Last week saw the news from London that there isn’t a single domestic violence shelter place for male victims in the entire city. That’s a city of over eight million people, with vast wealth and huge tax revenues and massive government spending, completely unwilling to house a single one of its tens of thousands of male victims of domestic violence (nor their children). Meanwhile, that very same city hosts the headquarters of feminist domestic violence charity “Refuge”, situated in opulent headquarters right in the centre of London, in St Katharine Docks. Their offices have views of Tower Bridge where rents start at £340K per annum.

Sitting in those plush offices one will find Refuge’s CEO, Sandra Horley. Like any good gender feminist, Horley has a history of using false, massively outdated or cherry-picked statistics about domestic violence to give a misleading picture of the proportion of male and female victims and her entire approach to the issue is one based on ideology rather than facts. At HEqual we had previously been informed that Horley had a ridiculously high remuneration package in excess of £100K, though to now say it’s close to £100K would be as misleading as Horley’s own stats on domestic violence.

In reality, Horley’s renumeration for 2016-17 totalled a staggering £220,000 a figure in excess of 84 CEOs out of the UK’s 100 biggest charities. As an added “bonus” every single page of the Refuge website even tries to sell you her book via Amazon, thus presumably increasing her wealth further still.

The obvious way to put Horley’s pay into context is to compare it to he leading equivalent charity for male domestic violence victim – the Mankind Initiative. Headquartered in rather more basic office in Taunton, Somerset, the annual cost of running the entire charity, its helpline and paying its staff is £45,000. In other words, just one year of Horley’s remuneration package would fund the leading charity for male victims for almost FIVE YEARS.

We decided to take a look at Refuge’s accounts in more detail. Not only do they confirm Horley’s astonishing pay packet, but they also tell us that she received a very large rise over her previous years pay, which totalled between £170K-£180K. Incredibly, this pay rise alone would fund an entire year of the Mankind Initiative’s operations!

Refuge was of course founded back in 1971 in Chiswick by the brilliant Erin Pizzey, though the charity refuses to acknowledge her as its founder , with her name nowhere to be found in its website, let alone any words of thanks or appreciation. We therefore thought it would be interesting to get in touch with Erin to find out about her pay and benefits when she ran the organisation (under much more difficult conditions than staff face today).

Erin told us the following:

“I was not paid for the first ten years only the administrator, the house mother and the head of the children’s team were paid, everyone else were volunteers or lived in our houses.”

So, Erin worked for free helping victims of abuse for a decade, yet tens years of pay for Horley will see Refuge pay out over £2 million to her at current rates.

Looking at issues more widely, and going back to the story of the lack of shelters in London, there’s a repeated “argument” from feminists that comes up time and again as to why this situation exists. Feminists constantly insist that the only reason women have shelters (and men do not) is because women set them up and raised the money to purchase and operate them.

Of course there’s an element of truth to this, for example Erin bought a number of buildings thanks to supporters and squatted in a number of properties back in the day and these have since been taken over by the radical feminists at Refuge. However, many such donations came from men of course and the situation is far different today. Contrary to feminist propaganda, most funding for Refuge and other feminist organisations comes not from donations and fund-raising activities, but from the taxpayer (i.e. mostly from men)

Erin’s website features a detailed analysis of the financials of various feminist domesitc violence charities, including Refuge carried out by the brilliant William Collins. It notes that their level of taxpayer funding is at least 60%, and if one includes lottery funding and all rental income the figures is as high as 76%. So in other words, the majority of Horley’s ridiculous pay package isn’t something she has earned by working hard collecting private donations, it mostly comes directly from you, the taxpayer.

In contrast to the tens of millions of pounds the states gives to female victims, they’re incredibly reluctant to give anything to victims of domestic violence who happen to be male. One only has to consider the state’s treatment of the Mankind Initiative as a clear example of extreme discrimination against male victims. It’s undeniable that Mankind is the leading organisation for male victims. They’re produced brilliant viral videos raising awareness, they’ve been helping men for 17 years now and do fantastic work on a tiny budget. Despite that track record of success, they haven’t had a single penny from the taxpayer and rely 100% on donations.

It’s notable that the misandrist agenda of the likes of Refuge isn’t merely offensive, sexist and unpleasant, there are real world consequences to their agenda against male victims too. By lying about domestic violence and using dishonest statistics, they contribute to the overall false impression that men aren’t really victims of domestic violence, and that women merely act in self defence. Just yesterday we saw the official report released into the death of David Edwards, who was murdered by his violent wife. The review came to the following conclusions:

The Panel considered whether gender was in some way a modifying factor that may have obscured the judgement of those who knew that David was a victim of domestic abuse and had an effect on whether to intervene or not. With the number of women convicted of perpetrating domestic abuse in the UK quadrupling over recent years, David’s death has highlighted the need for greater public awareness of female on male violence, the different forms of domestic abuse and the signs and symptoms of coercive control, particularly pertaining to male victims. David was a male victim of domestic violence and homicide during a time when specialist support services for men were and proportionately still are fewer than services for women. The review learned that many agencies are only just beginning to actively recognise domestic abuse towards men (by their female partners) as a problem. This review has identified that more could be done to raise awareness of the need for services for male victims. It would certainly be beneficial to increase public awareness of domestic abuse against men

How about we make a start in achieving the above recommendations by just giving Horley’s latest pay rise to the Mankind Initiative instead? In fact why not go further and fund them properly so they can at least run their helpline 24/7, thus giving people like David he opportunity to get help at any time? (i.e. exactly the same opportunities female victims have had for years). And lets please shut down organisations operating illegal sexist “helplines” that continue to treat male victims as potential abusers and refuse to believe what they have to say simply because of their gender.

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