There appears to be an ongoing campaign to discredit the Men’s Human Rights Movement by claiming we are violent and dangerous. It started with an unsubstantiated allegation that a Men’s Rights Activist threatened and then physically assaulted a feminist student. Despite the fact that to date no eyewitnesses, camera footage, or any other corroborating evidence that any MRA was involved in any physical altercation at Queen’s University, this report is now being used to try to deny any need for men to have their voices heard and issues explored free of feminist monitoring and approval.

In a letter to the editor dated March 31, published in the Queens University Paper, Andrew Howard argues that men should not create their own spaces to address their issues outside of feminist oversight. Among other things, he uses the unsubstantiated insinuation that some MRA must have battered a student. Since he signs his letter with “Sci ’14” I assume he must be a science student of some sort. Thinking he might understand science, I replied with an extensive list of statistics that feminists choose to ignore when creating their campaigns that present men as more likely to be rapists than rape victims. One of those statistics was this:

95% of abused boys in juvenile facilities reported being attacked/coerced by female staff.

– Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2012

Now I had more to say than that, but, almost immediately, someone going by “Adele Mercier,” whom we presume to be Adèle Mercier, Associate Professor of the Queen’s University Department of Philosophy, offers the following rebuttal to my presentation of that statistic:

Dear Alison, I know that statistics can be hard to interpret, but you need to learn to read before you spread misinformation into the stratosphere. You said: “95% of abused boys in juvenile facilities reported being attacked/coerced by female staff”. This is FALSE. Re-read Google “Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2012” “Sexual victimization” is there defined as ALL SEXUAL ACTIVITY with facility staff. And the numbers are that, among males in juvenile facilities: 5.2% of MALE YOUTH engage in unauthorized sexual activity with MALE STAFF; 89.1% of MALE YOUTH engage in unauthorized sexual activity with FEMALE STAFF; 3% of MALE YOUTH engage in unauthorized sexual activity with both male and female staff. This merely reflects THE PROPORTIONS OF GAY AND STRAIGHT MALES in juvenile detention centers, (and the fact that even people in detention centers like to have sex.) Also noteworthy: “As a result of the high rate of staff sexual misconduct reported in the NSYC-1 (10.3%), new items were added to the NSYC-2 questionnaire to better understand the circumstances surrounding incidents. Youth were asked a series of questions related to their relationship with the facility staff prior to sexual contact. Among victims of staff

sexual misconduct: Nearly two-thirds said that staff told them about their personal life outside of work (69.1%), treated them like a favorite or better than other youth (63.6%), or gave them a special gift that the staff would not have given to most other youth (62.3%). Almost half (49.2%) said the staff member gave them pictures or wrote them letters. Nearly a third (29.8%) said that the staff member contacted them in other ways when the staff member was not at the facility. More than a third (36.7%) said youth gave the staff member pictures of themselves, and more than a quarter (28.1%) said youth gave the staff member a special gift. When youth were asked who initiated the sexual contact, 36.4% said that the facility staff always made the first move, 17.4% reported that the youth always made the first move, and 46.3% said that sometimes the facility staff made the first move and sometimes the youth did. Youth were also asked to describe the sexual relationship with staff. Nearly half (46.3%) said the incident was usually just sexual. An estimated 40.1% said the sexual contact was more like friends with benefits, and 13.6% said that they really cared about each other. Among the 840 youth who experienced staff sexual misconduct WITHOUT FORCE, 5.1% reported the involvement of a male staff member (2.7% involved male staff only and 2.4% involved both male and female staff). So the 95% that you cite is of MALE YOUTH who experience sexual misconduct involving FEMALE STAFF WITHOUT FORCE.

Wow! Of course ~90% of sexually abused boys in juvenile facilities reported a female attacker who used force. That means female staff physically attacked 90% of the boys abused by staff in juvenile detention facilities.

But even if we look at separate claim of “without force,” I want to highlight this: Mercier’s defense–a feminist philosopher’s defense, apparently–of the female predators abusing underage boys in juvenile detention without overt or obvious force. It seems to comprise of the following rationale:

“He wanted it.” “He seduced her.” “He touched her first.”

Where have we heard these excuses before?

And all this on an article that argues feminists should have control over the discourse over men’s issues. Control over how boys talk about abuse they may have experienced when growing up.

Why, according to one feminist at Queens, it’s not really abuse at all! He was asking for it!

To see more of this feminist “philosopher” known online as Adele Mercier engaging in ludicrous statistical diversions and rape-apologia, and to assure you I am not making any of this up, here is a set of screen captures taken last night. Forgive if they’re a bit untidy, screen-capping a long conversation is hard, but none of these have been altered in any way.

Final question to ponder: will she now play Damsel In Distress, and claim she is being “harassed” and “attacked by evil thuggish violent Men’s Rights Activists” (like me) because we’re publishing all this? Or will she act like an adult and admit her hypocrisy? I guess time will tell.

Update: It appears that Francis Roy has an even better screen capture, in PDF form.