Worm Turning in ‘Baby Gabriel’ Case?
September 30, 2010
The worm might be starting to turn in Logan McQueary's quest to find his son, 'Baby Gabriel.' Last December, Baby Gabriel's mother, Elizabeth Johnson, grabbed the boy who was then eight months old, and took him to San Antonio, Texas, where he disappeared. McQueary got a court to award him custody a matter of days after she absconded with the boy, but, despite a multi-state hunt that's been extensively publicized, Baby Gabriel has never been found. Shortly after she left Arizona, Johnson texted McQueary that she had murdered the child, but she has since disavowed that claim.
Johnson was arrested in Florida and returned to Arizona where she was charged with custodial interference, kidnapping and child abuse. She's been in jail ever since under a $1.1 million bond. Earlier in the summer, she was declared incompetent to stand trial, but that finding has now been reversed. A trial date has not yet been set.
Johnson's friend, Tammi Smith is also charged in the matter. Smith wanted to adopt Gabriel, and apparently assisted Johnson in filing false documents with the court to facilitate an adoption. Among other things, those documents claimed that McQueary might not be Gabriel's father, even though an Arizona family court has found that he is. It is McQueary's objection to the adoption of his child that caused Johnson to kidnap the boy in the first place.
Despite her detention, Johnson has always adamantly refused to cooperate with authorities. Since her original claim of murder, she has always said that she gave Gabriel to a couple in a park in San Antonio and that she doesn't know who they are or where. Essentially no one buys that claim.
Now this article tells us that Johnson is open to a plea bargain (Arizona Republic, 9/28/10). That of course doesn't mean that the prosecution has offered anything or that, if it has, it's something she would accept. But my take on it is this: Johnson has been found competent to stand trial; her grandfather says she looks worn out by her time in jail; a trial date will be set soon and when she's tried, she'll be convicted; her extremely bad behavior since absconding with the child are well known to all, so she can expect no favors either from the judge or from the jury; Tammi Smith is trying to cut a deal with prosecutors and that would mean telling police everything she knows about Johnson's conduct. In short, Johnson is in a crack; she's got no friends and will likely receive the longest sentence a judge can give her under the circumstances of the case.
So her lawyer has figured out that it's time to make the best deal he can. And any deal would surely require Johnson to tell the truth about the whereabouts of Logan McQueary's son. I can't see a prosecutor giving Johnson the time of day without that for the simple reason that she's got nothing else to offer. Now of course, if she did kill the child, she won't admit to that, but I've never believed she did. I've always thought that Tammi Smith and possibly a woman she knows in Atlanta gave Johnson information about how to get rid of an infant in an extra-legal, no-questions-asked manner.
But whatever the case, Johnson won't see the outside until the newspapers run photos of a smiling Logan McQueary holding his son.
Stay tuned.
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News reports of upswing in middle-aged suicide miss one glaring fact
September 29, 2010
The following was written by reader Jim Evans.
On September 28th, it was on the front page: “Surprising Hike in Suicide Rates Found Among Baby Boomers”, read the headline in Yahoo News. Early in the article, it was reported that the suicide rate for middle-aged women has climbed faster than the suicide rate for middle-aged men. Increases of more than 3% per year were seen among women, and more than 2% among men.
The article bandies about a lot of numbers, particularly percentages. For example, suicide rates in men aged 40 to 49 who had some college but no degree went up 16.3 percent between 2000 and 2005, and a 30% increase in the suicide rate for women with some college but no degree during the same time period.
You have to dig deep into the actual study here, not just the news reports, to find out what the media are NOT saying: men are committing suicide at rates far outstripping that of women. Males aged 40-49 years who are unmarried, for example, commit suicide 3.6 times more often then women in the same age group. Unmarried males aged 50-59 years commit suicide 4.3 times more often than their female counterparts.
If you weren't familiar with the media bias towards honoring women’s lives and ignoring men’s suffering, it might come as a surprise that in news reports chronicling suicide, no mention was made that in 2007, 27,000 males in the United States killed themselves, compared to 7,000 females. You might expect the headlines to read “Suicide among men 3.7 times greater than among women” or something to that effect.
Even looking at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Facts and Figures page
where the above numbers are listed, what is the bold headline underneath the table? “A woman takes her own life every 90 minutes in the U.S., but it is estimated that one woman attempts suicide every 78 seconds.” And in the bulleted list that follows, women are once again highlighted, even though they acknowledge that men commit suicide at a rate four times that of women. Nearly every one of the 14 bullet point focuses on women - six do not mention men at all, and of those that do mention men, sometimes it’s merely as an aside, as in this point: “Firearms are now the leading method of suicide in women, as well as men.” There is only one bullet point that does not mention women.
Where are the hearings discussing this obvious problem? Why aren't those in the public health sector discussing it? Why aren't medical doctors and counselors being trained to recognize the symptoms and offer help to men who are particularly at risk?
The lack of coverage of the fact that men are much more at risk of suicide, the fact that there are no government programs specifically designed to help men cope with the factors that lead to suicide and the unbalanced focus on women proves once again what many have pointed out over the years; women are generally seen as more valuable than men, and a woman’s life lost is a tragedy. A man’s life lost? It’s just another man.
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News reports of upswing in middle-aged suicide miss one glaring fact
September 29, 2010
The following was written by reader Jim Evans.
On September 28th, it was on the front page: “Surprising Hike in Suicide Rates Found Among Baby Boomers”, read the headline in Yahoo News. Early in the article, it was reported that the suicide rate for middle-aged women has climbed faster than the suicide rate for middle-aged men. Increases of more than 3% per year were seen among women, and more than 2% among men.
The article bandies about a lot of numbers, particularly percentages. For example, suicide rates in men aged 40 to 49 who had some college but no degree went up 16.3 percent between 2000 and 2005, and a 30% increase in the suicide rate for women with some college but no degree during the same time period.
You have to dig deep into the actual study here, not just the news reports, to find out what the media are NOT saying: men are committing suicide at rates far outstripping that of women. Males aged 40-49 years who are unmarried, for example, commit suicide 3.6 times more often then women in the same age group. Unmarried males aged 50-59 years commit suicide 4.3 times more often than their female counterparts.
If you weren't familiar with the media bias towards honoring women’s lives and ignoring men’s suffering, it might come as a surprise that in news reports chronicling suicide, no mention was made that in 2007, 27,000 males in the United States killed themselves, compared to 7,000 females. You might expect the headlines to read “Suicide among men 3.7 times greater than among women” or something to that effect.
Even looking at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Facts and Figures page
where the above numbers are listed, what is the bold headline underneath the table? “A woman takes her own life every 90 minutes in the U.S., but it is estimated that one woman attempts suicide every 78 seconds.” And in the bulleted list that follows, women are once again highlighted, even though they acknowledge that men commit suicide at a rate four times that of women. Nearly every one of the 14 bullet point focuses on women - six do not mention men at all, and of those that do mention men, sometimes it’s merely as an aside, as in this point: “Firearms are now the leading method of suicide in women, as well as men.” There is only one bullet point that does not mention women.
Where are the hearings discussing this obvious problem? Why aren't those in the public health sector discussing it? Why aren't medical doctors and counselors being trained to recognize the symptoms and offer help to men who are particularly at risk?
The lack of coverage of the fact that men are much more at risk of suicide, the fact that there are no government programs specifically designed to help men cope with the factors that lead to suicide and the unbalanced focus on women proves once again what many have pointed out over the years; women are generally seen as more valuable than men, and a woman’s life lost is a tragedy. A man’s life lost? It’s just another man.
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Barbara Kay Nails Misandric Culture, Family Courts
September 29, 2010
I keep saying this: read this piece by Barbara Kay. I guess I'll continue until Barbara Kay starts writing pieces I can't agree with, but so far she hasn't. So here's another one; it's a speech she gave recently at McGill University at a conference entitled The Impact of Feminism on Society. As usual, Kay nails it.
Just for the record, I'll state a couple of quibbles. First, Kay says that mothers get sole custody in 90% of divorce cases involving children. I don't think that's right; she probably means 'primary custody.' Second, I don't think the character of Bridget Jones is a tramp, I think she's a ditz. She desperately searches for a good man to whom she can commit and who can commit to her. That she's almost a complete idiot would, in real life, tend to diminish her chances of success as Kay points out. And the movie's (I haven't read the book) main misandric problem is its assumption that Jones is worth a man's time, that, in some way, her difficulties in snaring a man reflect anything other than her own shortcomings. But a tramp? I think not.
Kay is Jewish and her comparison of current-day feminism to current-day anti-semitic Islam is interesting.
Virtually all Arab and many other Muslim nations rely on Jew hatred to externalize an explanation for their own failures. It works very well. The world has not seen such a widespread and virulent strain of anti-Semitism dominating an entire region since the Nazi era. So I can say with the conviction bred of close scrutiny that I have no use for blame-laying ideologies of any kind.
She touches on misandry in popular culture and correctly notes that, for the most part, it "flies beneath most people's radar." It's one of the amazing things about humans; we construct narratives about our lives and condition and, having done so, any and all facts that contradict those narratives go utterly ignored. We have the ability to stare a fact square in the face and not see it. And so it's been with the feminist narrative of male perdition. For decades now we've told ourselves that men are evil incarnate and women are kind, gentle, nurturing, strong, etc. And we doggedly ignore the mountain of information, clear for all to see, that contradicts the narrative.
Of course we humans aren't merely storytellers, mythmakers; we're also empirical scientists. And the two are often in conflict. For how long have men and fathers been trying to get people interested in the facts about, for one example, fatherhood, or about domestic violence for another? But the facts we bring to the "discussion" contradict the preferred narrative and are therefore mostly dismissed or simply not seen.
Kay of course sees them quite clearly.
For overt misandry, one has only to survey the industry around domestic violence. You could be forgiven for thinking that domestic violence is a one-way street, for that is certainly the impression one has from the fact that there are innumerable tax-funded shelters for abused women, none for abused men, unlimited funds for campaigns to raise consciousness around abused women, none for abused men. There is not a single social services agency or charity in Canada advertising “family services” that offers counseling, shelter or legal services for men who have been physically abused by women.
When angry feminists adduce their mantra that only men are inherently violent and that women use violence only in self-defense, I bring up a theme that is forbidden to discussion in women’s shelters: how is it then that partner violence amongst lesbians is significantly higher than amongst heterosexual partnerships?
How is it that children are far, far more likely to be physically abused by their mothers than their fathers? And when they are, how can we justify a woman’s right to take her children to a shelter to escape a violent husband when there is no shelter in the country that will accept a father with children fleeing an abusive mother?
Good questions all because the feminist narrative Kay describes has no answers to them. It has no answers because, according to it, facts we know to be true cannot be true. And that's a problem for any narrative, any worldview. The stream of facts is like a steady drip of water on stone; each drop seems to simply fall away, but over time it is the rock that erodes.
Kay's take on family law and radical feminism's attack on children's relationships with their fathers contains some classics.
The family law system is now systemically colonized by radical feminists. Their goal is the incremental legal eclipse of men’s influence over women’s spheres of “identity” interests, which includes children. To that end the custody issue has become a front line in the gender wars, supported by all feminist academics and institutional elites, by supine cabinet ministers and by feminist judges.
To illustrate with just a few examples:
Supreme Court of Canada chief justice Beverley McLachlin: “We have to be pro-active in rearranging the Canadian family.”
Former justice minister Martin Cauchon: “Men have no rights, only responsibilities.”
Feminist psychologist Peter Jaffe, a social-context educator of family court judges: “[J]oint custody is an attempt of males to continue dominance over females.”
And most egregiously this from the National Association of Women and the Law: “Courts may treat parents unequally and deny them basic civil liberties and rights, as long as their motives are good”.Here we are truly in George Orwell country. In simple words this statement means “The end justifies the means” and there is not a totalitarian regime in the world that does not espouse that exact excuse for their denial of rights to their citizens. In our courts the “good” that motivates them is supposedly the child’s “best interests” but in fact it is virtually always the mother’s happiness. This is not justice.
People's sense of justice forms very early in life. Just a couple of weeks ago, I witnessed the response of a three-year-old who believed his dad had treated him unjustly (he was right). He was adamant (as only a three-year-old can be) and absolutely refused to back down; he endured censure and punishment because of his position.
I mention this because men and women from all walks of life see the injustice of family courts and it is my belief that all the false concepts and false data peddled by radical feminists will never be their equal. Like my little three year old friend, they simply won't accept injustice; ultimately, the abuse of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, uncles, grandfathers and friends, by family court functionaries will not be tolerated.
Martin Luther King said that the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. I believe he was right and Barbara Kay is one of the many influential people who's bending the arc.
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Ohio SC Decision a Clear Win for Dads in Adoption Cases
September 27, 2010
The war on fathers' rights in adoption proceedings continues and fathers are starting to win a few battles, like the one described in this article (Toledo Blade, 9/24/10) and this Ohio Supreme Court opinion (Leagle, 7/22/10).
Benjamin Wyrembek had a brief affair with a married woman. She became pregnant in 2007 and, along with her husband, decided to place the child for adoption. Wyrembek had no way of knowing if the child was his or not and possibly neither did the woman, although neither the article nor the opinion says. But he timely filed his claim of paternity with the Ohio Putative Father Registry and brought suit in juvenile court in December, 2007 to establish paternity. In January, 2008, the adoptive parents, Jason and Christy Vaughn, filed their suit to adopt the child.
Genetic testing determined that the child is Wyrembek's and every court has since ruled in his favor. Basically, he's the biological father who's done every legal thing in his power to get custody of his son and every court has ruled that the adoption can't go forward. It seems that biological fathers have a few rights after all; it seems that the many United States Supreme Court cases so ruling actually mean something.
But, you may ask, "it's been almost three years since genetic testing determined Wyrembek's paternity; why does he still not have possession of his son?" Well, the answer is that adoption attorneys for many years have understood that when they're caught trying to force adoption on a child who doesn't need to be adopted because it has a fit father who wants it, the best thing to do is to stall.
In the past, that tactic worked well. Years of litigation often mean that fathers run out of money and give up. Personally, I've encountered cases in which the dad sees his child growing up in the household of another couple and comes to believe that, as much as he wants his child, as much as he's entitled to be his/her dad, it's better for the child for him to just walk away. So he does.
And in the past courts have ruled that, whatever the law on fathers' rights may be, after a certain amount of time has passed, the best interests of the child demand that the dad butt out and the child remain in its adoptive home.
So adoption attorneys believe that stalling is, if not right, at least effective. Their credo is "if you keep father and child separated long enough, maybe the adoption will happen." As the Blade article none too subtlely puts it,
On Tuesday, the Vaughns were served with an order from Lucas County Juvenile Court to hand over the nearly 3-year-old boy named Grayson to Mr. Wyrembek, prompting their attorney to file another flurry of motions to prevent the surrender.
That's a pretty accurate description of what's been going on since early 2008. Face it, everyone in the case knew almost three years ago that Wyrembek was the boy's father. Then, or at any time since then, they could have done the right thing and turned the boy over to him, but they didn't. The attorney kept filing motions, kept filing appeals and, the judicial system being what it is, time passed - a lot of it.
By now, that's the Vaughn's only claim - that their keeping the child in their custody in the face of every court ruling against them constitutes some sort of right that trumps those of the boy's father. As I said, in the past that often worked. But it doesn't any longer.
Now courts in Ohio and many other states are starting to take the rights of biological fathers far more seriously than ever before. The narrow ruling in the Ohio case is that a biological father has one year from the time his paternity is established to file suit to stop the adoption of his child. That means that mothers can no longer hide a child or a child's paternity from a father and deprive him of his parental rights via adoption. A father's rights can't be diminished or terminated until he knows he's the dad; once he does, he's got a year in which to act.
Amazingly enough, the attorney for the Vaughns and the article in the Toledo Blade want us to believe that Benjamin Wyrembek doesn't care about his child. They cite the fact that he hasn't communicated with his child during the course of the protracted litigation. Of course the idea that he might be trying to consider his child's feelings and not intrude unduly into his life seems never to have occurred to them. Whatever his reasons, the idea that a man will spend however much time, money and emotional energy over three years pursuing custody, but at the same time doesn't care about the child is borderline crazy.
The takeaway? The rights of biological fathers in adoption cases are no longer the pushovers they once were. This case and others stand for the proposition that, in adoption cases, courts will no longer allow mothers to control fathers' rights. A mother's hiding the child or hiding information about the child's paternity will no longer suffice to deprive a father of his parental rights. It's a win for dads.
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UK Review of Family Law May Mean Expanded Role for Dads
September 27, 2010
Since before the election in the Spring that turned Labor out of office in favor of a Conservative/Liberal Democratic government, British voters have been promised a thoroughgoing reevaluation of family law. Begun under the Brown government, the review of family law has been largely cloaked in mystery.
But last week, Lord Justice Wall, President of the Family Division gave a speech to the organization Families Need Fathers that sketched the outlines of the coming changes, and many news outlets picked up on his remarks. But most of those were at best suggestive and, as is so often the case, reporters looked for words that might unsettle readers as opposed to those that might inform them. From articles reporting on Wall's remarks, not a lot could be gathered about the immediate future of British family law.
But this blog by family attorney Marilyn Stowe sheds a good bit more light on the subject. Her basic take on the Lord Justice's speech is that it's a harbinger of legal changes to come, or at least those to be recommended by the Cameron and Clegg government.
What will the new law look like? Significantly, Wall said that "long and protracted contact and residence disputes will become a thing of the past." How will that be accomplished? That seems like a good question, one answer to which will apparently be that pre-divorce mediation will be mandatory.
As I've written before, mediation is a fine thing. It's cheaper and quicker than litigation and the best thing about it is that parties agree on the result. In litigation, one party wins and the other loses, guaranteeing that the latter is unhappy. "Getting to Yes" in mediation tends to make both parties equally happy or unhappy with the result; neither looks resentfully on the other side.
But one major problem with mediation is that it's only as effective as the equality of the parties' rights. If one party knows he can't win in court and the other knows she can't lose then, yes, they can probably agree to something in mediation, but one party will still lose and the other will still win. Call it anything you want, but mediation is just a gloss on the same old system when parties with different de facto rights mediate.
So the key to mediation's being successful at reducing conflict is to equalize parental rights. About that Stowe's message is somewhat encouraging, but only somewhat.
It does appear that changes to the law are afoot. Lord Justice Wall appears to approve of shared parenting, saying that the critical question is not so much the division of child’s time between their parents, but ensuring the role of each parent in a child’s life is given its proper importance.
In order for there to be a presumption of shared parenting (as opposed to equal parenting) Lord Justice Wall stated on several occasions in his speech that Parliament needs to enact the necessary legislation...
My guess? There will probably be a presumption of shared parenting as a starting point. A tribunal will decide in the case of disagreement (assuming mediation or other alternative dispute resolution methods fail) how shared parenting will work. There will be no more arguments about whether both parties should parent a child, as both will have that entitlement as a starting point. Everything will be approached from a less hostile, more user-friendly and cheaper perspective. This approach will focus on allocating the time children will spend with their parents based on the assumption of shared parenting.
The tribunal system she's talking about sounds like a system that's friendlier to divorcing parents than the current one, meaning that they won't need legal representation. My guess is that evidence rules will be largely abandoned and it will be the role of the tribunal to assist parties in getting the facts of the case before the court. It's less adversarial and probably cheaper.
So the bottom line seems to be that, in the not too distant future, divorcing parents in the U.K. will start with the presumption that their children need both of them in their lives. The only issue will become what exactly will the arrangement be and that will be decided in mediation if at all possible.
A subject Stowe doesn't broach is how the system will work when one parent interferes in the parenting time of the other, or when parental alienation of the child occurs. Usually, mediation is poorly suited to those cases, and I suspect they will end up in court.
If Stowe is correct about the direction of the new family law, fathers will still not have equality with mothers. The system she describes is an open invitation to tribunals and judges to issue parenting orders that reflect their own biases about who should be a parent and how much. And if parties know that orders are likely to favor mothers, mediation won't do much to change the matter. That'll mean fathers will tend to knuckle under in mediation and accept a lesser role, resulting soon in studies that say "see, fathers didn't want time with their children after all." That's the pessimistic view.
The optimistic view is that the emphasis of the new laws will be parenting time and responsibility, and real relationships between parents and children. Mothers who attempt to thwart fathers' rights will run afoul of the law and fathers will be able to assert their rights to parenting time. In mediation, fathers will be able to say "every other weekend plus Wednesday night isn't real parenting." Dads will be able to demand, and mothers will be forced to accept a greater role for fathers in their children's lives.
We'll see what the Parliament enacts and then we'll see how it works.
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Men’s Health Australia Busts Office for Women’s ‘False and Misleading’ DV Statistics
September 26, 2010
Here's the latest from Men's Health Australia. It makes for reading that is by turns amusing and infuriating.
It seems that in South Australia, there's a governmental office called the Office for Women (OFW). Last year it put up on its website a batch of statistics about domestic violence and - what a surprise - many of them were false and misleading. They routinely misstated data and artfully elided differences between violence generally and domestic violence. Because the site is "for women," it never saw fit to mention male victims of domestic violence. That there is no parallel office to provide those figures about male victims, effectively, the government of South Australia simply fails to provide the public with information about male victims and female perpetrators in a readily accessible way.
So in September of 2009, Greg Andresen of Men's Health Australia started complaining about the site. He complained to the OFW and eventually to the government's ombudsman. He cited 10 separate instances in which he claimed the site gave false or misleading data. Now the Ombudsman has returned his report and it finds that seven of Andresen's complaints were substantiated, two were partially substantiated and only one was unsubstantiated.
What's amusing, in a black humor sort of way, is the Ombudsman's description of the process of addressing the issues Andresen raised. Readers will note that it is now the end of September, 2010 and that he first complained in September of 2009. So, the OFW not only published false and misleading "information" on its government-funded website, but, when confronted by citizens (and even an MP), dragged its feet about correcting same.
Andresen first complained to the OFW which promptly informed him that all the data was correct and derived from government sources. He then asked for citations and the matter fell into a deep, dark hole. It took them about eight weeks to respond at all, and when they did, sure enough, the citations didn't say what the OFW's website said they did. So Andresen complained again and said if the false and misleading claims weren't corrected he would contact the Ombudsman's office. That's the last he heard from the OFW.
So the Ombudsman investigated the complaints and rendered its findings. First, he found the OFW's website published information that was "false and/or misleading" and that doing so was "unreasonable and wrong." Second, he found that the OFW "failed to correct information on its website" once its falsity and inaccuracy was brought to its attention, and that that failure too was "unreasonable and wrong." And third, he found that the OFW "failed to act with reasonable diligence and speed" to correct the multiple errors on its website. That failure was also found to be "unreasonable and wrong."
In short, it's a damning condemnation of the Office for Women. It published false and misleading claims and then, when the facts were brought to their attention, refused to correct the record.
The domestic violence industry has been riddled with this type of dishonesty for decades. False claims, misleading claims and the refusal to balance facts about female victims and male perpetrators with those about male victims and female perpetrators have been the lingua franca of the movement almost from its outset.
Actions like those of Greg Andresen and Men's Health Australia are valuable and necessary and should be applauded. In the end, they are no substitute for governments and communications media that demand and provide the truth about DV. It is far past time for both to happen.
Until they do, let's all lift a glass to Andresen and MHA.
Thanks to John for the heads-up.
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Are Same-Sex Classrooms the Answer to Boys Lagging in School?
September 26, 2010
The many problems boys encounter in primary and secondary school have been known to educators for at least 20 years. Indeed, in 1992, when the American Association of University Women trumpeted its claim that it was girls, not boys, who were being "shortchanged" by the school system, it was already well known to be false. Eighteen years later, because of the unwillingness of state legislatures and educators to even admit there's a problem, the plight of boys in our nation's schools has only gotten worse.
The facts are not in dispute. Boys are far less likely than girls to graduate from high school or go to college; they're less likely to even sit for the SAT; they're far more likely to be disciplined, suspended or expelled; they're far more likely to be diagnosed as suffering from ADHD or another learning disorder; they're more likely to drop out of school and they're more likely to commit suicide; they're more likely to be on prescription medication; they're more likely to use illegal drugs, alcohol and tobacco. As of this writing, 58% of college students are women. Researcher Judith Kleinfeld has found that high school age boys are far less likely than girls to have realistic expectations of the job market or what it takes to succeed in it.
The question long ago became "what do we do about the problem of boys lagging behind girls in school?" And the answer so far has been "nothing."
Despite that, one of the most tantalizing suggestions is unisex classrooms. I've reported on one such experiment taking place in Chicago that concentrates on poor and minority boys that seems to be succeeding. Christina Hoff Sommers described a similar effort in the United Kingdom in her 2000 book, The War on Boys. Now this article tells us about demands for all-boy classes in Anne Arundel County, Maryland (HometownAnnapolis, 9/22/10). And in the U.K. Gareth Malone has been given the opportunity to take over a class of boys to see if he can get them interested in school again. Read about it here (Belfast Telegraph, 9/18/10). (Malone has a three-part BBC show documenting his pedagogical adventure, but unfortunately, the BBC doesn't make links available to me.)
I'm not sure that all-male classes are necessarily the whole answer. My hesitation comes from many places, but chiefly from my sense that the reason boys aren't doing well is that they find school an inhospitable place. That's partly because 76% of public school teachers in the United States are women according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But even that fails to explain much for the simple reason that it's been true for over a century. Historian Richard Hofstadter found that, in the 1920s, some 83% of public school teachers were women.
So what explains boys' educational difficulties that have become so pronounced in the past, say 20-30 years? I would argue that the anti-male culture that's cropped up since about 1970 is at least partly responsible for boys' seeming incompatibility with their school environment. Although Doris Lessing found primary teachers "rubishing" the boys in her class and the lads beaten down because of it, I suspect that overt misandry in early education is rare. Still, a culture that routinely calls men and boys stupid can't be surprised when kids get the message. Predictably, as the Maryland article tells us, NOW opposes classes for boys.
Are girls being overtly favored in class? Probably not consciously, but teachers, most of whom are women, desire (appropriately) an orderly classroom. That, in years past might have meant sending boys to the principal's office if they disrupted class; now it means medication, suspension or expulsion.
Read what this mother has to say about her experiences with her son in school.
For any of us with boys to raise, the attitudes and opportunities our kids are growing up around in the UK today is seriously worrying...
Co-ordinating the school day around the natural inclinations of young boys would be extremely challenging, and utterly exhausting. And so, we have chosen as a society to demand that they behave like little girls, and if they can’t, to ignore them, threaten them with punishment, or sideline them altogether.
This attitude has long been endemic in schools but what really scares me is that I now see it in numerous facets of society.
When my toddler daughter chatted and giggled alongside me in coffee shops, strangers caught my eye and smiled.
When my three-year-old son babbles away — he’s louder, and more prone to pretending to be a lion or a tractor — people roll their eyes at each other, tut or move away.
When my daughter ran around soft-play areas with her friends squealing with excitement, no-one batted an eyelid.
When my son leads his procession of pals — or ‘racing cars’ — in circles, he’s usually told by a facilitator, in a strict, disapproving voice, that he must stop.
For that matter, note the first commenter to Graham's article who writes,
I remember my heart breaking when I would go to pick up my son from school, and he was made to stand in the corner at aged four by his teacher for "playing too much..."
But I'm not convinced that too much discipline is boys' problem in schools. Indeed, in the Chicago school I mentioned earlier as well as the one Sommers discussed discipline figures prominently. What seems to get results there is structure, i.e. clear requirements, clear goals, clear consequences for failure. Even uniforms seem to be important. Material to be learned that tends toward the concrete seems to appeal to boys including factual information and clearly articulated concepts. And it is the relative lack of those things that tends to turn boys away from education at an early age.
So, if boys do better in that educational environment and girls tend to thrive on less structure, so be it. Perhaps single-sex classes are necessary. Perhaps the classroom of a century ago, although headed by a woman, provided the structure boys needed to do well, but lacked the more relaxed atmosphere that favors girls. Perhaps, with the emphasis on girls' education over the past decades, we've reversed the process and lost sight of what makes for a pro-boy classroom environment.
Whatever the case, it's long past time to start addressing the needs of boys in school. One of the reasons gender equality is important is that no society can do its best when it ignores the intelligence, energy and creativity of half its population. Substituting one disadvantaged group for another isn't progress. If it takes separating the sexes in school in order for both to perform up to their potentials, then we shouldn't hesitate to do it.
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Amnesty International Yanked Pro-Father Film from its Festival
September 24, 2010
Earlier this year, Amnesty International sponsored a film festival in Göteborg, Sweden. Apparently the festival included submissions of short films by high school students and one such film was entitled "The Right to Be a Father." Here it is (YouTube).
It's a good little film. As so many productions like it do, it captures the anguish of Swedish fathers cut out of their children's lives by a family court system that assumes them to be uninterested in and dangerous to their children. Water that seed with plenty of allegations of domestic violence and sexual abuse and, irrespective of the truth of the claims, the men grow into at best occasional visitors in their children's lives.
The children, too young to have absorbed the anti-father messages the culture so prefers, see their dads, not as threats but as, well, dads. So when the courts step between the children and their fathers, the kids are traumatized as are their fathers. It's the old familiar system, the same old story. Fathers want their kids; kids want their fathers; kids do better on all counts with actively-involved fathers, but the courts say "No."
The film is eight minutes long and does a good job of conveying the heartbreak of the fathers and the callousness of the family law system. It was scheduled to be screened at the festival and the young people who made it were invited to see their creation shown to the public. But they never did. Amnesty International pulled the plug on the film at the last minute and removed it from its website.
Exactly why it did so seems debatable at this point, but a domestic violence organization in Uppsala, Sweden claimed responsibility for AI's removal of the film. For its part, AI has denied that pressure from the group played a role in its not being screened. I emailed AI to find out what it claims to be the actual reason; so far I've received no response.
Whatever the case, the claim by the DV organization is at least credible. For some years now, Amnesty International has swallowed, hook line and sinker, the claims of the DV industry about female victimization and male perpetration of DV. I searched its website in vain for any reference to male victimization in DV incidents. The site does express such blatant falsehoods as "Violence against women is...rarely punished," and "Women and girls suffer disproportionately from violence - both in peace and in war..."
This article by Stephen Baskerville about the film and AI paints with too broad a brush for my taste, but he does make a point that's worth remembering.
Amnesty International has, over many years, done much good work in attempting to confront the deprivation of basic individual rights by governments all over the world. It has been and should be applauded for that.
But part of AI has been colonized by gender feminists whose expressly-stated objective has been the destruction of the family. Disinformation about men and fathers has been part and parcel of that effort and disinformation about domestic violence has come to be the right tool for the job.
Therefore, whenever and wherever the subject of fathers' rights to children and children's rights to fathers arises, the response of the anti-dad crowd is "domestic violence." The fact that women commit DV as often as do men has been established by hundreds of studies spanning 35 years, and is one that gender feminists are at pains to hide. So is the fact that mothers do far more abuse and neglect of children than do fathers.
Their anti-father brief is unsupported and unsupportable, so they just keep repeating the same untruths in the hope that no one will notice that the empress is naked. So far AI has obliged, keeping its eyes wide shut.
But, as we see daily, the DV industry continually lobbies for greater and greater state power to be used against men and fathers. They've been amazingly successful at it, ramrodding laws that entirely bypass constitutional "guarantees" of due process to jail and remove from their homes and children innocent men who have become targets of DV allegations.
What Baskerville notices is that, by backing these astonishing expansions of state power at the expense of individuals, AI has become its own evil twin. When it comes to DV, the organization that won its spurs by standing up to despots now sides with them against that most humble of figures - the man who wants only to be a father to his child. The use of disinformation about DV to expand state power is nothing new. What is new is its embrace by an organization that supposedly champions individuals.
On a more positive note, just consider what an education the high school kids who made the film "The Right to Be a Father" have gotten. AI's pulling their film not only from the festival but from its website together with the nutcase opposition by the Uppsala DV organization has surely taught them more about the reality of fathers and fathers' rights than they ever would have learned just from making their film. For them, now it's personal, and that means they'll never forget it.
Thanks to John for the heads-up.
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Paycheck Fairness Law a Solution in Search of a Problem
September 24, 2010
Finally! This op-ed makes me think wonders may never cease (New York Times, 9/22/10).
In it, Christina Hoff Sommers points out some of the many reasons the "paycheck fairness" act shouldn't be passed and in the process educates Times readers about the causes of the wage gap between men and women in this country. In short, it's a valuable piece and the Times should be congratulated for running it, given that it contradicts the paper's usual acceptance of the notion that any inequality between the sexes must be caused by discrimination.
Well, I suppose I should amend that last sentence. After all, the "paper of record" rarely if ever notices, comments on, opposes or seems to care about inequalities in which men hold the short end of the stick. Has the Times ever run an article calling for equality in child custody? What about sentencing for crime that sees female defendants receive much greater leniency than males, even when all other pertinent factors are equal? Then there's the radical disparity in military deaths between men and women and the fact that women aren't required to register with the Selective Service System. More men than women lack health insurance according to Kaiser Health Plans' research, but the Times doesn't notice. That some 75% of the homeless are men has, as far as I can tell, entirely escaped the attention of The Gray Lady.
I could go on indefinitely, but suffice it to say that to the Times editorial board, some gender inequalities are more important than others.
So it's good to see the editors run Sommers' piece about earnings inequality that is almost solely a product of the choices that men and women make in what jobs to take, how much to work and how long to stay in a career. Appropriately, she cites the CONSAD analysis done in 2008 for the U.S. Labor Department and published in 2009 of some 50 peer-reviewed studies of the wage gap that proves to a virtual certainty that, if the gap has anything at all to do with discrimination, it's immeasurable by existing data.
Tellingly, the CONSAD report appeared on the website of the U.S. Labor Department in mid-January of 2009 and was taken down by the Obama Administration on January 21st. I've always been intrigued by the possibility that doing so was the very first official act of the new administration.
And that brings us to the so-called Paycheck Fairness Act scheduled to be voted on soon, which event apparently moved Sommers to write. About the act it may be enough to say that it is avidly backed by the American Association of University Women whose track record of intellectual dishonesty on a wide range of issues is by now the stuff of legend. What other organization can boast that one of its "studies" in the field of girls' and boys' education was described by Brookings Institution scholar and former assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch as "just completely wrong?" After all, scholars are usually quite circumspect when they critique the work of others.
According to Sommers, the main problem with the proposed law is that it seeks to penalize employers for the choices made by their employees.
Some of the bill’s supporters admit that the pay gap is largely explained by women’s choices, but they argue that those choices are skewed by sexist stereotypes and social pressures. Those are interesting and important points, worthy of continued public debate.
The problem is that while the debate proceeds, the bill assumes the answer: it would hold employers liable for the “lingering effects of past discrimination” — “pay disparities” that have been “spread and perpetuated through commerce.” Under the bill, it’s not enough for an employer to guard against intentional discrimination; it also has to police potentially discriminatory assumptions behind market-driven wage disparities that have nothing to do with sexism.
For a long time now gender feminists have sought to remove from women the consequences of their own actions. Therefore, last year feminst academic Donna Bobbitt-Zeher informed one and all that women in college are "segregated" into certain academic majors that lead to jobs that pay less than do those done by men. Never mind that actual segregation of that sort would violate more laws than I can count and lose any school guilty of same considerable sums of federal and state money. Never mind that half of medical and law school enrollees are women. Never mind that women in this country are free to pursue any profession or occupation they choose and are qualified to perform. And never mind that women's choices about jobs are rationally made on the basis of their own values.
No, according to the backers of the paycheck bill, none of those choices matter. Employers must be made to pay women, not only for the work they do but for anomalous "lingering effects." As Sommers describes it,
The Paycheck Fairness bill would set women against men, empower trial lawyers and activists, perpetuate falsehoods about the status of women in the workplace and create havoc in a precarious job market. It is 1970s-style gender-war feminism for a society that should be celebrating its success in substantially, if not yet completely, overcoming sex-based workplace discrimination.
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