Recent Letters in the Press

We present a selection of letters written to the press by UKMM members. Some were published.

I wish Fathers 4 Justice success with their direct action campaign (Comment, May 25). However, their chances of success are limited, since in Australia even a bombing campaign in the 1980s, which killed two judges, achieved nothing.

The dictum that child custody should always go to the mother irrespective of her conduct was established in 1948 by the Appeal Court in the case of a prisoner of war who returned home to find his wife and his eight-year-old daughter living with another man. The judges felt that he had been greatly wronged but that they could do nothing but award custody to the mother.

In the 1970s, Lord Lane established that blameless fathers could be ousted from their own homes, declaring sadly that "the law does not seem to be about justice - it seems that the needs of children have to come first".

OF the first 100 women who came to my refuge in Chiswick, 62 were as violent as the men they had left. They were not victims of violent men, they were 'victims' of their need for a violent relationship" - Prone to Violence by Erin Pizzey, founder of Women's Aid.

In common with most Western governments, the Scottish Executive, and most of > the Scottish Parliament, are deliberately excluding certain victims of violence from the justice and support that they give to other victims. They have misinformed, lied and tried to invoke hatred of one section of society, whilst denying the culpability of the other.

The targets of this hate campaign are men, the perpetrators are feminists, and those men who see advantage in appeasing the powerful feminist lobby.

The objective is to achieve the stated feminist goal of driving fathers out of the family. They do this by hugely exaggerating the number of female victims, and denying or trivialising the experiences of male victims.

Society has both a natural and a conditioned response to be less concerned about male suffering; even the most right-on equality-minded mother never tells her little girl to "stop crying, and be a brave little soldier".

When Lorena Bobbitt sexually mutilated her husband, the jokes abounded. I laughed at them too.

But had a man cut off the genitals of a woman, there would be damn few jokes, no invitations to TV shows and no freedom for many years either.

AT the same time as the Bobbitt affair, ITV was running a storyline in Coronation Street where Liz McDonald picked up a black eye for adultery
with her best mate. Both ITV and the ITC were flooded with complaints over this imaginary minor violence (which received an imaginary punishment, in line with policy).

That same week, in Kilmarnock a woman was given probation for killing her partner. The murdered man's sister, and her brother, lambasted the judge for accepting her claim that she had retaliated to abuse from her victim -both stated that she was the violent one.

The BBC has a book, Producer Guidelines, that specifically prohibits producers from creating any real or even fictional depiction of violence against women or children as being humorous, justified or trivial. That leaves only men to take the brunt of all the violence on our screens - any night's viewing will show men being justifiably, trivially or humorously killed or mutilated.

So we have a huge case of double standards here, and it is rampant throughout society.

Female suffering, real, imagined or faked, attracts sympathy and attention, males complaining attract contempt or indifference.

When men first approached the UK Men's Movement for help, that was my reaction, as I am not inclined by nature, appearance, upbringing or training to be anybody's idea of someone to abuse.

But one of the worst cases that came to us was a huge man in a tough job who looked as mean as a snake. He wasn't. He was at the end of his tether, falling apart as a result of years of abuse. The worst was not getting it, it was the psychological abuse, and knowing that his children would be his wife's targets if he left.

I recognised that his wife was a skilled amateur in psychological torture, and that she had metaphorically Bobbitted him. He left, for his survival, and I held him in disregard for doing so, until a woman who had endured the same torture as a child from her mother, explained the reality to me.

The only way his wife can torture him now is by wilfully alienating him from his children, which she does despite the sheriff having been concerned at the inability of the children to explain why they did not want to see their father.

I TOOK him, and a bright, articulate 13-year-old girl to the parliamentary committee of MSPs to lobby for recognition of Parental Alienation Syndrome. Both told harrowing stories of abuse by wife or mother.

Winnie Ewing and Dorothy-Grace Elder promised to try to introduce legislation for the girl, but appeared less moved by the man, who almost broke down whilst giving evidence.

Six months later, when I returned proposals for a domestic violence strategy, Ms Ewing said the only victim she ever came across in legal practice was "a poor, shilpit wee cratur".

I told her I could bring her back the 6ft 4in tall victim that she saw six months ago, but she has not availed herself of the offer. This trivialising is widespread, as is the ignoring of fact and the creation of fake "evidence", such as the Executive's recent report.

Following pressure from the UKMM through the Audit and Equality committees of the parliament, charging the Executive and former Communities Minister Jackie Baillie with unlawful provision of funding to feminist groups in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act, Ms Baillie commissioned Dr David Gadd, of Keele University, to undertake a study into male victims of domestic abuse, despite there being more than 100 existent quality studies worldwide that indicate almost gender parity in domestic abuse.

UNFORTUNATELY, this research was skewed, an expensive piece of political sleight of hand designed to deceive and misinform from its very inception. Its main prop was the Scottish Crime Survey 2000, which had already been used by the Executive to misinform and vilify men in their 2001 and 2002 domestic abuse advertising campaigns.

We exposed them via complaints to the ITC and the Advertising Standards Authority, about their claim that "one in five women in Scotland live with the constant threat of abuse". This caused the Executive to waste yet more public money withdrawing posters and removing the lies from their
broadcast adverts.

Dr Gadd's brief was framed in such a way that it could only result in the figures for male victims being reprised downwards.

His brief was to re-interview only the male respondents to the Scottish Crime Survey 2000, and only those who claimed to have been abused. It did not allow him to reprise the women who claimed to have been abused, which would probably have resulted in the similar diminution, nor was he briefed to review those who claimed not to have been victims, which would have resulted in an increase upwards.

His reprise also showed that some of the men who were supposed to have responded to the original SCS 2000 did not exist; they had been invented by researchers. It follows therefore that some women who responded were also figments of the imagination.

Low-quality, dubious research is ideal for feminist bigots in the Executive, to spread the lie that men, and only men, are the sole perpetrators of domestic violence. I do not believe that serious domestic abuse of either sex is commonplace in the vast majority of Scottish families. What is a fact is that it is a terrible thing for children to be exposed to, and that an approach that sets out to fix the problem, not the blame, would be far more constructive.

As so often, the men's movement is misrepresented by people who want to paint it as some kind of Neanderthal fascist movement that wants women to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

This was the case in John Naish's article, "Villainous women are waging war on us" (Weekend, December 4). There were references to "wife in the kitchen", "dad as head of the family" and "men wanting their traditional roles", but no quotes from the men interviewed conveyed anything of the sort. They spoke of unfair treatment in the divorce courts and health, where millions are spent on breast cancer, almost nothing on prostate cancer. Instead, Susan Faludi was wheeled in to "understand this die-hard misogyny". For every man quoted, a woman was quoted. When did you last see that when Germaine Greer was interviewed? Or Faludi?

As long as there are articles like this, the men's movement will continue to grow. Hopefully there will come a day when equality is for both men and women, and not just for women.

23 June 1998 The Times : 'no fault' divorce

Acknowledgement : image from The Times of 23 June 1999

9 June 1998 The Daily Telegraph : Pension Splitting on divorce

Harriet Harman's justification for pension splitting on divorce (report, June 9) contains the dismal array of false argument and selective evidence, which we have come to expect from the feminist establishment on this issue. A wife cannot be deemed to have contributed to a husband's pension by "bringing up the children and looking after the home". A pension is accrued by a worker through payments he has made during his working life, which he alone has earned. This would apply whether he was married or not. What a wife has contributed to is precisely as stated "bringing up the children and looking after the home". Since the wife normally gets the whole or major portion of both of these on divorce I should have thought that principles of fairness and equality would suggest an adjustment in favour of the husband rather than the wife.

Harriet Harman seems to have forgotten that the divorce scene has changed somewhat since the 1930s. We now have divorce on unilateral demand coupled with "needs" based rather than "conduct" based settlements, operating in a social climate in which men and women have equal access to education and career opportunities. She also seems to have forgotten that settlements take into account all assets possessed by the parties, whether owned before the marriage or not. A survey that I recently conducted on a sample of 350 divorced men showed that, on average, men brought five times as much capital into their marriages than women and left with five times less. Since the Government has made much of its intention to represent all the people, and support families, perhaps Harriet Harman could explain to my son, and other young men like him, the incentives introduced by her measures for him to work hard, get married and raise children ?

20 May 98 The Daily Telegraph : Church is wrong on remarriage

SIR - Marriage rates are at an all-time low and are still falling. This is only to be expected, as the adverse consequences of being divorced against one's will become increasingly visible to the wider community and relationships become increasingly strained and based on self-interest, protectionism and suspicion, rather than on mutual commitment, mutual benefit and trust.

The only logical way out of this quagmire is either to separate church affairs from secular ones entirely (so that a church marriage has no legal status), or (preferably) to recreate marriage through having the mutual commitments made in marriage to be reflected in law.

Just as you can't "buck" the market, you can't buck human nature and human needs.

Recent letters in the Press

9 June 1998 The Daily Telegraph : Pension Splitting on divorce

20 May 98 The Daily Telegraph : Church is wrong on remarriage