change the law to ensure lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people who are abused in the home, as well as their children, are not marginalised.

Mr Dempsey, who teaches at the University of Dundee, said: "My impression is that both politicians and people involved in delivering domestic abuse services are sympathetic to lesbian, gay bisexual and trans people but are generally pretty unaware of our needs - especially so in relation to transgendered people.

"But the overwhelming emphasis on presenting domestic abuse as something that men do to women means that people such as accident and emergency nurses or GPs or housing officers just aren't picking up on the signals that an LGBT client might need help.

"For LGBT people themselves it's often not worth the risk of raising the issue in an atmosphere where you don't know if you will be taken seriously and where services all seems to be geared to female victims of male abusers. To say 'I'm a male victim' or to say 'my abuser is female' is often just too risky."

Mr Dempsey said he takes no issue with an approach which recognises that gender is an important aspect of domestic abuse, as the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and the UK government have done.

But he said any attempt to define it exclusively as a crime perpetrated by men against women "excludes and marginalises" anyone who is not a female victim of a male abuser.

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "Domestic abuse must not be tolerated in any form and the Scottish Government has committed over £55m during the period 2008-12 to tackling domestic abuse and violence against women.

"We have received international recognition and praise for our gendered definition, which does not exclude or deny other experiences, but does focus on the majority experience, that 83% of domestic abuse incidents recorded by the police in 2009-10 involved a female victim and male perpetrator."