International Conference on Men’s Issues (ICMI18), 20-22 July 2018

This was the fourth such conference. YouTube videos of the presentations at the previous three can be found as follows: 2014, 8-10 July 2016, 9-11 June 2017. Videos from the 2018 conference will appear in due course. The text of my own presentation is below.

Men and Boys in the UK: Edited Lowlights (ICMI18, 20th July 2018)

In the text below, [N] denotes references/notes listed at the end. There are powerpoint slides in this accompanying file.

When Mike asked me to speak my immediate reaction was “can you give me a series of 20 two-hour lectures, so I can begin to do justice to the material?” That was hardly a practical proposition. But you take my point. These matters – and I mean these male disadvantages slide 2 – are broad in scope and deep in origin and import. All I can do is give a few illustrations, and I’ll concentrate on the UK. But first a couple of preliminaries.

Firstly, Identity Politics – surely the curse of our time. I might be accused of being just another Identity Politician, with my preferred identity group being males. The simplest way to refute that is via this quote from the heart of identity politics: “equality does not mean treating everyone the same” [1]. I rather thought it did. But that’s because I’m not an identity politician.

Then there’s victimhood. Some people will claim that anyone who talks about these male disadvantages is just playing at victimhood Olympics, and so is no better than a feminist [2]. But that’s wrong, and for a very important reason. Such people miss the most important fact about the male disadvantages, namely that almost no one cares much about them. There are no Brownie points to be had in talking about male disadvantage. There is no moral cachet in doing so. You will meet only with condemnation. Quite possibly accusations of misogyny. So where’s the victimhood bonus in that?

When people cry “victimhood Olympics” at you, what they are really saying is “shut up, we don’t want to talk about those things”. So let’s talk about them then.

Let’s start with criminal justice – slide 3 . I’ll be brief because Jordan Holbrook will be saying more on this topic.

Two years ago, MP Philip Davies stood in this spot and gave us a talk about imprisonment [3]. The burden of his talk was that, contrary to all one hears, it is men, not women, that are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system. For his pains he was afterwards vilified in social media and a number of articles by leading feminists appeared in the press purporting to refute Philip Davies’s claims. I carefully checked the counter-claims of a couple of those purported refutations against Ministry of Justice data. They were a litany of untruth. [4]

Slide 4 One reason I return to this issue is to point out the contrast between the media storm which greeted Philip Davies’s correct observations and the total lack of media attention just a couple of months later when the Ministry of Justice published a report whose conclusion was,

“Under similar criminal circumstances the odds of imprisonment for males is 88% higher than for females” [5]

This conclusion was based on logistic regression controlling for offence category.

This came as no surprise to those of us who had been studying the data for some years. And, though the MOJ did not look at sentence length, a similar gender disparity is to be found in that. [6]

Slide 5 The Big Picture on criminal justice is that men are convicted of 3 times more crimes than women, or 6 times more if one concentrates on the more serious indictable offences – but there are 21 times more men in prison. The gap between 6 times more and 21 times more is explicable in terms of the gender disparities I have alluded to.

On this basis I have claimed that there is a major imprisonment penalty for being male. Any controversy about that conclusion is now at an end. In fact, there is no longer any need to appeal to data to illustrate the male penalty in imprisonment. The Government has now made it explicit as policy.

Slide 6: Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, David Gawke, announced last month that the new policy will be to avoid custodial sentences for women except as a last resort [7]. The plan to build five new “community prisons” for women, following the closure of Holloway, has been scrapped. The build programme for additional men’s prisons continues.

I would have no difficulty with a strategy to imprison fewer people. My only opinion on the matter of punishment is that people should be punished for what they have done, not for what they are: race, religion and sex should be irrelevant. I am confident that almost everyone would agree with that principle.

But, in practice – and now in policy – what we have is compassion for women, and punishment for men.

This is identity politics in action. There is a word for it. The word is prejudice.

Perhaps feminists would attempt to rationalise this in terms of unequal power relations.

Slide 7 In that context I invite you to observe that,

The Head of State has been a woman all my life

The Prime Minister is a woman

The Home Secretary has been a woman for 10 of the last 11 years

The head of the most powerful police force in the country is a woman

The most powerful judge in the land is a woman

As I speak, the Director of Public Prosecutions is a woman (though perhaps not for much longer)

So much for the “argument from power imbalance”.

And yes, I am aware that these women are hardly of the same demographic as female offenders in general. And perhaps one might like to make claims for clemency based on demographic issues. But if so, that would not be sex specific. The demographics and personal histories of male and female offenders is essentially the same. But societal application of compassion is not.

The government’s proposals are unacceptable and quite possibly illegal.

And I haven’t even mentioned false allegations and the seeming melt-down in our criminal justice processes that have been exposed during this last year. [8]

As a bit of personal biography it was when – about 5 years ago – I realised that the feminist animus towards males had no lower age limit that I realised remaining silent on these matters was no longer morally justifiable.

Slide 8 I illustrate this with a minor but telling observation. As of April 2018, there were 913 boys and just 27 girls in the secure estate in England & Wales – child prisoners, in other words. [9]

In that month, Anne Longfield (the Childrens’ Commissioner for England) reported on a visit to some of these children [10]…

“to learn about their lives before entering custody and understand the factors that led to them being imprisoned and what, if anything, could have been done to change their trajectory”

Well, very laudable. It’s exactly what a Children’s Commission should do. I have no difficulty with that…

…except she chose only girls

A few years ago I’d not have read anything into such a thing. I’d have shrugged my shoulders and thought nothing of it. But this is too persistent a pattern. The mindset is clear. When girls are in trouble it’s because society has let them down and they deserve our compassion and assistance. Well, I have no great problem with that. What I have a problem with is that the same compassion is denied to boys – even when boys in trouble outnumber girls 913 to 27.

And that’s why I’m here.

Slide 9 – Turning attention now to Education.

It is well known that boys are falling behind at school. Unlike decades ago when boys tended to catch up with the girls by age 16 or so, these days the gender gap gets steadily bigger with age. [11] You might not get that impression from the newspapers.

Slide 10 This slide shows the headlines you would have read in the papers on last A Level results day. Boys beat girls to top grades for first time in 17 years [12]. Misleading is an understatement.

Slide 11 The reality is that girls got over 60,000 more of the top A* to B grades in each of the last couple of years, resulting in 100,000 more young women than young men applying to higher education institutions in the UK in each of the last two years, and 71,000 more being accepted last year.[13] There have been more women undergraduates than men at UK universities for quarter of a century now.

Slides 12

In university entrance, the figures paint a very stark picture – but you’ll rarely see this spelt out in detail (see [14]),

Women dominate in 70% of subjects

For the last three years, and contrary to all you hear, women have dominated in STEMM spelt with 2 M’s (and defined as Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine and subjects allied to medicine)

Women also dominate in the pure sciences

Men dominate only in the T, E and first M of STEMM – engineering, technology and maths. And if you add architecture, that’s the totality of subjects dominated by men. Virtually everything else is dominated by women.

Slide 13

Women in medicine/dentistry out-number men by 50%

Women in biological sciences out-number men by 50%

Women in social sciences out-number men by 60%

Women in art and design out-number men by 80%

Women even dominate in agricultural sciences

Slide 14

Twice as many women as men reading law (so, a good job there is no bias in the criminal justice system, then)

3 times as many women as men studying languages/literature

4 times as many women as men studying veterinary science

6 times as many women as men studying education (so, a good job there is no bias in the education system, then)

9 times as many women as men studying nursing (well, at least there is no bias in health care…is there?)

Slide 15 : But the narrative is always just “we need more women in STEMM”.

Slide 16 In 2015 Mike raised a Freedom of Information Act query with the Department for Education, asking whether they recognized boys’ underachievement as a problem to be addressed, and if so, what initiatives are in place. The answer was no & nothing. [15]

And that’s why I’m here.

Slide 17 In 2016 the Department for Education published a White Paper – a declaration of Government policy, “Education Excellence Everywhere” [16]. It was exclusively concerned about the geographical variation in educational attainment. Whilst there is nothing wrong with highlighting the variation of attainment with location, or the demographical dependence, the gender gap in educational attainment is larger than either of those. But the only mention of gender in the White Paper was…

We will continue to address the gender gap in STEM subjects – supporting our ambition to narrow the gender pay gap – and are committed to increasing the proportion of entries by girls in science and maths subjects.

When this report was published, the Minister for Education was also the Minister for Women and Equalities. Just saying.

Is it “playing at victimhood Olympics” to object to an allocation of concern which is so wildly at odds with the evidence? Is it?

Slide 18 Earlier this year, the Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, published a report “Growing Up North [17] which again addressed only the geographical variation of educational attainment. The only mention of gender was…We know girls outperform boys throughout school but are paid less as adults….It is very important that regeneration strategies…..speak to girls’ aspirations”.

Once again the attempt is being made to eclipse the education issue behind a more favoured political strategy in respect of pay and employment.

Slide 19 In 2012, a report commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Literacy Group, the “Boys’ Reading Commission” [18] observed, ‘The predominantly female make-up of the school and children’s workforce could mean that their knowledge of texts and reading materials could lead them to have a bias towards materials which suited girls’ interests. It could well be that the teacher’s gender could influence the extent to which they effectively promote books and reading materials that are attractive to boys and girls. Interestingly, one survey respondent who understood the need to promote reading materials that reflect the interests of boys at the same time made clear her discomfort with these interests: Quote: “We try to work from their interests no matter how banal, disgusting or undesirable”’.

Might such attitudes be part of the problem? Is it playing at identity-group victimhood to object to such an attitude being shown towards small boys by their teachers? Is it?

Slide 20 Turning now to Health Care

It is well known that men can, on average, expect a shorter life than women. What lies behind that is a hugely greater probability of premature death, as this graph shows.[19] Even very young boys and male babies have a chance of dying several tens of percent greater than that of girls the same age. By the early twenties, young men are 3 times more likely to die than women the same age.

Slide 21 Men are 78% more likely than women to die before the age of 45. The leading cause of death in men under 45 is suicide. But men remain at least 50% more likely to die than women until they are well past retirement age. By far the most significant causes of men’s premature death, that is before age 75, are cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

Yet, in the context of the pay gap, the Minister for Health and Social Care, Caroline Dinenage, has seen fit recently to describe the NHS as the National He Service [20]. Really? Perhaps the Minister needs to concentrate a little more on the service users of the NHS – you know, people who are dying, that sort of thing – rather than on the NHS merely as a vehicle for female empowerment.

This is the NHS, remember, which is still withholding the HPV vaccine from boys, on grounds of sex [21], despite the premature cancer mortality due to HPV being the same for the two sexes, the main difference being that male HPV related mortality is increasing rapidly. [Four days after my presentation the Government announced that the HPV vaccine was, finally, to be rolled out to boys at age 11/12]. This is the NHS which has no screening programme for any male-specific cancer, whilst men have a higher premature death rate than women from every non-sex-specific category of cancer.

As an aside – and in view of the pay gap constantly being raised out of context by politicians, when the subject at hand is education or health care – you may like to consider this rejoinder to someone complaining of being disadvantaged by the pay gap.

The deal you put to them is this: we give you a pay hike equal to the median pay gap for full time workers, 9.1%. But you have to accept a 78% greater chance of dying before age 45. Before they leap at that attractive offer, do ensure they read the fine print.

The pay gap only kicks in after age 40 – they’ll get nothing before that;

Also, they will be obliged to work 52% more hours than before in order to qualify.

Of course, the latter is what those pushing this agenda really want – women working more paid hours, thus increasing GDP and tax revenue.

And they approach this – as the Prime Minister has – by calling on men to do more child minding. I do wonder if Mrs May ran that one passed Andrea Leadsom, who doesn’t seem too happy about men doing child care. It is rich, isn’t it – they spend half a century very successfully winkling men out of the family home – and then they say “can men do more child care?”. It’s a little tricky to oblige, I suggest, if there is a court injunction against you having contact with your children.

And what if men did adopt the working patterns of women, and the latter remained unchanged. The income tax revenue into the Exchequer would be little more than half its current level [22]. The country would be thrown into the farthest reaches of total economic meltdown, with the public sector sinking first – and the public sector is predominantly an employer of women. Just saying.

But I digress. Back to healthcare.

Slide 22 In 2015 the Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies, published a report “The Health of the 51%: Women” [23]. Despite polite requests she has declined to produce an equivalent for men. This is a little odd in view of the evident male disadvantage in health and longevity.

I wrote to Sally Davies querying the title. What is the strange “51%” doing in the title? Is it some sort of triumphalism? It seems odd to me that she would want to advertise her own failure. You see, at birth, it’s closer to 51% of babies that are male. The gender ratio only reverses in the general population because of the greater male death rate – and that is predominantly due to cardiovascular diseases and cancers – which would be firmly in the Chief Medical Officer’s bailiwick, wouldn’t it? She didn’t do me the honour of a reply.

And that’s why I’m here.

But I think I understand now. The first two chapters of “The Health of the 51%: Women” are – wait for it – Violence Against Women and Girls, and Female Genital Mutilation. So that explains why no equivalent is required for men, because men don’t suffer as the victims of violence, and men are not subject to genital mutilation.

Steven Svoboda will be telling us more about that.

Slide 23 Chapter 12 of the Chief Medical Officer’s report takes a human rights approach to women’s health. It lists a number of rights claimed for women which are presented as human rights, of which the powerpoint slide is just a small sample.

The right to life

The right to decide the number and spacing of children

The right to equality and non-discrimination

The right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress

Now I am no moral philosopher, but Kant was. I believe his Categorical Imperative [24] has something to say about the need for moral principles to be universal in their application. So, what’s good for the goose should be good for the gander. One could expand at great length on the implications of the moral principles claimed on this slide in the context of men.

But let’s look just at that last one: the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress…

Slide 24 … and let’s talk about DNA testing then. When it comes to a lack of basic rights, how about this one…

In the UK, men have no legal right to know if a child is biologically theirs.

That fact alone is enough to justify a men’s movement, without everything else. I wonder how many people even know that that is the case?

When cheap, reliable home DNA testing kits first became available, it was remarkable how quickly the legislature acted to frustrate men using them. It is an offence under the 2004 Human Tissues Act to hold human tissue with an intent to carry out DNA testing without the consent of the individual [25]. A young child cannot legally consent. A man who does not already have Parental Responsibility cannot consent on behalf of the child – only someone with Parental Responsibility can consent, which always includes the mother. Thus, a man without legal Parental Responsibility cannot discover if a child is, or is not, his unless the mother wishes him to do so.

Men are being denied the right to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress” – an issue which our Chief Medical Officer has identified as a human right.

And that’s why I’m here.

Slide 25 I recall Mike being on a radio show a couple of years ago discussing paternity fraud. The woman presenter expressed her horror that the rate of paternity fraud might be as high as 2%. There is a great deal of data on the subject. I personally have about 200 references to studies [26]. Of course you must be careful to distinguish between tests carried out when there was a prior suspicion of mispaternity or where paternity was in dispute, from cases where this does not apply. The data indicates,

In the former case, Mispaternity runs at a rate of 25% and it’s not surprising that that is a large percentage;

Of greater interest is the subset of data where there is no prior suspicion or dispute. Here my dataset indicates a mean Mispaternity rate of 10% and a median 6%

Slide 26 What really aggravates me especially is the appalling double standards displayed by so-called medical ethicists. Who decides, incidentally, whether these so-called ethicists are ethical? They are pedalling an opinion that mere genes don’t matter – not when it comes to fathers, that is. Some quotes…

Dr Anna Smajdor opined: DNA paternity testing “over-values the importance of genetic relationships, and that’s why we think of it as fraud“…..”The issue should not be whose genes are in this child….We should have a situation in which people didn’t think about genes at all” [27]

Heather Draper: “cases of misattributed paternity produce the same distorted and thin view of what it means to be a father that paternity testing assumes, and underscores a trend that is not in the interests of children.” [28]

If these women truly believed their own words, we could dispense with those wrist tags on new babies in maternity wards and send mothers home with any baby – they’re all the same. But they would have no intention of applying these views to mothers. They will not be accusing women who prefer to raise their own child of having a “thin view of motherhood”. They fail the Categorical Imperative and betray themselves as ethical frauds.

And as for “not being in the interests of the child”, are these people really medically educated? Have they not considered that the child will be medically disadvantaged all his or her life by being ignorant of their correct father’s true health history?

Or is this a case of the mother’s interests trumping those of the child? Which brings me to…

Slide 27 …the Family Courts. The Family Courts, surely the epicentre of male disadvantage. Though more importantly they are also an epicentre of children’s disadvantage. It is with the deepest trepidation that I approach this subject. I will say just a very little – Nick Langford will be saying more.

Slide 28 There are around 45,000 “Children’s Act” private family law cases in England and Wales annually [29]. Half of these involve allegations of domestic abuse. I’ll say that again: half of these involve allegations of domestic abuse. [30]

This is hardly surprising when such allegations function as a fast track to securing the claimants wishes – including the acquisition of legal aid [31]. A trivially small proportion of these domestic abuse allegations in the family courts are ever subject to any real investigation. Everyone involved in the process – the lawyers, the judges, the social workers – they all know that fabrication of abuse claims is endemic. It’s a game, though a rigged game and a sick game.

Slide 29 Alienation is a common concomitant of child arrangement disputes. It is a form of child abuse consisting of an induced mental health issue. Alienation is a condition which has been virtually created by the way our society addresses parental separation. It is a problem created by society which previously barely existed. Around 90% to 95% of non-resident parents are fathers, and consequently about this percentage of alienated parents are fathers – because the courts ensure that it is generally the mother who has the opportunity to do the alienating. ……

Slide 30 In July 2016, Sarah Parsons, Principal Social Worker and Assistant Director of Cafcass, stated that “parental alienation is responsible for around 80% of the most intransigent cases that come before the family courts”. [32]

Slide 31 False allegations are strongly linked to cases of alienation. Alienation expert and counselling psychologist, Dr Sue Whitcombe, has estimated from a sample of 54 of her clients that 81% of alienation cases involve false allegations of child abuse. [32]

Slide 32 Regrettably time is too short to go into the evidence that fathers, as well as mothers, are beneficial to child outcomes. I merely allude briefly to the fact that there is growing research support, not merely for a correlation between fatherlessness and adverse outcomes for children, but that this correlation is actually causal – a rare claim in social science circles. [33]

Slide 33 I also allude only very briefly to the issue of parental conflict and outcomes for children. There is a de facto premise in the family courts that where there is a high level of conflict between the parents, the children’s best interests are served by restricting, or eliminating entirely, contact with one parent.

Slide 34 But it isn’t so. For example, Linda Nielsen has carried out a careful review of the literature and concluded that, “Joint physical custody is associated with better outcomes for children than sole physical custody even when conflict is not low”. [34]

Slide 35 The key principle in the Family Court is that the best interests of the child are paramount. But the courts are dramatically failing to live by that dictum, in large part because of a lazy assumption which conflates the best interests of the child with the wishes of the mother. The courts fail to abide by the paramountcy principle in,

Their promotion of parental strife

Their promotion of domestic abuse allegations

Their promotion of alienation

Their promotion of fatherlessness

Their lack of knowledge of the outcomes of their own decisions

As an illustration of the destructive skirmishes that arise when lobby groups jockey for strategic advantage in the family courts, consider this episode.

Slide 36 In 2016, Women’s Aid produced a report “19 Child Homicides” [35] which trawled 10 years of serious case reviews to identify a dozen cases of fathers killing children during child contact. Polly Neate (then Women’s Aid CEO) stated that “We have launched the campaign to stop avoidable child deaths as a result of unsafe child contact with dangerous perpetrators of domestic violence”. Judge for yourself the significance of this campaign objective given the prevalence of false accusations of domestic abuse in the family courts.

The strategy is to raise the spectre that every father appearing in the courts against whom an accusation is made – and that means half of them – is likely to be a murderer, thus disenfranchising him from meaningful involvement in his child’s life thereafter. The success of this strategy is the fruit of decades of misandry. Denigration is the handmaiden of discrimination.

Women’s Aid’s campaign was well organised and planned. MPs were lobbied in advance. They won a debate in Parliament. It was not a debate, a debate has two sides. It was a monoculture of opinion – that of Women’s Aid [36]. The blame here lies with the MPs. A lobby group cannot be expected to be balanced. But MPs are under an obligation to represent everyone fairly, and are assumed to be intelligent enough to seek balance. Instead it appears that our parliament can very easily be led by the nose by a lobby group which presses the right emotional buttons. Any MPs who might have had reservations lacked the moral fibre to speak up.

Slide 37 The cases Women’s Aid identified were real and terrible. But they represented an extreme degree of “cherry picking”. I wondered what I might find if I looked through all the serious case reviews. So I did – not an edifying task. I identified, not just 19 child killings in 10 years, but 332 child killings in 7 years [37]. Mothers, I discovered, were more often responsible for a child death than fathers and male partners combined. Single mothers were the demographic most likely to be responsible for the deaths of children.

And what are we to conclude from this? That mothers are dangerous to children? Clearly not, for that would be preposterous. But that would be the equivalent of Women’s Aid’s strategy for fathers. The purpose of the exercise was only to expose the fraudulence of that strategy by showing how it could be turned around if one were willing to embrace the same mendacious folly. The truth is that the terrible cases identified tell us nothing about the bulk of cases going through the courts.

Slide 38 Having committed the ultimate PC sin of claiming that mothers were at least equally responsible for child deaths as men, I was rather surprised when substantial support for this contention came from a most unexpected source: CAFCASS – the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service. Their report “Learning from Cafcass submissions to Serious Case Reviews” was made publicly available in November 2017 [38]. Its conclusions were broadly consistent with my own, as follows,

Men and women were suspected perpetrators of a similar number of incidents of homicide;

Almost all allegations of domestic abuse were against men, usually fathers;

In almost half of these cases the person thought to have killed or harmed the child was not the alleged domestic abuse perpetrator;

SCR submissions showed that in some cases the risk posed by the alleged violent adult may have masked the risk posed by the other parent.

I hardly dare believe that some semblance of reason might be beginning to emerge.

Slide 39 : I close on a subject which might seem to be off-topic, but isn’t. [39]

This year we celebrate the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. Predictably, it is being celebrated as the Act which gave the Parliamentary vote to women. Well, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating that – but what is wrong is celebrating only that. Because that is not the most important aspect of that Act. And no, I do not refer only to the fact that that same Act also enfranchised a far larger number of men than any other previous Act, though that is also true. I refer to something more fundamental.

The necessity to redefine the Parliamentary electoral roll arose because the existing property-based franchise had been shot to pieces by the dislocation of millions of men as a result of World War 1. The primary purpose of the 1918 Act was to give the vote to disenfranshised working class men because to withhold it any longer was insupportable in view of the mayhem of World War 1. The dominant sentiment which controlled the direction of the new franchise was “if they are fit to fight they are fit to vote”. World War 1 ended the age-old class antagonism which had withheld political representation from the majority of working class men until that time. Prior to 1918 “democracy” had been a dirty word.

The 1918 Act was the final triumph of the democratic principle: that all adult citizens should enjoy equal political influence. This was the culmination of the entirety of history up to that time. It represents the triumph of the recognition of the individual, rather than the class identity group to which he or she belonged – which is why these observations are so pertinent. This dissolution of the age-old class antagonism came about as a result of the slaughter of men in World War 1.

But now we are told that the 1918 Act was just about women. If I wished to be inflammatory I could say that the vote for women was bought with men’s lives. Whilst that would hardly be a fully rounded depiction of the history, nor would it be entirely wrong – unlike the suffragette mythology, which is entirely wrong.

It is surely a noble and uplifting thing, and I can think of little more genuinely worthy of celebration, than the fact that such a desirable, egalitarian advance – the triumph of the democratic principle – the triumph of the individual – arose from the horror of the trenches. But that is forgotten. It has been eclipsed by the identity-group perspective of the suffragette mythology. We are ostensibly celebrating the 1918 Act, but in reality we are participating in neglecting its true significance. Just how disturbed should we be that, not only is the triumph of the democratic principle now deemed unworthy of note, but the crucial role of men in bringing that about has been written out of popular history.

References/Notes

[1] “Equality does not mean treating everyone the same” – I first came across this in the Corston Report (see also here) but it appears repeatedly in the latest edition of the Equal Treatment Bench Book and so is now an integral part of our criminal justice processes.

[2] E.g., Joanna Williams “Women vs Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars” (see Chapter 7 “Competing claims for victimhood”. Williams may be arguing against feminism but this section is every bit as inaccurate about the MRM as the accounts of it written by feminists. Which MRAs did she consult before writing what it is we are supposed to stand for?)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBECpFjOhVk

[4] See Observations on Davies-Corston Disagreement and Sophie Walker’s Criminal Record

[5] MOJ Report “Associations between being male or female and being sentenced to prison in England and Wales in 2015”

[6] “UK Prisoners – The Genders Compared”

[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/secretary-of-state-launches-dedicated-strategy-to-break-the-cycle-of-female-offending

[8] UK government, 20/7/18: Disclosure of evidence in criminal cases

[9] Youth custody data (May’18)

[10] Voices from the Inside: The experiences of girls in Secure Training Centres. See also https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Childrens-Commissioner-for-England-Business-Plan-2017-18-1.3-1.pdf

[11] See various posts on education, indexed here

[12] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/08/17/a-level-results-2017-first-rise-top-grades-six-years-despite/

[13] https://www.ucas.com/file/115911/download?token=EokhytEH and https://www.ucas.com/corporate/data-and-analysis/ucas-undergraduate-releases/ucas-undergraduate-end-cycle-data-resources/applicants-and-acceptances-groups-applicants-2017

[14] University Entrants 2017 (UK)

[15] https://j4mb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2015/07/150730-dept-for-education-foi-response.pdf

[16] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/508447/Educational_Excellence_Everywhere.pdf

[17] https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Growing-Up-North-March-2018-1.pdf

[18] https://literacytrust.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/all-party-parliamentary-group-literacy/boys-reading-commission/

[19] Death data for England and Wales in 2016 at each age have been taken from ONS 2017 and death data for Wales at each age have been taken from Stats Wales 2011.

[20] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/men-favoured-in-nhs-pay-minister-caroline-dineage-admits-wl0t7h82d

[21] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5486421/Jeremy-Hunt-advisers-say-HPV-vaccine-boys-not-cost-effective.html

[22] This follows from the fact that men currently contribute three-quarters of the income tax, and because this is predominantly due to longer working hours (52%).

[23] “The Health of the 51%: Women”

[24] http://empathygap.uk/?p=1424

[25] Human Tissues Act 2004: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/30/contents

[26] I have made my database publicly available here. The bulk of it was obtained as explained in this post.

[27] Taken from 6th April 2016 Mike Buchanan interviewed by Shelagh Fogerty on LBC radio on Paternity Fraud

[28] Heather Draper, Professor of Biomedical Ethics in the Institute of Applied Health Research, Birmingham University, “Paternity fraud and compensation for misattributed paternity”, J Med Ethics (2007) 33(8): 475–480

[29] Family Court Statistics Quarterly, see any of the recent quarterly bulletins.

[30] “Half of Children’s Act private family law cases involve allegations of domestic abuse”. The joint research reported by Women’s Aid and CAFCASS in July 2017 claimed that “62% of applications to the family court about where a child should live or spend time feature allegations of domestic abuse.” However, this was based on a subset of cases and cannot be taken as definitive for all cases. The best data on the percentage of private family law cases involving allegations of domestic violence was provided by the Ministry of Justice research team as a private communication to FNF-BPM Cymru together with HMCTS (HM Courts & Tribunals Service) and is reproduced below.

Percentage of private family law cases involving allegations of domestic violence (England and Wales) – click to enlarge





[31] Legal Aid and Domestic Violence in the Family Courts

[32] Sue Whitcombe, presentation at the June 2017 Male Psychology Conference, UCL

[33] E.g., “The Causal Effects of Father Absence” by Sara McLanahan et al (Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2013. 39:399–427).

[34] Linda Nielsen, “Woozles: Their Role in Custody Law Reform, Parenting Plans, and Family Court” (Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2014). Linda Nielsen, “Re-examining the Research on Parental Conflict, Coparenting, and Custody Arrangements” (Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, American Psychological Association 2017, Vol. 23, No. 2, 211–231).

[35] Women’s Aid’s 2016 “Nineteen Child Homicides” report

[36] Hansard, 19th September 2016, Domestic Abuse Victims in Family Law Courts

[37] 332 Child Homicides

[38] CAFCASS review “Learning from Cafcass submissions to Serious Case Reviews”, see also the conclusions drawn out clearly on web site: http://www.safecic.co.uk/news/1640-news091117

[39] Universal Suffrage in the UK – The Videos