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For Ill Eagle in past years, go to
www.ivorcatt.com/99.htm or to www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/1csetz.htm and
www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/1cset0.htm Solicitors'
body comes to heel - Times, 1nov01, p15 The solicitors'
complaints body, which is accused today of failing to give the public crucial
information about its members' track records, is to lose its idependent
identity. The Office for
the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS), which receives 16,085 complaints a year,
one for every five solicitors, is to be brought under the direct control of
the Law Society of England and Wales. The move comes as
a Which? report says that the
organisation's helpline is far from helpful and fails to tell people if their
solicitor has been disciplined or struck off. "The OSS seemed reluctant
or unable to give out the correct information," it said. Solicitors
under fire Letter from Mr
John Wilson, Times, 1nov01, p21 Sir, David
Blunkett has angered solicitors by casting aspersions on their professional
standards (report, oct29). For ten years I have been specialising in
representing clients who have a complaint about a solicitor, so I know
something about furious lawyers. The lawyers are
quite right in pointing out just the latest example of the executive branch
not always being entirely
full-square with civil liberties. But they are hardly a shining beacon
themselves. Time and time
again I have been consulted by a client who has been let down by a lawyer
making the sort of elementary mistakes that any sane person would just own up
to and refer to the insurance company, only to be met by the professional
shutters slamming down. In contrast to the frequent
stories of doctors being exposed and unished for incompatence, lawyers seem
to be immune from this sort of coverage. Mr Blunkett's outburst makes a
pleasant change, but at what cost to our liberties? Yours, John Wilson
(Solicitor), 6a Rodney Lane,
Leeds LS13 1HU Solicitor
jailed - Times, 11dec01, p4 A solicitor with
assets of more than £1 million stole £73,000 from a 91-year-old aunt to buy a
luxury boat. David Benham, 59, of Southwark, London, who denied stealing from
an account set aside to pay for nursing home fees, was jailed for six months
by Winchester Crown Court. Solicitors
bring in Layman to see fair play - Francis Gibb, Times, 25jan02, p6 The solicitors'
complaints system, which handles 12,000 grievances a year, is to be
overhaouled and placed under the scrutiny of a non-;awyer for the first time.
.... in an effort to boost public confidence .... The society has
succeeded so far in seeing off ministerial threats that it be stripped if its
self-regulatory powers. .... Two years ago,
.... complainants .... were told that they would have to wait a year before
their grievances were dealt with., the Lord Chancellor threatened to remove
the Law Society's power to regulate itself. .... Bar
for the course Cambridge lecturer
Gillian Evans has gone back to being a student on the Bar vocational course.
She is unimpressed. - Guardian Education, 8jan02, p12 .... Students who
are made to feel it would be unwise to use their critical faculties until
after they are safely "called". A culture of toadying is actively
fostered, for one must network to get the best pupillages. .... .... the
depth of the institutionalised discrimination they practise. .... .... While
winds of change at the Bar Council and the Law Society are stopped by
draught-excluders of complacency and students' fear of professional
disadvantage if they say what they think, all this will presumably go on.
.... it needs to be run in a way that will produce barristers who will take a
lead in the reform of the legal profession. .... Lawrence
sergeant cleared of rapes - Sam Lister, Times, 11dec01, p4 Accusations of
multiple rape against a police sergeant who was highly praised in the Stephen
Lawrence murder inquiry were thrown out at the Old Bailey yesterday. The trial of
Peter Solley, accused of raping a woman on nine occasions, was stopped after
Judge David Paget described the alleged victim's evidence as "manifestly
unreliable". The woman said that Sergeant Solley, 47, had committed the
rapes during a secret fuive-year relationship, but after three days of
cross-examination the prosecution dropped all charges. The .... woman, a
black community worker, .... the defence, suggested that the woman made the
accusations because Sergeant Solley had rejected her. .... Sergeant Solley,
from Beckenham, Kent, said: "I find it astonishing that the complainant
can be shielded by anonymity, despite the finding that she is a proven
liar." Women
should go it alone - Jeremy Campbell, Evening
Standard,
4dec01, p20 A startling survey had
found that women learn about one third less than men in college. Nearly
20,000 students at 56 colleges were interviewed, comparing scores on a
standardised test. Gender was a "huge" factor, according to
Professor Ernest Pascarella of the University of Iowa. Women fell behind most
in maths and science. .... Spouse - Steve Doughty, Daily
Mail, 20july01 The Crown
Prosecution Service has banned its 6,000 employees from using the word
'spouse'. In future, those working at the organisation responsible for
bringing all criminal prosecutions will have to refer to 'partners' or
'friends' whenever they invite a colleague to a social event. Using the term
'spouse' assumes someone is married and leaves homosexuals feeling excluded,
claimed a rulebook designed to eliminate discrimination. Two
days before - Melanie Phillips, Sunday
Times, 9sep01,
p17 .... Liberal
values will be protected only if Christianity holds the line as our dominant
culture. A society which professes neutrality between cultures would create a
void which Islam, with its militant political creed, would attempt to fill.
.... society is beginning to understand the need for truth-telling, family
stability and distinctions between right and wrong, against all of which the
Establishment has set its face. .... Prisons - Rechel Sylvester, Telegraph, 17dec01, p12 HM Chief
Inspector of Prisons, .... forced out of his job .... he was shocked to find
staff in a mental ward had been falsifying suicide watch records. .... the
Home Office is "a terrible place". .... the Home Office bureaucracy
has "spiralled out of control". .... "Civil servants .... not
used to putting things into practice .... Very few of our ministers have ever
run anything, either - they're all professional politicians. ...." Dworkin "I want to
see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like
an apple in the mouth of a pig." - Andrea Dworkin, leading feminist
speaker, speaking through a character in her book Ice and Fire. Gloria Steinmen says of Andrea Dworkin;
"In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human
race to evolve. Andrea is one of them". Quoted by Warren Farrell in his
book; Women Can't Hear ....,
pub. Tarcher/Putnam 1999, p179. Recently, Dworkin
co-authored a book with the other extremist Catherine MacKinnon, who played a
part in drafting recent Canadian legislation. ".... rape,
which by conservative definition happened to almost half of all women at
least once in their lives." - C A MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pub. Harvard Univ.
Press 1989, p142. Do
children come first? - Cristina Odone,
Observer, 20jan02, p23 .... a baby had
been ditched at the roadside by his mama. .... the 24-year-old had already
dumped an older child, whome she had left with her mother to raise. Charles,
the three-month-old baby she left near the airport of Faro had a cleft lip
and palate. .... Dismissing a life as if it were an uninvited guest; opting
for instant gratification .... placing self above others - all deserve to be
roundly condemned .... Yet it is not. Or
at least not by the liberal commentators .... 'It is not always easy being a
parent,' proclaimed one headline, above a piece which went on to lay the
blame for bad mothers like Penny squarely on - you guessed it - men. .... It
allows women to regard motherhood as a project which entails no more
commitment than a Berlitz course in French, which they can .... always drop
out of. .... an arena for
competing rights .... she wins, hands down, every time .... lots of
supporters .... will raise a wail of apologies on her behalf. [I am mystified
by the remark "the liberal commentators" being allowed in the Observer. For years, the
Observer/Guardian stable has fronted a more vicious attack on the family and
on men than anyone else. However, it seemed to wobble more than a year ago,
when it allowed in Rabinovich even though she was under the influence of
Oliver Cyriax. Perhaps Melanie Phillips could go back now! - Ed] The
Real Goal of Feminism: Transforming Society - Antonia Feltz, 2/3/00 Speech delivered
at the Inverell Forum. At
www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/THE REAL GOAL OF FEMINISM.htm This is perhaps
the definitive anslysis and indictment of what I call the Radfem Ideology,
but Feltz would tend to make me call it Feminazi. Reading it had a powerful
effect on me. Show it to your well-meaning women friends. - Ed How
fathers fit into the family A fact sheet for
secondary schools from CIVITAS which is in general agreement with ManKind.
For example; "Statistics about
children who do not live with their fathers can be grim. On almost every
outcome that has been tested, including educational achievement, self-esteem,
responsible social behaviour, and adjustment as adults, children do better
when they live with both parents." See www.ivorcatt.com/2801.htm CIVITAS, tel 020 7401 5471 www.civitas.org.uk The
cost of Radfem policies Generally,
Britain plans to follow NZ's expensive radfem policies, which our chairman
said would bankrupt them.. Date: 08 January
2002 06:02 Dear Julian, RE New Zealand, navy cuts
and RW's prediction. Do you recall the
email exchange we had [two years ago] about New Zealand and its expenditure
on social services and legal aid ? I said it would
soon have to give up its defence capability and rely on Australia if it continued
on its present path. Well, it looks
like that prediction is coming true. The BBC reports,
within the last 48 hours, that NZ is to give up most of its surface fleet. I got it slightly
wrong when I said that all they would be left with would be a few frigates.
It seems that they're going to give those up and keep the supply ships
instead. And the airforce,
of about 18 planes, is up for sale too. Robert Whiston Cohabitees
to adopt children! With or without
children, only 4% of cohabitees stay together for more than 10 years. Source,
Lynette Burrows, our conference speaker. The
right to life Sadly, Afghan
women have been deprived of their right to education, employment, and freedom
of movement. At the same time, many thousands of Afghan men have been
selectively targeted in a series of involuntary inscriptions, forced
detentions, torture, and executions. As a result, many thousands of innocent
men have lost the most precious right of all: the right to life. [Full article at
www.ivorcatt.com/2006.htm] The
Intervening Variable Kaye Wellings et.
al, Sexual Behaviour in Britain,
pub. Penguin 1994, is the Gold Standard of statistics on the subject. Of
particular interest is their figure for homosexual practice. pp183/5, find
homosexuals number only around 1% of the population. (Ill
Eagle 10, p2) Buggery is a tiny minority sport, as is even the
desire to bugger. The winter 01/02
issue no. 106 of the FYC Bulletin, p1, discusses the follow-up articles to
the Wellings book, published in the Lancet
of 1dec01 (vol. 358). Here we see interesting manipulation of facts for
political ends. "The whole thrust of the article is immensely
encouraging to the govt, .... the most important predictor of early
motherhood is given as the educational level of the teenage girl. ....
[also,] 'the factors most strongly associated with risk behaviour and adverse
outcomes have considerable potential for preventive intervention'. "Lurking in
all these columns of figures is the uncomfortable fact of family structure.
.... [the article] ignores the extent to which educational level and family
structure are linked. [i.e. bad famly structure causes both teenage pregnancy
and also bad educational outcome.] Anyone who thinks that standards in
education can be raised irrespective of the home backgrounds of pupils
obviously hasn't been in a school lately. Unless the govt's teenage pregnancy
strategy is prepared to take family structure on board, the 'potential for
preventive intervention' may be less than the authors of this study seem to
think." The last
paragraph chillingly contrasts Wellings's statistic on people admitting to
ten or more partners with the large number who had had no partner at all;
".... for many people, the breakdown of the family brought about by the
sexual revolution has resulted in lives characterised by loneliness and
sterility." FYC
(Family & Youth Concern) is at www.famyouth.org.uk Josephine
Smith Shot her husband
as he slept. Convicted in 1993. Women's groups criticised the verdict. Has
now been referred to the Court of Appeal. www.ivorcatt.com/2007.htm More
girls than boys shoplift - John Steele, Telegraph, 5dec02 [21,000 men and
24,000 women] .... the growing predominance of schoolgirls .... was most
worrying. .... some offenders came from troubled backgrounds but about 50%
were from affluent families. Prostate
cancer and diet .... if you have any
specific questions relating to prostate cancer and diet, .... email
diet@prostate-cancer.org.uk or ring 020 8222 7622 |
|
Editorial Catch
22 Fiebert,
available on my website www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk and numerous other sources show us that domestic
violence (DV) is initiated more often by women than by men. This creates a
major problem when we discuss the issue with our female allies. They know
that women are not violent. Some years ago, I
emphasised to Melanie Phillips and to Erin Pizzey that whenever they make the
assertion, that women attack men more often than men attack women, they must
add the caveat that there is very little violence started by anybody. Home
Office Report No. 191, which gives violence from women as well as men at
4.2%, is a useful reference. The assertion
that women too are violent, made on its own, does not defend the traditional
family. Quite the reverse. In contrast, if joined by the assertion that there
is very little violence overall, it has a positive effect. The anti-family
axis which includes MacKinnon, Harman, Hewett, Dworkin, Stinko, Jay, Bindell,
will be helped, rather than hindered, by assertions that women are violent as
well. It is unwise to give them even more power, by helping their cause,
which is to destroy the traditional family on the grounds that it is a
dangerous place to be, as Stinko asserts. We may diverge
from some of our perceived allies on this matter. For instance, those who
want to get funding for refuges for male victims may exaggerate the problem.
What would be legitimate would be for them to assert that the problem of male
victims equals that for female victims. Let us hope that they desist from any
tendency to go beyond that. Mary Cleary of AMEN, who set up the first refuge
for battered men, and who now receives funding from the Irish govt, does not
overstep this mark. The Domestic
Violence Industry, which includes those who try to set up refuges for men,
continually broadens the definition of Domestic Violence in order to increase
their funding and their job security. Their definition, which is accepted by
government, now includes "Financial Violence" - the withdrawal of
money from one's spouse. It also includes shouting and also threat of
violence. (Extraordinarily, when Stinko says that one quarter of women
experience DV in the home, she is also saying that three quarters of women
have never been shouted at!) Given this, it is of major importance that those
who correctly say that men assault women no more less than women assault men,
include discussion of their definitions in the same piece. The issue is
clouded by the fact of attacks by men on men. However, that is a completely
different issue. The key to this is difference chivalry. Today it is completely overlooked, for good
reason, that from the cradle boys are taught to never attack a woman, and
they never do. The reason why this incessant training is ignored is that it
clashes with radfem dogma, that men are trained to oppress women, for
instance fathers sexually abusing their daughters in order to prepare them
for oppression later on within marriage. The continuance of a heavy theme of
chivalry in our society had to be overlooked if radfem dogma were to gain a
hold, as it has. The continuing reign of chivalry means that women may attack
women, men may attack men, women may attack men. Any attack by men on women
is outlawed. The reality, that
men do not attack women, explains the increasing shrillness of such charges;
for instance, the fantastic charge that men regularly kick pregnant women in
the stomach. Since the whole thing is a lie, it may as well be further
embroidered. DV - Dina
Rabinovirch, Guardian, 26nov01,
p6 .... Last year
was not good for Pizzey: she was diagnosed with cancer, and her grandson,
Kelta, a schizophrenic, committed suicide in a prison cell. .... she managed
to have the case reheard - last month a jury .... found unanimously that his
death was contributed to by the neglect of prison staff. .... a "legal
landmark" .... .... the
statistic that every third day a woman in this country is beaten or killed by
a current or ex-partner. When I repeat this to PIzzey, it causes her to
grimace. She doesn't accept the thesis - that only men need to change their
behaviour - or the figures. "If you come
from a dysfunctional, violent and sexually abusive family, how do you learn?
Therefore, domestic violence can't be a gender issue, it can't be just men
...." DV "One in four
women experience domestic violence at some stage in their lives" Poisonous,
socially destructive Stinko lies put out by the Church of England;
www.oxford.anglican.org/docs/100189446124996.shtml Dear Mr.
Catt, I request that you stop all
communication with me. I find the letters you forward to me abusive and
distressing. I am certain that your rmother and sister would be appalled if
they knew that you were so unkind to people you have never met. Sincerely,
Professor EA Stanko 20March
2000 ESRC
defends Radfem 'research' 22jan02 Dear Mr. Catt, .... the
complaint which you sent to us .... in which you claimed that Professor Betsy
Stanko had falsified a (research) result, namely that 1 in 4 women experience
Domestic Violence in the home. .... the source of the complaint was a
publication entitled "Counting the Costs" .... published in 1998 by
Crime Concern. .... I cannot find any grounds for supporting the view that
the findings in the report are falsified. In fact the report is very careful
in its methodology and the basis for its conclusion, and does so in
transparent detail. There seems therefore to be absolutely no case for this
to be seen as falsification and I cannot therefore accept your complaint.
Yours sincerely, Chris Caswill, Director of Research, ESRC chris.caswill@esrc Full text at www.ivorcatt.com/2004.htm Gobbledeygook Take
care of the sounds, and the sense will take care of itself - Lewis Carroll In Redbourn in
the '60s, I went across the road to a further education lecture series by a
gardener. Since he was a real gardener, his middle class audience listened in
rapt silence. They admired The Common Man.
However, I realised that the gardener, having heard lectures, and knowing
what they sounded like, was actually making noises which sounded like a
lecture, but which had no content. Fearing that my suppressed guffaws would
offend my anxious neighbours, I never attended again. Radfems, using
the argument that rationality is part of patriarchal oppression, have taken
over large swathes of academia and filled it with such gobbledeygook. A good
example is of course Catherine MacKinnon, Toward
a Feminiist Theory of the State, pub. Harvard UP 1989. I will
quote a justification for such gobbledegook by two academics in England,
Victoria Robinson and Diane Richardson; Introducing
Women's Studies, pub. Macmillan 1993/7. On p2, Robinson writes; "If a
fundamental feature of Women's Studies is the simple yet radical belief in an
approach to knowledge which places women at the centre of analysis
(challenging an androcentric/phallocentric notion of knowledge which can be
defined as men's experiences and priorities being seen as central and
representative of all), then
this realisation of a theoretical dishonesty has profound implications for
how we organise, stucture, teach and research within the disciplines and the
academy in general. This 'simple' shift in theorising and teaching recognises
the politics of theory in terms of the so-called objuctivity of knowledge,
which has failed to recognise and validate the diversity of experience of
over half of mankind. "Post-modern
claims that to pursue a total theory is mistaken and essentialist, given that
to do so inevitably means to generalise and universalise, have informed this
feminist theorising." Wow! The very
idea that radfems do not generalise! The undermining
of academic precepts, by men like Feyerabend, pre-dates the radfems. Taking
advantage of scientific treachery by F and others, we now see a full-scale,
largely successful, radfem subvertion of the probity of academia. The radfem
fixation on the penis recurs (/phallocentric).
Radfems, including lesbian radfems, think and talk about the penis far, far
more often than men do. How
exams are fixed in favour of girls The article with
the above title by Dr Madsden Pirie from The
Spectator, 20jan01, was printed in Ill Eagle 14, p8. I added a
footnote; The attack on
Physics is gong on hand in hand with the attack on Maths. They are the two
subjects I did at A level in 1953, gaining a State Scholarship to Cambridge.
Because girls do better at Geography than at Physics, Physics has now been
turned into a branch of Geography. It is particularly destructive to corrupt
Physics by bringing ecology propaganda into it. True Physics is objective,
value-free. - Ed The
future for Science ".... the
oppressed may make better biologists, physicists, and philosophers than their
oppressors. Thus we find the feminist theorist Hilary Rose saying that male
scientists have been handicapped by being men. A better wcience would be
based on women's domestic experience and practice. Professor Virginia Held
offers hope that 'a feminist standpoint would give us a quite different
understanding of even physical reality.' Conversely, those who are most
socially favored, the proverbial white, middle-class males, are in the worst
epistemic position." - Christina Hoff Sommers, Who stole feminism?, pub. Simon &
Schuster 1994, p74. The
Black Hole: Women's Studies, Science and Technology - Lynda Birke and Marsha
Henry From the book Introducing Women's Studies, ed.
academics Victoria Robinson and Diane Richardson, pub. Macmillan 1993/97, pp
221 and 222 .... At the
beginning of 'second-wave' feminism .... There was .... some hostility
towards science within the women's movement, which sometimes collapsed into
hostility towards women scientists ....
.... science .... is stereotypically associated with masculinity .... One important
strand .... involves attempts to
encourage women into science by various means, including changing the
curriculum and its delivery. This has entailed, for example, developing 'girl
friendly science' .... Challenging the content is, of course, rather more
difficult. It is also rather threatening to many scientists, including many
women scientists, and particularly so when feminists assert that science is
masculine and needs to be changed. .... in 1985, one of us encountered
hostility from a woman scientist in the audience: 'But if you succeed in
changing it,' she agonised, 'it would no longer be science'. Indeed: it would
no longer be the kind of science that so many of us have criticised. [Note
that this is only in the 1997 edition, when boys had already fallen behind in
'science'! - Ed] Feminization
of Maths My article with
the above title in Male View
oct98 referred to the article by Marian Chester Coombs in the journal Chronicles, oct97, p47, which discusses
the attack on maths also taking place in the USA entitled Dumb and Number. ".... to cripple
all, by making girls' 'learning style' mandatory for all. Mathematics .... is
being neutered ...." Elsewhere, in Ill
Eagle, I have said that Physics has been turned into a subset of
Geography, because girls do better in Geography and boys in Physics.
(Example; What are the similarities between our Moon and a certain planet of
Jupiter? - GCSE Physics today. Next, perhaps boys will be learning the names
of the rivers of Wales, because water flows downhill - a potential question
in Physics which I learnt in Geography class in my Welsh school.) We have now
reached the stage where, as reported by the headline in the Telegraph, 12jan02, p1, "Girls win
all the way from primary to university." The article says; "At both
school and university, the gap between the sexes has widened as the nature of
testing has changed. "More
emphasis has been put on coursework and continuous assessment, which reward
steady application, and less on 'sudden death' exams, which are thought to
favour boys." The article misses
altogether the removal from syllabi of content in which boys excel. Now that girls
are well ahead at all levels, even in maths, perhaps those who control
education and have, at the behest of feminists, removed course material in
which boys excel, might allow us to restore some parts at least of the
doctored syllabus. Would women in general settle for mere sex equality in
exam achievement? That would let us restore some key concepts in maths and
physics. An example in A level Maths and Physics is the couple, or torque, which girls tend to have more trouble with.
Another is angular momentum. A society which bans key concepts in the
interests of equality puts itself at a disadvantage internationally. Another factor is
suicide. As the suicide rate among young men continues to escalate, their
examination performance will deteriorate further. Someone contemplating
suicide does not study so well. A reduction in the massive man-bashing in all
the media would help here. It damages young men more than older, because the
young have only ever experienced the current anti-male vituperation. A good
man is hard to find - Eugen Hockenjos
(honorary member of ManKind), Guardian,
20mar96, p2 Tommy is a quiet
four-year-old living with his mother in Islington. He hasn't seen his father
since mum left a relationship in which she felt abused. He likes playing with
super-heroes. Since mum started a part-time job he gets looked after by a
child minder who has a baby of her own. Next month he will start nursery. In
Islington, 97 per cent of nursery staff are female. When he moves to primary
school he will be welcomed by a teaching staff which, if it is anything like
the national average, will be 80 per cent female. Should his mother have
problems requiring help from the social services he will again see only women
in the caring roles, as, similar to other local authorities, Islington's pool
of social workers is 82 per cent female. There is also
little chance for Tommy to encounter a caring male during his contact with
social services, as many of the male staff are allocated to deal with drug or
alcohol-dependent clients, or those with HIV/Aids, and are often preoccupied
with tasks considered too dangerous for Ilsington's women social workers. How
will Tommy learn to care if he has no access to male role models? .... The
absence of men in caring roles is escalating. .... [Does the
government introduce a policy aimed at restoring the proportion of men in
teaching to 50%, as for the Commons, where the female representation is around
20 or 25%? Read on. - Ed] IT
must put gender on the agenda - Rachel Fielding
18jan02 It's time for IT
to put gender on the agenda. It may sound trite but that's the message from
industry bodies and human resources executives from some of the world's largest
IT recruiters. Speaking at the
Computer Software and Services Association (CSSA) conference to tackle the
women in IT issue, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Patricia Hewitt
has called for greater collaboration between industry, government and
education to tackle the issue head on. "It is
pathetic that fewer women are entering the IT industry than 20 years ago. The
opportunities for industry and the economy in general are huge," she
said. Encouraging women
to enter and stay in IT jobs is more than simply an altruistic ideal. It
makes more business sense than ever, although getting that message through to
the industry is proving a pretty hard nut to crack. Ian Watmore,
managing director of Accenture in the UK, said that equal representation and
"equal perception" of his company by females was essential. "It's not
just a moral and ethical argument, it makes common sense," he explained.
"By 2010 I will represent a minority - white, able bodied males. Eighty
per cent of the growth market of the future will be women." And although
companies continue to complain about skills shortages in certain areas, the
situation is compounded because they're recruiting from a pool that is half
its potential size. Women represent over half of the potential workforce in
this country, but only 22 per cent of the IT workforce. The figure is
more shocking as the number of IT jobs in the UK has grown by over 50 per
cent in the last five years, with proportionally less women being recruited
than before. As recently as 1994, women made up 29 per cent of IT employees,
according to government figures. "We need to
do something at a grassroots level to change the image of the industry and
share lessons about how some employers have succeeded in broadening their
recruitment," said Anne Cantelo, project director at national training
organisation e-skills NTO. The body has launched IT Compass, a website to
attract individuals from non-IT backgrounds into the industry. ... "We need an
incentive structure to encourage all employers to invest in training and
level out the playing field," he said Poodle-Man Lance Williams, human
resources director at EDS. A Barriers to women returning to IT report
will be published by the Department of Trade and Industry on 21 January. Schools
are short of male staff, admits minister - Rebecca
Smithers, Guardian, 8jan02, p8 The govt
yesterday admitted there was a worrying shortage of male role models in the
classroom, after a Labour MP claimed that black boys were under-achieving
because primary schools were dominated by women teachers. The school
standards minister .... admitted that .... more male role models were needed
in schools. The proportion of
men entering primary teacher training courses is below the 15% target set for
the teacher training agency. [A much smaller % than women MPs now in the
Commons. Why not 50%? The implication that we need more women students
because they will go part-time or withdraw, is surely matched by the fact
that the attrition of male teachers as a result of false allegations will
continue to rise. Is any effort being made to attract men to teaching by
setting up procedures to give them better protection against false
allegations? Diane Abbott, MP for
Hackney North and Stoke Newington [bordering Islington], said black boys
needed boundaries and strong direction from "male mentors" at an
early age. [This directly contradicts the radfem anti-patriarchy propaganda
that if boys are left in the hands of women, they will avoid learning macho
behaviour, and be passive and sweet. - Ed] She said primary
schools had become a feminine domain and called on the education secretary,
Estelle Morris, to recruit more teachers from the Caribbean. ....
"There's nothing wrong [with white women] but the fact is when these
black children come into school aged five, the are doing as well as white and
Asian children. By age 16 their achievement has collapsed, particularly black
boys. [she said the issue was] a silent catastrophe. .... "Black
children are six times more likely to be excluded than others. Children in
care run 10 times the risk .... 42% of young offenders are former
excludees."
- Mary Riddell, Observer, 20jan02, p24 ".... more
than two-thirds of Afro-Caribbean families are .... single mother." -
Eamon McMahon, Letter, Observer,
13jan02 From the
Guardian, 31jan02; "Among the statistics contained in Social Trends is
the frequency of mental illness among children. Around one in 10 adolescents
had some form of mental disorder and children of lone parents were twice as
likely to suffer mental health problems as those from "couple
families". Mental illness is closely related to class. Only 5% of
children of social class 1 families had such disorders, compared to 14% of
children of social class 5. Even more
alarmingly, as many as 2% of children aged between 11 and 15 had tried to
'harm, hurt or kill themselves'." Deadbeat
dads: Victims? - Laurence A. Elder,
30jan02 Full text at www.ivorcatt.com/2019.htm .... this angry response from an
eighth-grade inner-city public school teacher: "As an
African-American public school educator in a school that serves an urban
demographic, I'm intimately familiar to the genesis of these irresponsible
fathers. There is little the government can do to help these men. They must
first help themselves, and their communities must help them help themselves. This year, 95
percent of the black boys I educate are failing my eighth-grade algebra
class, despite all of them being at least as capable [if not more] than those
that are passing. These 95 percent waste most of their class time, do little
or no homework, are preoccupied with sports and girls, deride the 5 percent
passing my class as "weak" or "soft," are consumed with
wearing the latest "gear," only read when their teacher pleads, and
laugh when they get Fs. While I love them
as intensely as I love my own son, I loathe their academic skills, attitude
and commitment. I have no doubt the public school system has ruined them with
years of inexperienced/uncommitted teachers who haven't demanded or expected
the level of performance I have of them. Not surprisingly, none of these boys
has a father at home (conversely, the 5 percent that are passing do). Very
few of them are promising athletes, which, combined with their poor academic
performance and social skills (many of the girls find them quite
undesirable), you have the recipe for gang-bait. The help these young men
need starts at home. .... I take little pride in
being the first black man they've known who a) went to college; b) doesn't
smoke, do drugs or abuse alcohol; c) doesn't try to be a "playa";
d) consistently speaks standard English; e) doesn't have a criminal record.
Black people must simply stop having children that cannot be responsibly
reared, period. It's obvious to me why this issue is never emphasized by the
social service advocates: You can't get government money for something most
people should learn at home ..." Tories
target the causes of crime - Philip Johnson,
Telegraph, 9jan02 .... Oliver
Letwin, shadow home secretary, .... focusing on social ills that fuel
criminal behaviour - notably an absence of fathers from millions of broken
homes. .... crime .... was particularly pronounced where there were a large
number of broken homes. "Britain suffers from an epidemic of father
absence," he said. "More than a fifth of our children now live
without their fathers and, for half of these, contact is so infrequent that
they are effectively fatherless." .... if a neighbourhood is allowed to
go to rack and ruin crime will quickly take root. .... Marriage
works, so what is the point of a pale imitation? - Oliver Letwin,
Shadow Home Secretary, Telegraph, 25jan02, p28 .... The Civil
Partnerships Bill .... provides us with the opportunity to restate sociaty's
commitment to marriage and the special obligations and benefits that it
entails. .... society particularly benefits from the fact that children
brought up by married parents are more likely to have a stable background.
.... children born to cohabiting couples are twice as likely to see their
parents separate as children born within marriage. The Conservative
approach is based on outcomes - it does not stem from dogma, or from a
particular set of religious values. .... politicians .... should leave well
alone when they encounter long-standing institutions .... We must build on
success. We must do noting to undermine the institution of marriage. That is why the
Civil Partnerships Bill does not merit support. It provides rights .... that
are already available to couples through marriage..... Providing a
watered-down variant of marriage would serve only to undermine the
institution, and increase the risk of the state intruding into people's lives
in order to discover whether the extent of their cohabitation justifies the
rights that they would claim. .... the state should intrude less into
people's lives. This principle is more likely to be upheld if we keep faith
with institutions, such as marriage, that are the bulwark against state
interference. Marriage is clear cut, whereas weaker alrternatives would
involve the state inquiring into the length or type of people's
relationships: an increase in intrusion into our lives. .... Marriage, which
has proved itself to be a force for good, must remain one of our essential
foundations. [Full article is at
www.ivorcatt.com/2005.htm ] Megaphone
Diplomacy - Mathew Mudge, 29jan02 Dear All, As planned, on
Friday 25th January 2002 from 18:30 to 20:15, between 35 and 40 Equal
Parenting Coalition demonstrators manned a peaceful but very vocal picket
outside the Severnshed Restaurant in The Grove, Bristol. The occasion was the
annual dinner of the Bristol Solicitors Family Law Association and marked the
first demonstrating event of 2002. The weather was
less than helpful being somewhat windy and wet but did not prevent the
generation of a warm reception for those attending the dinner. Many colourful
placards were evident as well as the new EPC handouts bearing the new logo
(big thanks to Matt OConnor). Our new megaphone
(courtesy of Spike and Julie) was put to good use (after some initial
teething trouble getting the batteries in the right way !) and the diners
were left in no doubt about our reason for being there. Sheepish looks were
the order of the evening, made only worse by the courtesy of the protesters.
Anson Allen had to be seen to be believed sporting a shirt (with a collar !),
bow tie and bowler hat, Anson provided a doorman service (with umbrella) for
those being dropped off at the restaurant door. Bolder souls parked further
up the street and walked past us, braving the presence of fathers, mothers,
aunts, uncles, grandparents, family friends and supporters. The demo was
covered by a reporter and press photographer from the Bristol Evening Post
and Anson is liaising with them about press releases etc. One new record to
note a great grandmother had braved the elements and travelled all the way
from Cardiff for the event. Anyone know the
details of the Great Grandparents Federation ? May I publicly
thank all those who attended, several who did not quite make it due to
traffic hold-ups, and those who telephoned their support during the protest.
Our thanks too for the patience and understanding demonstrated by the staff
of the Severnshed Restaurant who took it all with grace and in good humour. It would be
remiss of me not to thank the van full of local constabulary officers who
were present throughout. I introduced myself to them at the beginning of the
evening and made sure they knew we were not there to cause trouble. One
officer thanked me for my trouble and pointed out to me that he recognised me
from the Bath demo where he had been on duty too. The officer asked for
leaflets for one of his colleagues in the back of the van who was
experiencing the same difficulties in his private life and quantities of
leaflets, posters and membership forms were handed over. To conclude, I am
in no doubt about the effectiveness of targeting such events for action and
judging by the many favourable comments received on the night from
by-passers, bus, van and lorry drivers (and even from some of those attending
the dinner), we are succeeding in our aims of raising public awareness and generating
public sympathy for the plight of our children. Now is not the time to relax. Even a year ago,
we would have all been delighted to have a crowd of 40 people attend a demo
in the middle of summer. To do so in January on an evening of quite dreadful
weather indicates how far we have come in such a short time. Our children now
need us to convert this number from tens into hundreds and then thousands.
Many more events are being planned and absolute support and commitment is now
vital. I am not writing this for the regular attendees quite rightly I could
be accused of preaching to the converted. We must now encourage and motivate
all those who have yet to support a demo to do so. I have yet to meet the
person who attends only 1 demo and then walks away EVERYONE who comes once
will be made welcome and I'm sure, will wish to keep coming. That's all for
now watch for details of the next demo. Kind regards and best wishes to
everyone; Matthew Mudge, Cardiff. Also see www.ivorcatt.com/2013.htm Sunday
fathers: their untold story - Maureen Freely, Marie
Claire dec01 .... Above all,
we must resist the tendency to use children as weapons in a continuing battle
against another partner or another adult. .... 40% of fathers lose contact
with their children within two years of separation or divorce. This is a
famous statistic and is usually read at meaning 40% of post-divorce dads are
either deadbeats - who don't want to know or pay for their children - or
beyond the pale in some other way. They must have histories of abuse, neglect
or violence, people assume. However, it is
beginning to emerge that a large number of these fathers are unjustifiably
stereotyped. Hiding inside this shadowy 40% are hundreds of thousands of
ordinary men who have been barred from seeing their children and often for
reasons that would be deemed sexist if applied to women. .... the Children
Act, for all its fine words about shared parenting, gives non-resident
parents - usually the father - only one right: the right to apply to a court
to see their child. However, this is
rarely made explicit. As one father told me, 'No one tells you anything. You
go to a solicitor, who tells you nothing .... .... the court reporter decided
his two girls did not want to see him because that's what they said in an
interview conducted in the presence of the mother. When this father asked why
the family court reporter hadn't spoken to the girls alone, she said,
'Actually, I was thinking of taking them for a walk, but it was raining.'
When he asked if she might have made a different decision if it had been
sunny and she had taken the girls for that walk, she replied, 'Yes, I
probably would have done.' But by then it was too late to undo the damage. .... a court
reporter can make any recommendations for any reason. There is no established
way for her to make sure she's not unduly influenced by any personal views
she might have about what is 'right' for a child. Due to added pressure of
work, she is often obliged to arrive at her decisions quickly. There is no
set form she must follow. There's not even a requirement that she ascertains
the wishes of the children in a safe place where neither parent can
pressurise them. In one case, the
court reporter cold find no reason why a child shouldn't see more of his
father. She went on to say that, 'Nonetheless, the mother must be concerned
about something', and advised that his contact be limited to two hours, once
every six weeks. Another father with no signs of abnormality had to undergo
three medical/psychological exams on the recommendation of a court reporter
to prove he was normal. When the results were judged to be inconclusive
because he only 'appeared normal', his application to see his children was
denied. .... Unfortunately, it
is impossible to report on the precise nature of these cases as judgements
are confidential. Not even the judiciary knows what the overall picture is.
The can't even see if different judges or courts have different types of
outcomes. There has been no effort to collate data on the first 1 million cases
that have gone through the system. Everyone is in the dark. But it would
appear that the court's standard solution in contact cases is to support the
parent it perceives as the primary carer and to marginalise the other. And
there's a pretty solid consensus now among professionals that this isn't
always good news for the children. .... The Coalition for
Equal Parenting, which includes mothers' as well as fathers' groups, would
like a system in which it is much more difficult for one parent to make false
allegations against the other. .... [We shall be meeting
more and more triumphalism, see below, since today an employer needs to avoid
employing white males in order to steer clear of equality and sexist
legislation. - Ed] "Goodbye
Boys" - Maggie Brown, Radio Times 12jan02, cover and p39 Meet the women
who are taking over the news. .... In announcing the
appointment of [Kirsty] Young, Kevin Lygo, Channel 5's director of
programmes, believes that he has found the answer. "The main news
programmes have all been presented by men in their fifities and upwards, ....
To have an intelligent, attractive, talented professional woman at the centre
of our news and our channel is equally important. It is positioning the
channel in keeping with what we are. She is a modern woman, a working mother:
she personifies the values we aant to be associated with." .... Attwell, 50, tuns
the news content of BBC News 24, BBC World and services on BBC3 and BBC4. She
recently watched a boxful of tapes from young hopefuls: 15 women, just two
men. "I can't tell you the trouble I've had finding male presenters -
ones of quality, able to cope with anything. They are really thin on the
ground. ...." So why are good
male presenters so hard to find? "I don't know ...." [Have young white
males finally got the message, that a TV channel must use a non-white or a
woman as front man in order to fend off Employment Tribunals, the Equal
Opportunities Commission and the Race Relations Board. With a PC frontage,
the TV company may get away with employing a few white males with technical
skills in the background. - Ed] The
baby war - Tessa Boase
dares to be politically incorrect - Sunday
Times News Review, 11nov01, p1 .... Supermums.
But many childless women secretly call them an absolute pain. Is motherhood
compatible with work? .... I get no
benefits equal to family pension or healthcare plans. .... none-parents are
being cheated .... the "new found fury of the childless". Largely missing
from the debate is the question of whether couples become parents as a matter
of absolute choice or whether they are meeting the needs of society, which
should consequently take collective responsibility for children.
...."They're continuing the human race, for God's sake, ...." What
men earn will be revealed to women - Sarah Womack, Telegraph, 6dec01, p4 Women will have
the right to know how much male colleagues doing similar work are paid, the
Govt announced yesterday. Companies who
refuse the information could be taken to an employment tribunal. The move is
aimed at closing the 18 per cent pay gap between men and women in similar
full-time jobs. Patricia Hewitt,
the Trade and Industry Secretary, said the employment law changes would not
solve the problem of unequal pay overnight. "A cultural
change among employers to value women's contribution to business success
properly was also needed," she said. She wanted women
to test an employer's equal pay policy by obtaining information about wages
and job grades. Too many women
were becoming "detached" from well-paid jobs by motherhood, she
said. Mrs Hewett made
her announcement in response to a report by Denise Kingsmill, the Govt's
adviser on equal pay, which said employers' attitudes to equal employment and
pay should be open to public scrutiny. Firms were urged
to launch pay reviews to make sure women staff were not being paid less than
men. Larger companies
will have to publish details of how they train and recruit staff. Thirty years
after the Equal Pay Act, women are still getting paid less than men,
resulting in a deficit that could add up to as much as £250,000 over a
lifetime. On average, for
every £1 a man earns, a woman gets only 82p over both the public and private
sectors. In the banking
and insurance sector, male pay averages approximately £18 per hour. Women
receive just under £10.50. [But see P Hewett
and P Leach, Social Justice, Children and
Families, pub. IPPR 1993, p iv; "....The pay
gap between women and men is largely a result of family responsibilities. The
earnings of single childless women, on average, are over 95% of those of
single, childless men: but married mothers earn, on average, only 60% of the
pay of married fathers." She has to avoid
the significance of her own figures. She is using the failure of married
mothers to earn much, to raise the pay of single women above that of single
men. That will make young men even more unmarriageable, and accelerate the
drop in the marriage rate and the birth rate, both already at crisis level,
because women and men will pay an increasing penalty if they marry. The missing
statistic in the Hewett book is that single men, single women and married
women all earn about the same (see Gilder), while Married men earn 70% more
than all the others. However, there is enough information in the Hewett book
to show that the present Hewett initiative is undertaken by an anti-social
shyster bent on destroying the family, or else by a stupid woman. Harman's 1993
book The Century Gap, p123,
says; "Young men and women with
comparable qualifications but who are not parents earn much the same as each
other. When men become fathers their earnings are unaffected or increase;
when women become mothers their earnings drop...." Harman, along with
radfems in general, is immune to statistics, so her confirmation that singles
earn the same is of limited value, but worth mentioning to show the hypocrisy
extends beyond Hewett to the full coterie surounding Blair. - Ed] Worms
are crushed by a feminazi boot - letter from Andrew
Schofield, Telegraph, 8dec01 Some years ago, The Two Ronnies conjured up a vision of
Stalinist feminism in a sketch called "The Worm that Turned". I
never thought I would live to see it become a reality. Yet the announcement
by Patricia Hewett that female employees are to enjoy the right to
confidential salary information about their male colleagues (report, Dec.6),
I believe I might. It remains to be
seen whether the courts uphold reciprocal rights for men. What is truly
disturbing, and should worry women as much as men, is what it reveals of a
government terrorised by political correctness and in thrall to a
"feminazi" clique. A series of
bone-headed initiatives in the area of employment law is already in danger of
diminishing the achievements of successful women. European and govt money
funds sexually exclusive training centres, while bounties are offered to
employers to hire female engineers and scientists. The Equal
Opportunities Commission is now seeking the right of automatic promotion for
women, with the burden of proof shifted to employers to prove inadequacy or
incompetence. What next in the
gender jihad? Men's health is already comprehensively neglected, in spite of
reliable new screening methods for the scourge of prostate cancer. Men are
routinely asset stripped in the courts without regard to the conduct of a
former spouse. But overpromoted women present the thorniest problem of all,
for the respect of peers is a matter of private conscience. Patricia Hewett,
Harried Harperson and Labour's other unreconstructed feminists may have to
consider an oriental mode of ritual obeisance. It could be the only way to
keep this cruel and capricious show on the road. - Andrew
Schofield, Cambridge Reality Control of the
media by radfems prevents the public from knowing that the denial of basic
human rights to fathers is routine. The hidden agenda is the belief, fostered
by Stinko of RHC, who is funded by the Home Office to fabricate false
statistics, that the main threat to a child is its own father; that the
reason why a father wishes to access his child is in order batter it or else
to sexually molest it. This letter is one of many. - Ed Dear Ivor, Thanks
for sending me the extracts on the DV research and the goings on at RHC. I sent copies on
to my MP FD, pointing out that the Melanie Phillips quote - of lies about men
being accepted as truth - was nowhere better adopted in vicious anti-male
style than by our own A City Council, who despite knowing I have 'equal
parental rights' AND a court order to see my son, supply my ex with 3 nights
a week social work carers, babysitting whilst I pace the streets totally
unable even to see my 6 year
old. This is naked us of social work for political ends and the thin end of
an ugly wedge. Social services being used to facilitate the exclusion of a
man from his children and refusing even to discuss the matter. Like many I am a
not-too-proud-of-it member of FNF .... I very much appreciate the stance of
the publications and hope I can be of some small help .... All of the best, PH. When
ignorance is not bliss for the rest of us I just do not
understand why I know more about the law than all the salaried judges,
relevant journalists and relevant Cabinet Ministers put together. Do none of
them operate their brains when addressing legal matters? "Ministers'
revolt saves trial by jury. - Francis Gibb, Times,
21jan02, p1. "Plans to
scrap the right to trial by jury for many offences are to be abandoned in the
face of strong opposition led by prominent members of the Cabinet. .... One
option would be to implement Sir Robin's proposal for a formalised system of
plea-bargaining, increasing incentives for defendants to plead guilty before
magistrates. Conviction in the Crown Court would result in heavier
punishment. ...." Plea-bargaining
increases the conviction rate, and will always be exploited by the police.
Even after the end of Thatcher, their promotion will still be linked to their
conviction rate. However, the most insidious factor, which none of these
highly salaried people link in, is parole. I am in
correspondence with many falsely imprisoned prisoners who refuse to admit to
a crime they did not commit, and so serve their full sentence rather than
only half. I set out to organise a "crossed fingers behind your
back" "confession", so that the prisoner could proceed to sue
all the rogues to framed him, even after "admitting" the crime so
as to get out of prison and back home earlier. (My friend, the wife-murderer
Charles Hanson, see Ill Eagle
10, p4, www.ivorcatt.2000.htm whose help I needed, refused to help,
so I gave up.) I think particularly of a policeman framed on a rape charge
and still in prison in Northern Ireland, who finally, after some years,
succumbed and falsely admitted guilt so as to get back to his wife and children
two years earlier. (He tells me that he now faces listening to courses run by
virulent radfems, which he finds extremely upsetting, on how to not rape
again.) It seems that none of the judges, politicians and journalists have
the motivation to think these matters through, although it is easy to do so.
Another man, Koupparis, who was framed and sentenced to four years, discussed
in my book The Hook and the Sting,
on my old website www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk, told me he served his full term so that
afterwards he would still be able to sue for wrongful imprisonment. These
cases are all around us, but not around politicians, judges and journalists. What is so
terrifying is that a highly intelligent woman friend of mine stuck to the
disastrous idea that admission of guilt has to remain the first atep in the
rehabilitation process, even though she was familiar the way all the lawyers
and juddges in my divorce case welcomed perjury, and knew that it was rampant
in the courts. So it is not only politicians, judges and journalists who
refuse to use their brains when addressing these terribly important matters. A legal and
criminal system run by people whose only interest is their golf handicap is
threat to every one of us. - Ed False
result fear over DNA tests - Nick Paton Walsh, Observer, 27jan02, p11 One in every
hundred forensic tests performed on the DNA of suspected criminals may give a
false result, according to the first research of its kind into laboratory
error rates. .... DNA testing is widely used to convince juries of a
suspect's guilt or presence at the scene of a crime, and was thought to be
almost flawless. The findings will
shock British DNA laboratories, which deny that errors exist. .... the first
accuracy tests carried out on DNA laboratories [in Texas] .... calculated
.... error had occurred in 12 in every 1,000 tests. .... Charles
Hanson W1638 Charles Hanson H M Prison Kingston Milton Rd., Portsmouth PO3 6AS 25jan02 Dear Ivor, I regret that you
do not see the way that all those prisoners who profess their so called
innocence see things. First let me say
that I have met many many prisoners who tell you that they are innocent, in
fact so many that all the innocent people must be in prison which suggests
that the outside world is perhaps the more dangerous than I thought and
perhaps prison is after all the safest place to be. I have personally
known those that have steadfastly maintained their innocence who would NEVER
dream of admitting any guilt for short term gains like that clown in Northern
Ireland. Stephen Dowling the lifer who was released last year after 27 years
and was recently cleared by the Court of Appeal would have been released
years ago had he admitted his guilt, as it was he was 10 years over his
tariff when he was finally granted bail to await the outcome of his appeal
which was a foregone conclusion, he too had a family and loved ones as did
the Birmingham 6, the Guildford 4, Judith Ward, Stefan Kisvko, Andy Evans
(did 21 years) and others. NONE admitted
their guilt, all were lifers and all had loved ones. These weren't
short term whingers like the person you refer to who wouldn't be able to
claim false imprisonment let alone successfully challenge his conviction by
the very dubious and dangerous ploy of "crossed fingers behind one's
back" of admitting his guilt so as he can get out of prison to fight on,
what form would that fight take I wonder telling the world he is guilty but
it's only a game? The criminal
justice system does not play games and since I broached this subject last
year I later spoke to my solicitor about this approach and I have to tell you
that he was horrified. The very nature
of your proposal most surely and will certainly bring into question whether
anyone taking that route of deceit can be believed at all having denied his
offence to start with, it would actually create more problems that it would
solve and I am bound to say that it might suit you and serve your agenda but
it most certainly is dangerous for the prisoner who would have to suffer the
consequences of wrathful judges who would take the view for sure that in
front of them they have a manipulative defendant whom it's very difficult to
be sure of and to know what is lies and what is truth all based on a
mechanism to avoid prison. A person who would
take that route you suggest is liable to take any route to escape prison
whether it's being deceitful manipulative or informing on others, just to
stop and think about the people in these places who might well have an
arguable case to clear their name, who have refused to cooperate with the
system and will not admit guilt at any price and then you come along and tell
them to put up their hands up and confess if only to get released from
prison. They would I can
tell you send you on your way. Moreover once it
becomes apparent that you are encouraging [prisoners to admit their guilt, it
could also open to question as to whether the course of justice is being
perverted. I have NO
disagreement with other aspects of what you do. I commend you on your
campaigns and would be delighted to be an active participant if I were out
there. I do however draw the line at the proposal to admit guilt with fingers
crossed behind one's back. .... My prison career
has been involved with long term prison regimes and I am bound to say at this
all lifer prison Kingston we have prisoners who will never be released and if
I was a betting man I would say I will be one of them. At the age of 56, my
tariff expires when I am 61 and that is only the minimum term there is NO
guarantee of release. And yet if I were innocent and was offered the chance
of release if i admitted guilt I would tell them to go to hell, I would go
out on my terms as an innocent man, no deals, no games and no head games as
an innocent man my freedom wouldn't be open to negotiation. I have seen many
prisoners go for years professing
innocence only to admit that they did commit the offence, they just couldn't
face up to it, they had involved family in their innocence sometimes costing
them fortunes in legal bills etc. only to turn round and HAVE to apologise to
them for leading them up the garden path. The group of
prisoners most likely to deny their offence are sex offenders, rapists etc.
They are kept apart from the general prison population for fear of attack. I
have met many prisoners who over the years have told me they were burglars,
armed robbers or their murder offence was the result of a fight in a pub etc. When the real
nature of their offence becomes known they disappear into segregation leaving
prisoners who knew him as a friend feeling somewhat silly and deceived and
that prisoner will become a pariah and regarded as scum by most prisoners. Me? I am not
judge and jury, the courts have already judges all. I think that when
you make references to some official in this case a judge "one of our
most senior judges said that 10% of those in jail were innocent" it
would be helpful to name your source as it becomes mere anecdotal otherwise
and questionable to say the least. Well these are my
comments on what you sent me. I trust that you
are keeping well and apart from any set backs you march on still with your
campaigns which I am bound to say are most worthy. Yours
sincerely, Charles Hanson. Parentectomy FNF Annual
Report 1993 Report
of Directors .... 2
Principal Activities The
principal activities are: a
to conduct research into the problems concerned with children deprived of the
presence of a parent and parents deprived of access to their children; b
.... to publish research findings .... These are two of
the four items abcd under "Principal activities" for FNF. I
continue to find it astonishing that FNF remains indifferent to my discovery,
and Canadian Senator Anne C Cools's independent discovery, that a child has not right of access to its parent,
is a matter of total indifference to FNF. What do they think about then? Will FNF publish
our findings? - Ed Doubts
grow over Jill Dando verdict - Tony Thompson, Observer, 8july01, p12 "....
growing unease about the safety of the conviction." [When the Plods
have worked for a year without success, and spent a million in the process,
they call in their First Reserve Villain, who is usually today's equivalent
of the Village Idiot, and charge him. They prefer to choose a Village Idiot
with a record of petty crime, who is idiot enough to think he deserves what
is coming. This gets the Daily Mail
off their backs for a few years, hopefully through to their retirement, when
the conviction is thrown out. ManKind should probably get involved in this
recurrent travesty. ManKind is not limited to addressing corruption in the
family courts. - Ed] Smearing
the Jury system To Paul Robertshaw, Lecturer in Law, Cardiff University, Cardiff Dear Dr.
Robertshaw, re the article
"Liverpool juries ....", Sunday
Times, 6jan02, p4, by Tom Robbins, which mentions you. It is helpful in
a way that Judge Mumby jailed my colleague Mark Harris on trumped-up
(Contempt of Court) charges for ten months (admittedly getting those phoney
charges past a jury!). It is also helpful that Harris is firmly convinced
that pressure from me and others made Mumby get him out after a two months,
so that Harris continues to demonstrate outside Mumby's home over Munby's
misbehaviour in court, which was the real reason why Munby cooked up the
charges in the first place. As you probably
know, the secret Family Court system, presided over by Sloss, is in terminal
decline. As they see the writing on the wall more and more clearly, we can
expect its embattled judges, already behaving more or less totally alegally,
to become more dangerous. This means that we would-be reformers need the
protection provided by our peers in open court - the jury system. Consideration of
reducing the role of Jury Trials must be deferred until after the collapse
and repacement of the Family Court System. Ivor Catt,
Editor, Ill Eagle. 6jan02 cc Sloss, Munby,
Tom Robbins. "It is
unacceptable that the disagreements and failure of communication of adults
should be allowed to obscure the needs of children both long term and short
term in so sensitive, difficult and important a field. The children had
unhappy experiences which should not be allowed to happen again." -
Butler-Sloss, The Cleveland Report
1987, p11. When will Sloss begin to talk with father victims of her secret
family courts, with a view to reducing the damage to their children? What
about talking with men's charities? IWF .... a shift in
power in Washingtoin .... Earlier this year, Washingtonian
magazine poublished a list of "INs" and "OUTs" for 2001.
On the OUT list the [redfem] National
Organisation for Women [NOW]
- an on the IN list was the Independent
Women's Forum [www.iwf.org]. What a refreshing change! Plus the
influential Washington Post
wrote a very positive article, calling IWF:
"One of the few women's groups willing to challenge the central beliefs
of feminist organisations, arguing that contemporary feminism is too willing
to cast women as victime. This has resulted, the group believes, in an angry
and intellectually rigid feminist viewpoint that believes affirmative action
and other government programs are the only way to obtain true equality
between the sexes." - IWF
newsletter, 14dec01. ************ Draft ManKind
and Ill Eagle can be reached at:- 1). Suite 367, 2 Lansdowne Row, London
W1X 8HL. www.mankind.org.uk
2) www.ivorcatt.com/ 3) Email Head.Office@mankind.co.uk
The Editor, Ivor Catt, 121 Westfields, St. Albans AL3
4JR, England. ( 01727 - 864257 Email ivor@ivorcatt.com http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=111911 Dozens
of sex offenders win right to appeal - Robert Verkaik,
Legal Affairs Correspondent, Independent,
28dec01 Dozens of
convicted paedophiles are to have their cases reheard by the Court of Appeal
amid concern that the methods used by police to investigate child abuse have
led to serious miscarriages of justice. Many of the
reviews centre on children's homes but others involve step-parents whose
convictions have been referred to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases
Review Commission (CCRC). The "test cases" will be followed by an
inquiry by MPs into child-abuse prosecutions over the last 30 years amid
charges that police "trawled" children's homes and prisons for new
complainants. The moves
highlight the difficulty in securing safe convictions against paedophiles and
follow a controversial proposal by Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, that
some suspected sex offenders may need to be locked up before they have
committed a crime. Lawyers bringing
the test cases have been working closely with an all-party parliamentary
group, whose members include Baroness Williams of Crosby and the MP for
Crosby, Claire Curtis-Thomas. Last week the group won an agreement from the
Home Affairs Select Committee for an inquiry into child-abuse prosecutions,
an issue many MPs believe has been ignored after the outrage over the trials
of Sarah Payne's killer, Roy Whiting, and the pop mogul Jonathan King. The group is
particularly concerned about allegations investigated by Merseyside Police in
the 1980s and 1990s. In a test case to be heard by the Court of Appeal in
January a careworker at a Merseyside children's home, sentenced to 14 years
in jail last year, is to have his case reheard after a key witness, a
convicted criminal, withdrew his complaint, claiming he was encouraged to
give evidence by the police. The Court of
Appeal will also hear the case of a 60-year-old careworker from Devon who
claims the evidence against him consists of uncorroborated allegations made
by serving prisoners. In a third case referred tothe court, a careworker from
Penarth, south Wales, claims allegations against him relate to
"non-specific events" over a long time. His solicitor, Tim Hacket
said: "[South Wales] police deliberately search out ex-pupils, who
generally [have] poor self-esteem or previous convictions, and then suggest
names." Ms Curtis-Thomas
said: "A significant proportion of the victims in these cases have been
identified while serving prison sentences or are known to the police in other
contexts." The select
committee is also expected to look at the effect of compensation. Victims who
allege child abuse are usually guaranteed compensation once they have
achieved a conviction in the criminal courts. In a letter to
Chris Mullin, the select committee chairman, Ms Curtis-Thomas said:
"There is much criticism about how the police trawl for victims and the
way they conduct their interviews with the individuals who have allegedly
been abused by leading the complainant into making or asserting allegations
put forward by the police." She said once a careworker had been
convicted, other complaints usually followed, yet many allegations referred
to events 20 or 30 years ago that were hard to contest. Sex offenders now
make up a third of all new cases considered by the CCRC. A separate category
of cases, also to be heard by the Court of Appeal, include step-parents
convicted of child abuse many years after the event. In one case, a man from
Kent had his conviction for raping his step-daughter quashed after the CCRC
questioned the strength of the evidence. Children's
welfare groups said challenges to convictions should not deter the police
from investigating allegations of abuse. Shaun Kelly, of NCH, formerly the
National Children's Homes, said: "Very few people actually are convicted
of child abuse. We are concerned about the number of allegations which are
not made and the large number of cases which go unreported. The experience of
child abuse which took place 15 and 20 years ago in this country is very similar
to what happened in Ireland and Canada
all these people can't be lying." [The more
convictions, the more money and children NCH will get to care for, and the
higher Kelly's salary and job security. The Child Protection Industry keeps
growing. I have told Claire Curtis-Thomas MP that this crisis links closely
with divorce perjury. For our forecast of this scandal, see for instance Ill Eagle 4, sep99, Editorial and p4,
Eddie Hampton; Esther Ranzen climbing on the dangerous bandwagon, Ill Eagle 6, p8; Ill Eagle 8, p3; Ill Eagle 12, p11, Ill Eagle 17, p2, etc. False Allegations
were discussed by speaker Risbridger at the ManKind
28oct00 Conference. Nobody at the Moxon 1999 Leicester Conference
on sex offences had the concept of a false allegation. Years ago I warned
Betty Moxon of the Home Office, who was working to increase rape sentences,
that compensation for so much wrongful imprisonment could be on a scale large
enough to bankrupt the UK and US governments. She did not reply. She is
deeply irresponsible. I established that nobody in govt has as part of their
remit the problem of false allegations, see my website. "To the
Attorney-General. You cannot keep the lid down on the kettle any more. The
pressure is too great. Ivor Catt, Editor, Ill
Eagle. [sent to
the Attorney-General on 25feb00, with a copy of Melanie Phillips, Sunday
Times 20feb00.] - Ed.] * A man was arrested
yesterday in connection with the murder of a suspected paedophile found
battered to death at his home, police said. George Crawford, 64, had been due
to appear at Manchester Crown Court next month over allegations he abused
four children in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr Crawford, who had no previous
convictions for sex abuse, was expected to deny all charges. - Robert Verkaik, Independent, 28dec01 We've
debunked authority so long, there isn't any left - Minette Marin, Sunday
Times, 20jan02,
p17 .... Children
know that adults cannot lay a hand on them without breaking the law. They are
also well aware of the current obsession with paedophilia, so they know that
they can threaten to call Childline with lurid allegations, if adults are
becomoing tiresome; my daughter threatened me with this when she was only
six. Childcare
theorists have done a great deal to undermine authority as well. Not long ago
I sat next to the husband of a leading expert in the field; he was outraged
by my admission that I sometimes tell my children to do things "because
I say so". .... .... it is
dangerous for a society when the idea of authority breaks down, because without
self-control, there will in the end be chaos. And chaos is no respecter of
persons .... Child
Abuse Hansard, 17oct01, col. 646 6.21 p.m. Earl
Howe rose to call attention to the damage caused to families by false
accusations of child abuse; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl
said: .... My concern can be summed up very simply. It is that alongside the
worrying numbers of genuine child abuse cases there is a parallel cause for
worry, which is that many innocent people are being wrongly accused of child
abuse and whose lives in consequence are being turned upside down without due
justification. I should like to
talk today about two of the triggers for false accusations. The first one is
a phenomenon known as "recovered memory". .... families being torn
apart as a result of adults - usually women - making retrospective
accusations of childhood sexual abuse against a member of their family. The
accused person - most often a father of hitherto impeccable character - would
protest his inocence. A common thread in many cases was that the grown-up
daughter had undergone a course of psychotherapy .... In 1998 the Royal
College of Psychotherapists set up a working party .... Its unequivocal
conclusions was that when apparent memories appear to be recovered after a
long period of amnesia there is a high probability that those memories are
false. .... its report reads ....: "Despite widespread clinical support
and popular belief that memories can be blocked out by the mindh, no empirical
evidence exists that supports the existence of repression or
dissociation." .... uncritical acceptance by the police and social
workers of claims about newly remembered abuse. The possibility of false
memory is often either ignored or overlooked. .... alleged retrospectively
against a care worker or teacher many years after .... The police often
assume guilt .... the burden of proof is effectively reversed. .... harmful
psychotherapeutic techniques are wreaking havoc with people's lives. .... .... the second
major trigger for false accusations .... Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or
MSBP. .... There is a good
case for making social workers personally and legally accountable for what
they do. Presently - perhaps uniquely among professional people - they are
not. .... The
channelling of considerable resources into chasing the falsely accused and
the pursuit of flimsily based allegations have the effect of removing
resources from where they arr really needed; namely, in the active prevention
of real physical violence, such as was inflicted on Victoria Climbie. .... Having made
a personal study of these matters, UI believe themn to be of deep
significance for the well-being of countless children and families up and
down the country .... 6.36 p.m. Lord
Warner: .... When I was a director of social services I had direct experience
of the kind of obsessive behaviour to which he referred by way of an NHS
consultant with a total attachment to anal dilatation. It took a huge effort
by social services, the police and others to remove that person from child
protection work. .... I share with the
noble Earl's concern over false or recovered memory. However, it is an
extremely difficult area to regulate. It sits in the complex area of what
transpires between a therapist and an unhappy person. Some therapists in the
US in the 1980s, and in the UK in the 1990s, have undoubtedly taken the area
of sexualk abuse and used it to sonvey a belief to their clients that it is
at the root of their unhappiness. The unhappy person then uses the idea to
satisfy his or her own needs as much as anything else. It is a serious and
difficult problem. .... 6.43 p.m. The
Lord Bishop of Birmingham: .... [frighteningly (radfem) Politically Correct,
he drew mild criticism from numerous other speakers] .... Child abuse is
hidesously common. It is not confined to any one class, race or gender. .... 6.48 p.m. Lord
Carlile of Berriew: .... People do not plead guilty, knowing they will
receive long terms of imprisonment, without being guilty on the whole. [How
wrong he is. See Mitchell on Plea Bargaining later on. - Ed] There has been
criticism of the way the police obtain evidence. Detective Chief
Superintendent Robbins of Liverpool is on record as saying that the police
adopt a quite different approach to obtain evidence in these cases, but his
remarks have been totally misunderstood. How else are the police to obtain
evidence save by asking people in an even-handed way without creating
prejudice if anything happened to them when they were in an institution years
ago of which they wish to make a complaint? [Read Lord Eden and Lucas later
on on Police trawling, and Claire Curtis-Thomas MP saying more than half the
accusers are criminals! Also their financial reward. - Ed] 6.54 p.m. Lord
Eden of Winton: .... we must be warned by the growing weight of evidence that
the experts in the social services, the medical profession and the police can
get things tragically wrong. It arises either because they have been
conditioned to believe that everything the child says has to be true or they
fail to interpret cprrectly the physical symptoms they may be examining. What
is most dangerous of all is that they might have a pre-conceived presumption
that abuse has taken place. If so, the child is then subjected to suggestible
questioning designed to substantiate that opinion. They appear to be
too ready to jump to a conclusion on the flimsiest of evidence. In one or two
cases I have heard about, when the police are brought in they sometimes trawl
the neighbourhood to seek corroboration for that so-called evidence. [Police
trawl through the prisons, offering financial reward. - Ed] .... children
.... might .... crave attention and in the process of craving attention they
will deliberately put themselves into trouble and might even inflict harm
upon themselves. I have met
several victims of false accusations: teachers and social workers. Some of
them are in prison, some of them have served prison sentences and all of them
have had their reputations completely destroyed. Some have maintained their
innocence to this day and others have been proven innocent. .... The fmaily
and, more importantly, the child have been deeply damaged. .... 7.6 p.m. Baroness
Carnegy of Lour: .... in relation to this debate, no fewer than 160,000 cases
of child abuse a year are alleged, of which only 40,000 go to a case
conference and only 25,000 result in children being put on the register. .... Something has to
be done in general about the problem. I hope that the Government will not be
bamboozled by all the detailed issues, but will see the problem clearly.
Children who go into care needlessly suffer unnecessarily from it.. About
120,000 innocent adults who are accused every year need not suffer. 7.12 p.m. The
Countess of Mar: .... Like the noble Earl, I have had a large number of
letters from parents and grandparents accused of child abuse. Their children
or grandchildren have been put on the "at risk" register, taken
into care or made wards of court. What I read and have been told profoundly
distresses and disturbs me. I am reminded of the witch hunts of previous
centuries. This time, the victims are frequently nice middle class families
[note what the bishop said - Ed] whose only fault is to be concerned about
their child, who has ill-defined symptoms from which he or she does not
rapidly recover. For various reasons, some social workers - I repeat that it
is some, not all - are not prepared to consider that these conditions might
be organic. Syspicion leads to referral, which leads to a huge investment in
social serivces, health services and court resources. There is no presumption
of innocence, as there is in other similar situations, and there seems to be
no requirement for social services to prove guilt. A terrible
injustice uis done to the fmailies involved. Virtually without warning, the
parent or parents find that they have been unjustly and unnecessarily
investigated under the child protection proceedings of Section 47 of the
Children Act 1989. Somehow, the Act has been so misconstrued as to enable
some social services departments, paediatricians and organisations such as
the NSPCC to abuse their powers, through misplaced zeal and ideology or
through sheer incompetencem to create tremendous distress and psychological
damage to parents, children and the wider family, sometimes destroying the
family structure. There is no measuring the levels of anxiety or the harm
done to children and their carers while the whole weight of the law is
brought to bear on them. Even when
accusations of child abuse against a parent or parents have subsequently been
withdrawn, often after prolongued and costly legal action, the stigma of
being branded a child abuser by the local authority remains with the parents.
Once a social services referral is placed on their Samson database, the
details remain for ever, no matter what the outcome of later enquiries. The
referral becomes common knowledge in the local community. Those who work with
children, either as carers or teachers, are refused employment and those who
have been active in the community or in voluntary work find that they are no
longer required, especially if children or young people are involved. These are people
who have been proved innocent, yet they are treated like criminals. What is
more, their sentence never ends. Their child, who is wrongly perceived as
having been abused, is pities. Parents are afraid to seek medical treatment
for themselves or their children. If they are brave enough to go to the
doctor, their complaints are often dismissed as somatisation. I know that many
social workers, doctors and voluntary workers do wonderful work with
seriously deprived children and their fmailies. I kow that they bridle
against the incompetence of a small number of their colleagues. We need to
think again about what we expect from social workers and to ask whether we
are expecting too much. The communal hysteria that is generated around child
abuse must have an effect on those who work with children. Are we being
reasonable in our expectations? I think that perhaps we are not. When I originally
asked for an inquiry, I had no idea that the problem was so widespread. I am
grateful that the Minister in another place has agreed to meet me with some
of the parents concerned, but I fear that that may not resolve the problem.
There is a need for an inquiry to resolve the problem, even if it is a Select
Committee of inquiry, as the noble Earl has suggested. Abused parents need to
be able to tell their stories. Solutions need to be sought and these dreadful
injustices must be put right as far as possible. There needs to be a
cleansing. 7.22 p.m. Lord
Lucas: My Lords, I do not share the impression that I gained from the speech
of the right reverand Prelate that, because of the horrendousness of the
effects of child abuse, we should pay any less attention to the
horrendousness of the effects of false allegations of child abuse. .... my
feeling is that things do not feel right. There is tto much pain, and too
many of the expressions of pain feel real and justified. The outlying
situation is one in which we could reasonably expect there to be a witch
hunt. .... Professionals,
too, have over the years consistently shown their ability to lose a sense of
balance and professionalism. I lost trust in the NSPCC a few years ago when
it ran an advertising campaign claiming that one in eight children in the
subject of abuse. The NSPCC cannot see that child abuse is a term which
should be reserved foe the serious abuse of children, which is far too
common. Its claim would suggest that 100 or your Lordships had suffered child
abuse and that perhaps 50 of your Lordships were child abusers. That is so
far from reality and reason. It is very important that such an organisation
maintains a sense of balance and professionalism. [At the FYC AGM, Guest
Speaker Baroness Young, shadow Leader of the House, said that all Children's
organisations were anti-family. Otherwise, she said, they would lose their
government funding. - Ed] .... I am
particularly disappointed that the Department of Health should have published
its consultation document as it has. The department has made great strides
under the Government in evidence-based medicine. I applaud it for NICE, and I
applaud it for doing the things that have needed doing for a long time. But
here is an example of the Department of Health publishing a document which
simply is not based on research or proper consideration. i hope that the
department will recover its balance in this matter. .... I want to pick up
two particular points. I should be encouraged if it were possible for the
accused to be given greater representation at case conferences. I believe
that if a case conference had a professional present to look after the
interests of the accused - be it a lawyer or anyone else - that would tend to
hold the level or rationality and proper professionalism of the conference at
a consistently better level than is sometimes the case. Unlike the noble
Lord, Lord Carlile, I do not like the practice of trawling. One can imagine
it applied in a totalitarian society where the police might offer people
£1,000 if they were able to give evidence against me that I had said
something rude about the Government. It is too much of a temptation,
particularly where the people being asked are themselves criminals or damaged
people for one reason or another. it invites false accusation, especially
when there is no penalty for making a false accusation. I believe that such a
technique should be used with a great deal of care and be subject to the type
of supervision which might be possible if an uindependent element were
introduced into case conferences. Dear Lord Howe, Child
Abuse Your speech in
the Lords on 17oct02 was valuable. I would like to add to what was said at
that time. Risbridger, when he
spoke on false allegations at the 28oct00 ManKind Conference that I chaired
(see my website), said that most false allegations occur during the divorce
process. That point was entirely missing from the Lords debate. Many sources
say that lawyers urge their divorcing clients to fabricate false allegations. With regard to
Munchausen's syndrome by proxy, I would add my wife's case, which is common.
When a wife feels loss of control, she may make false allegations in order to
gain attention for herself. This problem is most likely to occur when the
children reach the age to leave home, or at the menopause. The need to assert
control, or to assert power, links with the attention-seeking of Munchausen.
The wife brings in outside agencies to give her importance or to give her
power. All outside agencies give total support to the wife. Another major
factor missing from the Lords debate is the fact that in our totally secret
family courts, there is no procedure for investigating perjury. I have
challenged the legal profession to state the procedure. Overleaf is part of
my book "The Hook and the Sting", p65, avaliable on my website. I
argue that the family courts welcome perjury because it increases legal fees. Congratulations
on your 17oct01 speech. Best wishes, Ivor Catt. Editor, Ill
Eagle 1jan02 Affirmative-Action
Feminism A.k.a. 'Boss
Weed' feminism, a nick name that Wendy McElroy, an individualist-feminist,
coined for it, the branch of gender-feminism that devotes itself to promote
equal representation of women. In a
Dec. 11, 2001 FOXNews.com article, Wendy McElroy defines the qualities of affirmative-action-feminism by
measuring it relative to individualist-feminism: The ideal of
equal representation for women in democratic governments around the globe sounds
praiseworthy. But its implementation has little to do with
"equality" or "democracy." Instead, it has become a
policy of privilege and quota, driven by elite powers that disregard the
wishes of "the people" in regions where it is applied. It is affirmative
action applied to the political realm. Cries for
political quotas are becoming more common. In the West, quota-advocate
feminists speak euphemistically of "including the voices of women in
government." But the goal has shifted from giving women the vote on an
equal footing with men to enforcing the presence of women in governmental
bodies. According to their theory, the lack of female officials is the direct
result of discrimination that must be rectified by government policy. ... Feminism is the
belief that women and men should be treated as equals, but the definition of
"equality" can differ widely. To individualist feminists, or
ifeminists, equality means identical treatment under laws that protect person
and property. It is an equality of rights, not of results. If women cast a
ballot as men do, then women's political will has been actualized even if no
females are elected. ... Because gender feminism
defines equality in socio-economic terms, it seeks to reorganize society to
redistribute political, economic and cultural power from men to women. This
equality of results, not rights, leads to legal privileges for women, such as
mandatory placement on ballots. .... [from
www.ivorcatt.com/2003.htm] Hansard 24oct01, 7.57pm Women-only
short lists Miss Anne
Widdicombe (Maidstone and The Weald): .... I have always advocated greater
numbers of women in Parliament. I have always wanted to see more women
succeeding, not only in getting into the House but in holding positions of
responsibility. I earnestly look forward to the day when we have a second
woman Prime Minister. .... I am often quite
sorry for men. There are lots of injustices with which they have to put up.
For example, they do jnot live as long as we do, but they have to work longer
in order to get a pension. That will not be put right for some time. Some 50
per cent of young men getting married today will not be able to see their
children through to maturity in the same household. Whereas in the past women
have had it ery hard, there are now a few injustices for men. This Bill will
create more. .... this pernicious Bill, yet hon. Gentlemen welcome it as a
great step forward. It is a massive step towards inequality for men, and the
poor souls just let the women walk all over them. They do not appear to care
what will hyappen to them. .... I do not believe that the proposal behind the
Bill is what was intended by the equal opportunities legislation of the
mid-1970s. I remember that legislation, because I belonged to that minority
in my party that believed it was necessary. However, feminists in the 70s
said, "Give us equality of opportunity and we will show you that we are
as good as, if not better than, most men." Now, a quarter of a century
later, we whinbge and whine and demand special treatment because we cannot
make it otherwise. It that is not an
insult to women, I do not know what is. Positive discrimination is always
negative discrimination against someone. I want every women in this House to
be able to look every man, from the |Prime Minister down -- or up -- in the
eye and know that she got there on exactly the same terms as he did. She must
know that she has defeated all the competition, and that her path was not
artificially smoothed by the removal of inconvenient male competition. .... I
oppose the Bill. I think it is misconceived and an insult to women. It would
also be terrible for the future of men, and the poor souls just cannot see
it. They need to wake up. [Now let us
examine society's reaction if it is men who are excluded. - Ed] Merton
Refuge Established
1975 tel. 020 8542
8791 [Recently, their
services were broadened to include male vistims of Domestic Violence. They
were totally swamped by men, and have now had to withdraw their services from
male victims. - Ed.] 2000/2001
Annual Report and Accounts .... Report of the
M.A.L.E. Helpline April 1994 -
April 2001 .... Chief Supt.
Harwood in his [opening] address remarked that "there was a need for
this service, but you are opening a can of worms that society would find hard
to accept". His words still ring true to this day. .... Male
Victims We always knew
this would be a contentious issue, but nevertheless thought it was one that
needed to be addressed, much to the relief of male victims. At last here was
a group that took the issue seriously. Previously they had been an object of
humour, at best not to be taken seriously and at worst ridiculed. Until the
helpline intervened injuries inflicted on male victims were trivialised even
though the same injuries inflicted upon women were considered serious. Men
reporting incidents of violence against them by a female were considered to
be wimps and in such a minority they should be ignored. The media, keen to
report another angle of domestic violence invited our co-ordinator to
highlight the issue on many programmes including Hear & Now; Panorama;
Dispatches; News at Ten and many other current affairs and discussion
programmes. Nuimerous articles were written about this subject. The result
was more and more male victims calling the line for help. Their experiences
were varied. Some were totally disbelieved when reporting an incident, those
that were believed were turned away through lack of knowledge on how to help
him. This instigated setting up a training programme for other agencies. soon our
co-ordinatro was being contacted by Victim Support Groups, Citizen Advice
Centres, Communmity Safety Units and countless other groups all recognising
the lack of information and comprehension their particular organisation had
on the subject. Our co-ordinator also accepted an invitation from Scotland
Yard to become a member of their Male Rape and Serious Sexual Assault
Steering Group. We responded to
six government consultation documents and attended 14 meetings at the House
of Commons. Reference was made to other victinms in the British Crime Survey
Research Study 191produced by the Home Office which stated "Men are
equally as likely to suffer domestic violence". We acted as consultants
to Channel 4 television in 1999 when they produced the Dispatches programme
'Battered Men'. To make the programme they interviewed the largest number of
male victims than anywone had ever done previously. However, most
statutory organisations continued to focus solely of female victims. Toour
knowledge onle three of the forty three Police Authorities in England and
Wales have made positive change in their policy and have included other
victims in their information literature. Most Local Authorities and Social
Services Departments target only female victims, their only solution in
dealing with other victims is to give them our phone number, and then only if
the person responding happened to know of it. As knowledge of the [Merton]
Helpline grew more agencies were using it as a means of referral to any other
vicrtims who approached them. We were being used as an easy option, simply by
including our phone number in their leaflets they could report they were
responding to all victims and were complying with their Equal opportunities
Policy. Finally the workload became too heavy and the decision was made to
return the helpline to its original status in Merton. This particularly
alarmed manmy Police Forces, as they now had no referral for male, homosexual
or lesbian victims. Weadvised them to challenge their Domestic Violence
Forunms and Police Consultative Groups to draw up their own strategy. We hope
the work of the line has forced other agencies to recognise other victims and
address the issue rather than uignoring it as was previously the case. .... if a man
goes to Court s a victim of domestic violence he can expect to lose his home
and his children. .... During the seven
years of operation our co-ordinator 1 responded to 50,000
telephone calls 2 replied to 10,000
letters .... It's now up to other
agencies to provide their own service .... The
many faces of feminism Feminism? You want feminism? Which brand would you like? Whatever
positive image the word feminist may have had, it has been tarnished by those
who have made it their own, and I, for one, am content to leave the militants
in full possession of the term. Dale
O'Leary in her book The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality (p. 23) (Dale
O'Leary devoted a full two chapters of her book to describe and chronicle
radical feminism and "really radical feminism." WHS) Feminism is
exhibited by a spirit of unrest among a comparatively small number of
dissatisfied women. They preach the gospel of unholy discontent. They are
born agitators, and "dearly love a fight." They prefer war to peace;
turmoil to tranquility; contention to concord; pride to humility; sophistry
to truth; agnosticism to belief, and prefer to assert their own wills,
"live their own lives" as against the precepts of all conventional
morality, being moral anarchists. Benjamin
V. Hubbard, in Socialism, Feminism, and
Suffragism, the Terrible Triplets... (1915) Contemporary (or
second wave) feminism has aptly been described as "Marxism without
economics," since feminists replace class with gender as the key social
construct. Of course, what society
constructs can be deconstructed. This is the feminist project: to abolish
gender difference by transforming its institutional source the patriarchal family. Certain streams of the Gay Rights movement
have taken this analysis one step further.
The problem is not just sexism but heterosexism, and the solution is
to dismantle not just the patriarchal family but the heterosexual family as
such. F.L. Morton & Rainer Knopff
in The Charter Revolution & The Court Party (p. 75) .... .... Index Affirmative-Action (Boss
Weed) Feminism Anti-Feminism Amazon Feminism Anarcho Feminism 'Boss Tweed' Feminism Christian Feminists Constructionist Feminism Cultural Feminism Difference Feminism Dominance Feminism Eco Feminism Equity Feminism Erotic Feminism Femicommie Feminazi Feminism and Women of
Color Gender Feminism Individualist, or
Libertarian Feminism Lesbianism Lesbianism 30+ sexual orientations Liberal Feminism Libertarian Feminism Marxist Feminism Material Feminism Matriarchal Separatist
Feminism Moderate Feminism Pod Feminist Pop Feminism Post-modernist Feminism Pro-Family Advocates Pro-Life feminists Pro-Sex Feminists Radical Feminism Resenter (angry at men)
Feminism Separatists Socialist Feminism Survivor Feminism Total Rej (total
rejection) Feminism Victim Feminism Women of Color Feminism .... .... Virtually all of
the terms aim at the destruction of traditional moral standards and the
traditional nuclear family.... [For a
comprehensive analysis of the various
brands of feminism see
www.ivorcatt.com/2003.htm. I set out to do this research, but perhaps
it is already done and presented at 2003. Our excellent colleague in Canada
Walter H Schneider gave us this mine of information. - Ed] Bing
to Rights? - Margaret Driscoll, Sunday
Timies, 9oct01,
p24 .... it is plain
that Bing did not want a baby - yet now he has to live with the consequences.
His own fault .... But David Thomas, author of Not Guilty, IIn Defence of the Modern Man, disagrees:
"I don't see why a man should have to be a father when he doesn't
actively want to be. "The law and
society rightly make a huge issue of women's consent to sex, but no attention
is paid to a man's right to conesnt in reproduction. In cases where a woman
has deceived a man [by lying about her contraception], there should be some
kind of snaction. "At the
moment there is no legal redress against somebody who tricks or leads you
into an 18-year financial commitment, and that's wrong." .... Once upon a
time a woman "left holding the baby" was understood to have been
left in the lurch. Now the man can be left holding a demand from the Child
Support Agency. .... James Ward
from London was stunned when a woman with whom he'd had a one-night stand
(and foolishly assumed was on the pill) rang him six months later and told
him she was pregnant. .... DNA tests proved [it]. The woman pursued him for
maintenance, and he asked to visit his daughter. After a second visit
"the mother began to get jealous and contact ceased". Ever since, Ward
has been fighting for the right to see his daughter. He has been to court 49
times .... many estranged of involuntary fathers give up. "The father
only has the right to pay money," says Ward. "That's not likely to
change, because in this area men are so weak and women so strong." Pail Jones, ....
"Once she was pregnant, I'd served my purpose. She didn't want me in her
life," he says. He, too has fought for access .... It is expensive and
stressful. "The child isn't the mother's property, but she'll treat it
as her property .... The mother is the gatekeeper and she determines
access." Black
and white mischief - Thomas Sowell,
a leading American academic, Sunday Times,
16dec01, sect. 4, p10 .... Group
preferences have existed in many countries under a variety of names .... ....
"positive discrimination" in Britain. .... There is probably no
other programme which exists so widely around the world with so little
empirical data on its consequences. Yet such facts as
exist tell remarkably similar stories .... Perhaps the grand
illusion of preferential programmes is that they can be limited in time and
scope and can be ended when they have served their purpose. .... Affirmative
action programmes .... have been successively extended to so many different
groups that an absolute majority of the American population is now legally
entitled to group preferences and quotas whose rationale was to compensate
for historic injustices. .... There are
serious reasons why programmes intended to benefit those at the bottom turn
out to aid primarily those further up the socio-economic scale. .... .... Believers
have often pointed out that the numbers and proportions of American blacks in
professional, managerial .... occupations increased .... following the
passage of the 1964 civil rights act. They have seldom, if ever, pointed out
that the rise was even greater in the years immediately preceding the act.
.... The desire to
rescue the vision from painful facts has been apparent .... The most
important fact about all this is how few ever bothered to check the facts.
The vision was sufficient for those who are who are satisfied to be on the
side of the angels. For those concerned about the actual fate of others, the
factors which go into the creation of that fate are crucial, even if such
factors require hard work .... x To Adrienne Burgess From Ivor. 30apr98. In your meeting,
in view of who was present, you did damage to our children by misquoting the
UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It does not assert a child's right
of access to its parent. (If you believe that "a child's right to family
life" is the same, then please say so in writing.) I raised the point,
which was that after my previously raising it in an FNF AGM, with you
present, nobody had responded for some years. (This was to illustrate the
point that, if networks were incapable of taking in communication from me,
then it would follow that there was no place for me in networks. I do not
warm to the idea of a network which only socialises and plays personality
politics, but cannot support factual communication.) Your meeting was a
further example of a network in action, and of failure to take in information
from me. Now, by your error, you have delayed the process for perhaps another
five years. There are good grounds for arguing that if a child has no right
of access to its parent, then you and we are wasting our time. A building has
to be constructed from the foundations up. The FNF door knocker and Adrienne
window sashes come later. Victims
of Memory by Mark
Pendergrast, pub. HarperCollins 1995 p xxiii The current repressed-memory hunt has
breathed life into one of the most damaging and sexist traditions in our
culture - the subtle message to women that they can gain power and attention only through the victim role. That does not mean that they are inherently
passive, dependent, or hysterical, but it does
mean that the current hunt follows in that tradition. p562 Recovered Memories Since this form
of therapy became popular in 1990 (when The
Courage to Heal was published in England), it is reasonable to
assume, then, that well over 100,000 cases have been fomented in the United
Kingdon since that time. .... Why, then, have
only 700 families come forward to contact the British False memory Society?
There are several explanations. For one thing, it is likely that most British
parents accused of incest by their adult children on the basis of recovered
memory therapy are too embarrassed, frightened, and depressed to come
forward. They are suffering in silence all over the United Kingdon. [This is the
excellent, encyclopaedic book on the subject. According to Pendergrast,
today's witch craze was triggered by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal, pub. Cedar 1988,
which I discuss below with extracts. - Ed.] Bass and Davis
are clearly dysfunctional. ".... Bass .... gort divorced, declared
herself a lesbian, and currently lives with an incest survivor ...."
[Pendergrast p7] From the Bass
book; 19jan98 Mrs. Sally Spear, Fallows Corner, 38 Sun Lane, Harpenden AL5 4HA Dear Sally, Thank you so much
for your letters, including the hand drawn chart; "What the situation
appears to be to me", which involved you in a lot of effort. I came to the
second meeting at your house because a high up UNA [United Nations
Association] man was to talk. My sole purpose was to test whether it was in
fact true that the right of a child to access its parent is not asserted in
any international or national declarations on human rights, or in any
national or European legislation. The one Declaration he cited, I quoted back
to him, and he agreed that the assertion was missing. He now hides behind
asserting that it is a legal matter in which he is incompetent, which is not
true. The declaration of fundamental human rights is not a legal matter, and
is never buried in legalese. If your lecturer
continues to evade this issue, then it will negate any good he might have
done in his decades with UNA. It is estimated that one quarter of children in
England have lost all contact with one parent. (This breach has been legally orchestrated by various arms of
our government and semi government, with impunity.) He has no right to run away from his responsibilities in this
matter. With reputation comes responsibility. I shall be very grateful is you
give a copy of this letter to him. I could draft the
clause in five minutes. For instance, "A child has an inaleinable right
of access to its parent, unless the separation can be justified in a jury
trial, the legal costs of both sides to be borne by the agency or individual
totally separating child and parent. The burden of proof lies on the agency
or individual seeking to separate child from parent." Why does he evade
this matter? A member of UNA for decades, is he anti-social? Is he in fact an
enemy of basic civil rights? The concept is
close to Habeas Corpus. The recent decline in nuclear and extended family,
and attacks on them by agents of the state (in secret courts) and others, has
caused the issue to be more and more serious, partly because the philosophy
of what constitutes parent and what constitutes family has been undermined.
The right under discussion was never asserted in the past, because in the
past it was obviously a fundamental human right. Only the non-obvious human
rights get stated, and this has become one. It is estimated
separately by two researchers that the cost to the taxpayer of permanently
separating child from parent is £160,000 in each case, and evidence of the
non-fiscal damage to the individual and to society mounts. Yours
sincerely, Ivor Catt Abuse
of men by their female partners - Anne Lewis, Australia Anne Lewis, a
victims of male abuse, depth interviewed about fifty male victims of more
than twelve months of female abuse. See www.dvmen.org/dv-26.htm There are numerous references, giving a
good route into all aspects of the subject. Curse
of the first wives - Cristina Odone, Observer, 27jan02, p27 .... Not all
first wives are wronged wives (after all, statistics show that in more than
half of divorces, it is she who calls it quits). And not all first wives get
it wrong: my mother, I remember, only rang my father when my brother or I
were directly concerned .... And yet the way most ex-wives carry on, you'd
think they were victims of a rogue accountant bent on robbing them of their
hard-earned Enron salaries. .... There are millions and millions of ex-wives
nowadays, anbd their anger will not ease the strain between the sexes. .... Naomi
Wolf Below, Kristin
Aune and Martha Crossley talk to Naomi Wolf in Third Way, dec01, p21. www.thirdway.org.uk We were quite a
religious Jewish family: .... there was a very strong sense that the family
could be a source of tremendous nourishment and stability. My family stayed
together, unlike a lot of others. .... Another
great th8ing about my religioujs inhetritance is that sensuality and
sexuality - and woman's sexuality, surprisingly - within a marital context is
seen as very positive. .... As Betty Frieden
has said, feminism for women has to encompass the fact that women have
children. And men have children, too. That's the culmination of our
relations. .... To me,
feminism is the logical extension of democracy. .... I would say that the
nuclear famly is a disaster for good parenting. .... I've just had a woman
telling me that if I was sleeping with a man I was letting down the
sisterhood. .... I think Jesus was .... an unbelievably revolutionary, gutsy
feminist .... If I were giving advice to the church fathers, I would make the
case - which is really true of every institution - that the future is female.
.... .... as feminism
continues to make gains, men's lives become more and more difficult ....
[then she completely misses expropriation of the father after divorce. Does
she not know about it? - Ed] Naoimi Wolf is
the author of Fire with Fire,
pub. Chatto & Windus 1993. Divorce
is not in its index, but rape
figures heavily. What a mess! On the inner cover; "Why, asks Naomi Wolf,
has feminism become a dirty word, even among women? A chasm has opened up
between the feminist movement and the lives of most women. Feminist orthodoxy
is out of touch with the real world. .... She provides a blueprint for a
revitalised, positive and inclusive brand of feminism ...." Then on p88,
she discusses the way women are not allowed in the media to discuss women's
issues! Her fourth book, Misconceptions,
was published on 10sep01. Some
mothers can't 'ave 'em - Margarette
Driscoll and Rosie Waterhouse, Sunday
Times, 27jan02, p14 .... While the
govt is busy giving childcare tax credits to those on lower incomes to
encourage women back to work, higher earners who do not qualify for help are
finding that the costs of quality child-care are crippling. .... the average
London nanny earns £23,800; a working mother must earn £35,000 just to cover
childcare. The figure represents an 8.5% rise in nannies' wages over last
year, far outstripping inflation. The prohibitive
cost of childcare is not just a London phenomenon .... some middle-class
women are beginning to drop out of work altogether .... Nurseries provide little
alternative. Some London day nurseries charge £15,000 a year .... only 13% of
parents can afford to employ formal childcare. [Patricia Morgan,
who spoke at our ManKind 2000 conference, has written that childcare is
either too expensive, or of such low quality that it damages children. - Ed] 18dec01 second copy sent 28jan02 Recorded Delivery. Hilton Dawson M.P., House of Commons, Westminster Dear Sir, Kilroy
tue18dec01. Paedophiles. On the BBC1
Kilroy programme this morning you stated that "One in seven men had had
criminal conviction for sexual abuse against children." Please supply
your source for this statistic. Another
statistic, that there are 100,000 paedophiles in this country, was repeated
frequently on this morning's programme. You or Robert Kilroy, who repeated
this second (100,000) statistic, might be willing to supply the source, and
the definiition used. Yours sincerely, Ivor Catt, Editor, Ill Eagle. cc Chairman, ManKind, cc Robert Kilroy-Silk, BBC, Elstree Studios, Borehamwood,
Herts. The
Facts Behind Cohabitation Civitas report,
see www.ivorcatt.com/2008.htm Cohabiting
relationships are fragile. .... Less than 4% of cohabitations last for ten
years or more. .... cohabiting couples acculmulate less wealth than married
couples .... [wives are less likely to be abused] .... cohabitations with
children are even more likely to break up than childless ones .... [70% of
children born to married parents live their entire childhood with both
natural parents, but only 36% of those born to parents cohabiting at time of
their birth] .... The
price of casual sex - Carol Midgley, Times, 29jan02 Britain is suffering
from a sexually transmitted disease epidemic, with huge numbers of young
people becoming infected. www.ivorcatt.com.2010/htm Male
suicides www.ivorcatt.com/2011.htm Are Fathers' Rights a Factor in
Male Suicide? - Wendy McElroy,
29jan02 In the early
morning hours of Jan. 7, 43-year-old Derrick K. Miller walked up to a
security guard at the entrance to the San Diego Courthouse, where a family
court had recently ruled against him on overdue child support. Clutching
court papers in one hand, he drew out a gun with the other. Declaring:
"You did this to me," he fatally shot himself through the skull.
Miller's suicide is symbolic of a frightening global trend: an alarming rise
in male suicides. According to a round of studies conducted in North America,
Europe and Australia, one reason for the increase may be the discrimination
fathers encounter in family courts, especially the denial of access to their
children. If a similar rise in female suicides was occurring, a public
crusade would demand a remedy. Yet the extraordinarily high rate of male
suicide is rarely discussed. What are the statistics?
According to a 1999 surgeon general's report, suicide is the eighth leading
cause of death in America, with men four times more likely to kill themselves
than women. The prevalence of male suicide is not restricted to North
America. An Australian study offered similar statistics. Of 2,683 suicides in
Australia in 1998, 2,150 were males, making suicide the second leading cause
of death among 25- to 44-year-old men. The Australian Institute of Health and
Welfare reports that the suicide rate for men aged 20 to 39 years has risen
by 70 percent over the last two decades. Statistics from Ireland and the
United Kingdom indicate rates of male suicide as high as five times that of
women. Indeed, a recent study found that suicide was the leading cause of
death for Irish men between 15-34 years old. The research also points to a
probable cause. According to sociologist Augustine Kposow of the University
of California at Riverside, divorce and loss of children is a factor.
"As far as the [divorced] man is concerned, he has lost his marriage and
lost his children and that can lead to depression The Australian study's suggested reasons for some of the
suicides include "marriage breakdown." "There is evidence to
suggest that many men sense they are being discriminated against in family
court judgements," the study says. Cut off from their children, divorced
men experience heightened "frustration and isolation." Yet, the
motivation for male suicide remains a matter for speculation because little
research has focused on the subject. Telling the stories of
such forgotten men has been left largely to fathers' rights Web sites such as
Dads4Kids. There you read about Warren Gilbert who died of carbon monoxide
poisoning, clutching a letter from the Child Protective Service. Or Martin
Romanchick — the New York City police officer who hanged himself after being
denied access due to charges brought by his ex-wife, which the court found to
be frivolous.Or Darrin White, a Canadian who hanged himself after being
denied access because he could not pay child support that was twice his
take-home pay. His 14-year-old daughter wrote a letter to the Canadian prime
minister in which she pointed to "the frustration and hopelessness
caused in dealing with Canada's family justice system" as the "biggest
factor" in her father's death. "I know my father was a good man and
a good father. ... He obviously reached a point where he could see that
justice was beyond his reach and for reasons that only God will know, decided
that taking his life was the only way to end his suffering," Ashlee
White wrote. Ashlee signed the letter "In Memory of My Loving
Father."Are family court systems deeply biased against fathers? I
believe so. But discussing the matter is almost a taboo. How prevalent is the
silence? When did you last hear a discussion of whether a "father"
should have any voice in abortion? Even raising the issue draws derisive and
dismissive responses. Yet if men are forced to bear legal responsibility for
children, then it is not absurd to ask whether they should have some
prerogatives as well. The point here is not how the question should be
answered. The point is that the question should be asked. .... The stakes are
too high for the media to remain disinclined to comment. .... Male suicide
must be confronted honestly before America follows the way of Ireland, before
suicide becomes the leading cause of
death in young men. .... Last
Road Out of Hell
by James Hanback,
Jr. 15jan02 On Jan. 7, a
43-year-old man, apparently depressed about a recent overdue child support
ruling against him, shot himself to death on the steps of the San Diego
Courthouse. According to
reports in the San Diego Union Tribune, Derrick K. Miller walked up to a
security guard around 6:25 a.m. and began raving about injustices thrust upon
him by the legal system. Court papers in one hand, he produced a handgun with
the other and fired one shot into his skull, instantly killing himself. What the
six-paragraph story in the Union Tribune doesn't say, however, is that
Miller's actions represent a small sampling of a disturbing trend all over
the world. Men who are fed up with what they see as injustices perpetrated
upon them by court systems that, in cases of child custody, child support,
and divorce, generally favor women, are increasingly taking their own lives. The problem has
become so widespread, in fact, that some governments-Australia's, for
instance-have implemented new programs aimed at getting suicidal men help in
overcoming the urge to end it all. Likewise, official studies from both
Australia and Ireland within the past year have connected an alarming
increase in male suicide in their respective countries to the breaking down
of family structure, and a perception by men of wrong-doing to them
perpetrated by the legal system. According to the
Irish study, five times more men than women in that country die from suicide
each year, and more than 40 percent of those are men under 30. The principle
cause of death for men between the ages of 15-34 in Ireland, in fact, is
suicide. Once upon a time, more men died from traffic accidents. The Irish report
further stated that the "strong protective effect of marriage" was
confirmed as prevention for male suicide. Single, separated, divorced, or
widowed individuals all had higher suicide rates. In similar
fashion, the Australian study found that younger men in that country were
particularly susceptible to suicide upon divorce or separation from their
children. "Recent
research into male suicide in this age group revealed that males in the 'separation
phase' of a marriage break-up were most at risk of suicide, compared with
widowed or divorced males," the report's authors wrote. "Marriage
breakdown is a significant characteristic of male suicide in the 24-39 age
bracket. The anxiety and emotional pain of separation and divorce appear to
effect [sic] men differently. "Whilst
suicides may simply be recorded as statistics, it is the increasing number of
murder/suicides, involving children that have brought the tragic reality of
male suicide, and male mental health issues in general into the public arena.
"Where
children are concerned, there is evidence to suggest that many men sense they
are being discriminated against in family court judgements, and often find
themselves in financial straits having to pay legal fees and child support
payments. The difficulty in maintaining access to children also heightens the
frustration and isolation of separated and/or divorced men." Two studies, two
separate nations, and a plethora of social scientists have thus apparently
confirmed what individual families have known and news reports have ignored
for years: family courts all over Western society are unfair to men, and some
men are dying as a result. In the U.S. alone, statistics from the Centers for
Disease Control estimate that approximately 80 percent of all suicides every
year are by men. Compared to homicide rates recorded by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, the number of suicides every year in this country is about 32
percent higher than the number of homicides. Although both the
Irish and Australian studies suggest that mental health professionals should
focus more on men and getting men to help themselves out of the depressions
which result in suicide, perhaps a greater contributor to men's well-being would
be to reform family courts. Perhaps it's time to change things so that men
going through divorce, child custody battles, and child support hearings are
given a fair shake. Even in these
days of Western feminine liberation there are men who pay alimony. Why? Women
in Western culture have been welcomed into the workplace. Everyone knows a
woman can make her own ends meet if she so chooses. If, in divorce, the
female is absolved from all marital obligations to her former husband, why
should he still be forced to be her breadwinner? Likewise, child
support is no longer about providing for children. It is a multi-million
dollar industry designed to generate revenue for individual state
governments, at least in the United States. Visit any fathers advocates forum
on the Internet and you'll find a variety of horror stories about child
support rulings which deprive a man of his own livelihood, while his ex-wife
maintains custody of the children, denies him visitation, and has married
another man who is also providing for her. Adding insult to
injury, there's even a Yahoo! Group dedicated to informing women about how to
achieve this particular lifestyle. It's called "Ex-husband Is Now My
Slave" and currently has more than 900 members. You can find it here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ex-husband_is_now_my_slave/. So if the family
court situation is the root cause of so much trouble--and is creating a world
where men take their own lives out of desperation and women brag about it on
the Internet--why, apparently, is nothing being done to change it? That answer lies
in the media. No matter who you are or where you live, chances are there is a
man in your life, or in your extended family, who has been through some of
the pain and anguish associated with divorce, child custody, or child support
battles. Chances are that the toll of that situation was much greater on him
than his former spouse. In America, divorce court is routine, and
fictionalized accounts of it are even broadcast on daytime television.
Unfortunately for the men involved in genuine cases, though, the media tends
to ignore the courts' consistent discrimination against them as simple facts
of life which cannot (or should not) be changed. Miller--he who
shot himself on the San Diego Courthouse steps--is the exception which proves
the rule. His case was so dramatic--and public-as a result of his suicide
that the Union Tribune could not ignore it. But what happens now that his
brief story has been told? Will an intrepid reporter examine the suicide
rates of divorced men in San Diego and discover a pattern? Will said reporter
examine the family court system from the inside out and determine for himself
whether justice is routinely served or men routinely discriminated against? It's not
probable. Instead, the
Union Tribune reporters will do precisely what I did when I faced a similar
story as a police reporter for The Review Appeal in Franklin, Tenn., in the
mid-1990s. They'll simply go on about their business--writing about budgets,
schools, police chases, and criminal trials--until the next man kills himself
on the courthouse steps in similar dramatic fashion. Then they'll write six
more paragraphs about it and move on again. That's what good
police reporters do. Sometimes I think
back on that bright production day at The Review Appeal. I remember I was
writing a small two-paragraph note for what we called "The Police
Blotter" about someone who had exposed himself (and escaped police) at a
local mall. The radio scanner had been silent all afternoon and, just two
hours before we were to put the paper to bed, I heard two sentences from a
preternaturally calm female voice creep across the airwaves on the Franklin
Police Department's frequency: "He's on the
Square. He's got a gun to his head." My office chair
was probably still spinning as I ran out the door. Two streets down
was Public Square, the Franklin town center where there were several shops,
Franklin City Hall, and the Williamson County Courthouse. No sooner had I
turned the corner where I could see the tall statue in the Square gleaming
against the afternoon sun than I heard the gunshot, and saw a crowd of police
and emergency personnel swarm in upon the man as his formerly seated body
crumpled to the concrete. While my
photographer snapped away at the scene, I talked to witnesses and police
officers. I asked where the man had come from, who he was, and why he might
have committed such an act. Some faces in the
crowd told me they had seen the man walk out of the courthouse, so while my
editor continued to interview witnesses, I went to see the Williamson County
Court Clerk. There, I learned the man's identity and that he had spent most
of the day in divorce court. After apparently losing his job, his wife, and a
battle with depression, he had finally given up hope. The article I
wrote for the paper the next day contained all the details a good police
reporter includes: who, what, when, where, and some possible reasons why. I
had quotes from the officers who worked the scene as well as a few notes from
the court filings. When I finished writing, I walked outside and smoked a
Marlboro I bummed from someone in the production department (even though I'm
not a smoker). The image of that man with the gun played over and over in my
head, and as I exhaled the stale smoke of the cigarette from my lungs, I
wondered what smoke and gunpowder from a firearm must taste like at such
close range. Sometimes I think
back on that bright production day, and I wonder why I didn't continue to
follow up on that story. I wonder why I felt that examining that man's case
in the cold light of an objective reporter's eye wasn't worth pursuing. I
wonder what I might have found had I been persistent. Most of all,
though, I wonder if I might not have been able to shed some light and create change
in some small way. And maybe saved
someone else's life. That's what a
good reporter should have done. Is
there an upside to divorce? - Cathy Young, Boston
Globe, 23jan02,
pA15 .... a new book, For Better or Worse: Divorce Reconsidered,
by renowned psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington. The book is not a polemic but
a meticulous analysis of a major study. However, it is widely perceived as a
rejoinder to writings which, according to Hetherington, have ''exaggerated
the negative effects'' of divorce and ignored its possible benefits - such as
the books of family researcher Judith Wallerstein. Social
conservatives such as David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values
are accusing Hetherington of promoting ''happy talk'' about divorce.
Syndicated columnist and author Maggie Gallagher points out that
Hetherington's own data belie her optimistic message. True, 75 to 80 percent
of children of divorce grow up to be reasonably well-adjusted - but 20 to 25
percent have serious social or emotional problems, compared to 10 percent of
children from intact families. .... .... Hubin, who
has joint custody of his children and believes that he is a better father
than he would have been had he stayed in his first marriage, worries about
the implication of antidivorce rhetoric that the pursuit of happiness by
adults ought to be stigmatized as selfish. ''Yes, the children's interests
come first, but don't we care about the happiness of mothers and fathers
too?'' he wonders. ''At what point do I tell my 18-year-old son that his
happiness doesn't matter anymore?'' Like most divorced men,
Hubin believes that we would go a long way toward mitigating the negative
effects of divorce if the culture and the courts were more supportive of
divorced fathers' efforts to stay involved in their children's lives. One of
the Hetherington's more disturbing findings is that after divorce, men and
boys fare markedly worse than women and girls. While young adults whose
parents usually have good relationships with their mothers, about 70 percent
report having a poor relationship with their fathers (compared to 30 percent
of children from intact families). Gallagher concludes that few men have
''figured out how to be effective fathers outside of marriage.'' But all too
often, it's outdated social policies that make it impossible for them to be
effective fathers by treating the mother as the only real parent. Changing
these policies is a far more realistic goal than eliminating divorce.
.... Full text at
www.ivorcatt.com/2012.htm http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/article/0,,9003-2002042998,00.html Women
troops to be kept off front line - James Clark, Sunday
Times, 27jan02 Women will not be
allowed to fight with frontline units in the British military, Geoff Hoon,
the defence secretary, will announce next month. The saga over
whether women should be allowed to join units such as the Parachute Regiment,
SAS, marines and armoured regiments has been running since Labour took office
in 1997. .... Claire Ward MP
.... spent a year alongside the Royal
Marines as part of a parliamentary armed forces scheme, in which MPs
experience military life. "I arrived with the view that women should
have the right to do this and told them so, said Ward. But after a year I had
my mind changed." I dont think
women are physically built for it, and I also think that while the lads I
knew were mature and calm, they are trained to be very aggressive and, lets
be frank, to kill, often with bare hands. I believe firmly in equality, but
men and women are different." .... It was thought
that the most serious problems might emerge in the way the soldiers
interacted. However, while the cohesion of mixed-sex units suffered slightly,
the report found stark differences in performance. Tests also showed that the
injury rate among women was double that of male soldiers. .... New insight into Mutual
Combat. Psychological
Effects of Partner Abuse against Men: A Neglected Researched Area - Hines, Denise A. and Malley-Morrison,
Kathleen dahines@bu.edu Psychology of Men and
Masculinity Vol 2 (2) July
2001 page 75 -- 85; American
Psychological Association Inc. This article
discusses the research on abuse against men in intimate relationships with a
primary focus on the effects of this abuse. .... Although there is a substantial research
literature addressing abuse against women and its consequences, the flip side
of this issue, physical abuse against men and its consequences, is a less
researched area....... There has been almost no research on the consequences
of this type of abuse.... .... a bulk of the research on motivations for
violence in intimate relationships has shown that self defence is not the
motivation for women's violence in the majority of cases. There has been some
recognition by researchers who do not use the CTS [Conflict Tactics Scale]
that husband abuse may indeed be a problem that can be categorised as a
serious social concern. For instance,
while treating the clients of a male batterer's program, Stacey, Hazelwood,
and Shupe (1994) found that many of
their cases were actually cases of mutual abuse. They found that many couples
tended to be mutually abusive and that the roles of victim and perpetrator
were constantly shifting. [This is the point always made by Erin Pizzey. See
her book Prone to Violence, on
the www - Ed] In addition, when studying the responses of police officers in
their study, Stacey et al. reported that the police would arrest the man as the batterer if
the women were the abuser
because there was no counselling program for women available. The police
hoped that, by arresting the man, they could get the couple into a
program. The assumption was that if
they arrested the wife, no counselling would be mandated and the husband
would generally drop the charges.
However because the man was arrested, he had to sign a statement that
labeled him as the violent perpetrator.
This lack of help for women who abuse their husbands is quite common.
Several studies have indicated that violence by women may be increasing. ....
See www.ivorcatt.com/2015.htm Marital
Rape and Eminem - Michael Gilson
De Lemos, 31jan02 .... A State
Attorney boasted to me; "Marriage as once understood is now a crime in
the USA." Legally, spouses are equivalent to streetwalkers in many
respects, she gloated. She told me of a seminar she attended at Yale where it
was pointed out that, legally, since it embodies an illegal pledge, the
marriage ring is itself inherently abusive and "evidence of rape"
and violence. Several judges and scholars present affirmed that this, while
technicallly true, would need time to be presented to the public "by
incremental, socially targeted prosecutions." .... See
www.ivorcatt.com/2016.htm Women's
Groups Blast 'Politically Correct' Pentagon Policies CNS News, 31jan02 see
www.ivorcatt.com/2017.htm Quote: Donnelly
.... called for an end to "gender quotas, pregnancy policies that
subsidize single parenthood and create deployability problems, incremental
steps to force women into land combat, and Clinton-era social policies that
undermine discipline." Donnelly
blasted the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) -
a 35-member panel of mostly civilian women, as "a tax-funded feminist
power base within the Department of Defense." The panel is demanding that
women be allowed to serve in so-called "tip of the spear units,"
including Special Forces and on submarines, and as combat helicopter pilots. "When the
nation watches the Superbowl on Sunday," Yoest said, "there will be
no women on either team, for the obvious reason that men are stronger than
women." And yet, we now send women into combat. A truth that we
intuitively grasp and automatically accept in the sports arena, we blithely
ignore and rationalize away for the military," she said. .... Orientation
and health At www.ivorcatt.com/2018.htm Dale O'Leary supplies a
comprehensive range of statistics which show the multifarious health risks
faced by boys who self-identify as gay. The worrying statistics cover gay.
lesbian and bisexual (GLB). The
Divorce Industry www.ivorcatt.com/2009.htm The is an
excellent, comprehensive, 5,000 word analysis of the forces which have
combined to attack our children for funancial gain. Clearly a growing
international problem, leading world expert Baskerville cites Melanie Phillips,
The Sex Change Society, pub. SMF 1999. Melanie is now a Daily Mail columnist. The English yearly legal aid bill is £1.6bn. 31jan02 To
Stephen Baskerville; I am saying that
you are the world expert on the nationalisation of the family and its handing
over to the Chld Protection Industry. I think you are ahead of Anne Cools. We need to
standardise our language in order to characterise your speciality. It might
also be called "The Divorce Industry". However, some children are
being confiscated without any divorce action occurring. Another title might
be the "Child Theft Industry". However, we are also interested in
the confiscation of a father's property. We need to give a name to the
incubus that you identify and write about.
- Ivor Thanks for the
kind words. I have more in the works.
- Stephen Implacable
hostility - letter from
Mary Thomas, Telegraph, 5dec01 .... If the
mother is implacably hostile to wards the absent father, she can easily share
that hostility with her child. In Britain, many children
caught up in parental hostilities cope by opting out of the conflict. The
allegation that "my child no longer wishes to see his father" soon
then becomes true. It is vital that
the Lord Chancellor's advisory board on family law recognises and names
"implacable hostility syndrome", and states clearly its policy on
this particularly insidious form of child abuse. The penalty for emotional
distress caused by long-term brain-washing of a child - deprived of the love
of a father and perhaps a whole family - is one that should be carefully
defined and adhered to. [Two Appeal Court
decisions ruled that a father should be cut off if the mother is implacably
hostile. (Even an
implacably hostile step-father was backed by the Appeal Court, when he
threatened to abandon the mother and child.) The argument was that the interests of the child
came first, and if the mother were forced to allow contact, she might take
vengeance on the child. In both cases, no sanctions were applied against the
implacable mother (or
the step-father). -
Ed] Lady Hollis,
minister responsible for the Child Support Agency, said: " .... Children
benefit .... when they have contact with both parents. Obviously it's right
that, if we require absent parents to obey the law to pay maintenance, it's
also right that parents with care should also respect court rulings." - Telegraph, 3dec02. [She obviously
doesn't know that the court supports defiant mothers. Using the mantra
"the interests of the child", Sloss will continue to defy
Parliament. (An ignorant Sloss makes a subjective judgement as to the best
interests of the child.) - Ed] Fathers
picket judges over child access - Clare Dyer, Guardian, 30oct01 A growing number
of judges are having their homes picketed by bands of unhappy divorced and
separated fathers who are demanding equal rights for both parents. .... The picketers
arew divorced and separated parents, who accuse the family courts of failing
to deliver on a key principle enshrined in the Children Act - that both
parents should continue to play a part in their children's lives when the
adults' relationship has broken down. The Equal
Parenting Couincil and the charity Families Need Fathers say the courts are
unwilling to act when faced with a mother who is determined to flout a
contact order. Judges accept
that there are "implacably hostile" mothers who deliberately
alienate children from their fathers. But although judges have power to jail
mothers for contempt of court, they rarely use it because they are reluctant
to deprive children of their mothers' care. .... xx xxxx Draft |
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