Our thanks to M for this deeply moving story of an American father and daughter reunited after 30 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LhBbvys-ve0

Two months after Scott Becker’s wife had a baby daughter, April, the marriage fell apart. The mother moved and didn’t tell Becker anything about his daughter or even their whereabouts. But for 30 years he didn’t give up hope of seeing her again, he hired private detectives, and for the past 10 years had a website dedicated to finding her. She too made efforts to track him down, all to no avail.

Then one day – she was by this time 30 – she Googled a phrase which led to his website, and they were later reunited. She now has children, so Scott’s a grandfather. Watching the video floored me, I have to say, especially when at 0:47 she describes her reaction at finally being in touch with him:

I must have cried for three hours straight.

Over the years a number of women had approached Becker, claiming to be his daughter. In his own words, ‘I’ve gotten taken a few times’. Those women should now be serving long jail sentences.

April describes her mother in warm terms at the end. But if her father had taken her at two months of age and moved to an unknown location, you can be sure the police would have been all over the case. This is just another one of countless cases of state-sponsored brutality against fathers to add to the pile.

As far as the mother was concerned, how could she have had so little humanity as to deprive her daughter of her father’s love, and her ex-husband of his daughter’s love? To my mind, what she did – and actions like it – should be criminal offences resulting in long prison sentences.

We’re going to be putting an increasing focus on fathers’ and children’s human rights over the 18 months remaining before the next general election.

It’s about damned time a political party spoke out for fathers and children.

Paul Elam, Founder and Publisher of AVfM, makes a very insightful point with one photograph and a few words:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/updates/in-the-memetime/

Ray Barry’s the leader of the Equal Parenting Alliance, a political party, but will be standing for J4MB in Wolverhampton South-West at the May 2015 general election. He’s regarded as a national authority on the damage wrought by the family courts system on fathers and children, and he spends a good deal of his time supporting fathers trying to gain access to their children. He and his ex-wife together spent over £100,000 on legal bills in a custody battle. He failed to gain regular access to his three children, all of whom are now adults, and with whom he’s no longer in contact (they live with their mother). He was recently interviewed on BBC Radio West Midlands (it’s on our YouTube channel) and he was interviewed three days ago by BBC Radio 5 Live. Ray’s latest interview is also on our YouTube channel, link below. It ends at 5:17:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m09MhGQUVbY

The presenter, Rachel Burden, was the very epitome of a sympathetic and professional interviewer. We defy anyone to listen to this interview and not be deeply moved by Ray’s account of the situation faced by himself and so many other fathers, as well as his account of how he hopes to see his children again one day. Ray’s interview is followed by an hour-long piece in which Rachel Burden talks to separated fathers and mothers about their Xmas arrangements with their children.

You’ll be hearing a lot more from us over the 18 months before the 2015 general election about the barbaric assaults on father’s and children’s human rights, which are the consequences of both poor legislation and an ultimately self-serving family courts system.

Our thanks to D for pointing us to this moving story:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2529272/I-cut-ex-daughters-life-Now-Im-glad-fought-tooth-nail-her.html

In the UK, and I expect other countries, we hear a constant narrative about ‘Deadbeat Dads’. David Cameron cruelly used the phrase on – of all days – Father’s Day, two or three years ago. It’s a phrase used only a few days ago by the odious Janet Street-Porter, in her column in the Daily Mail. This was a few days before Xmas Day, another time of particular anguish for fathers unable to see their children. In response we posted a piece, ‘Janet Street-Porter: the most evil woman in Britain?’

I can’t recall ever having heard the term ‘Deadbeat Mums’, so I was very interested in a piece just sent in by M (does the man never sleep?) He pointed us to a recently-published report relating to the United States 2011 Census, and published recently. It’s titled, ‘Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support’:

131226 US Census (2011) report

A few highlights:

14.4 million parents live with 23.4 million children under 21, the other parent living elsewhere.

81.7% of custodial parents are mothers, 18.3% fathers.

53.4% of custodial mothers and 28.8% of custodial fathers had legal or informal child support agreements.

30.7% of custodial parents who were due child support received full payments, 43.4% partial payments, 25.9% no payments.

We plan to do a detailed analysis of the report at some point, but M points to some intriguing data near the top of Table 2 (p.7). It outlines the extent to which non-resident fathers and mothers meet (or fail to meet) their obligations with respect to paying child support:

Custodial mothers

Average payment due: $6,115

Average payment received: $3,862 (63.2%)

43.6% received all due payments

25.1% received no payments

Custodial fathers

Average payment due: $5,527

Average payment received: $3,015 (54.6%)

41.4% received all due payments

32% received no payments

So there you have it. Compared with non-resident fathers, non-resident mothers are required to pay less, pay a lower proportion of what they’re required to pay, are less likely to pay all they’re required to pay, and are markedly more likely to pay nothing towards the support of their children. If we accept that these are some of the measures of being a ‘deadbeat parent’ – as tends to be the case in the UK, at least – then the conclusion is clear. In the United States, a majority of deadbeat non-resident parents are mothers. Is it time for Americans to start using the term ‘Deadbeat Moms’?

It’s the constant refrain of whiny women like Laura Bates and the 100,000+ Twitter followers of her Everyday Whining Project that women are pressurised (by the media, in particular) to meet unrealistic standards of attractiveness. It’s utter bunkum of course, as anyone who’s read Steve Moxon’s excellent book The Woman Racket (2008) will understand very well. Essentially women seek to maximise their attractiveness in order to ascend the female dominance hierarchy (based on attractiveness and youth) and thereby improve their prospects of attracting and then retaining a man higher up the male dominance hierarchy (based on power or its usual modern proxy, money). Well, it’s easier than working to finance a good standard of living, isn’t it?

But still the women whine on and on, year after year, decade after decade. So we must thank the indefatigable M for pointing us to an interesting article, ‘A Cold War Fought by Women’, in the New York Times, which draws on a paper published recently by the Royal Society. The article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html?_r=3&

From the article:

Indirect aggression can take a psychological toll on women who are ostracized or feel pressured to meet impossible standards, like the vogue of thin bodies in many modern societies. Studies have shown that women’s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average — and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other researchers say that it’s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images.

“To a large degree the media reflects trends that are going on in society, not creates them,” said Dr. Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University. He found that women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies did not correlate with what they watched on television at home. Nor were they influenced by TV programs shown in laboratory experiments: Watching the svelte actresses on “Scrubs” induced no more feelings of inferiority than watching the not-so-svelte star of “Roseanne.”…

In traditional villages, people married at an early age to someone nearby, but young men and women in modern societies are free to postpone marriage as they search long and far for better options. The result is more competition because there are so many more rivals — and there’s no longer any scientific doubt that both sexes are in to win it.

Our thanks to D for pointing us to this story. Another one for the ‘You couldn’t make this s*** up!’ file:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2529393/Unemployed-mother-two-borrows-1-700-EIGHT-payday-loan-companies-buy-hundreds-Christmas-presents-children-says-pay-back.html

From the article:

The jobless mother said: ‘There were hundreds  of presents under the tree. Their gran passed away this year so it was nice to  be able to treat them. They got loads of computer games for their  Xbox, they got a new TV and DVD player each, new bikes and loads  more.’

My guess is she’ll get away with this scam, and her smile suggests she knows she will, or someone else will repay the loans. Once again we have a woman being held no more accountable for her actions than a child. Children can’t be held accountable for committing to legal agreements.

Our thanks to M for alerting us to this piece about a Czech organisation, ‘Union of Fathers’, objecting to a pilot scheme in the Czech Republic which is copying the women-only railway compartment initiatives of Austria and Switzerland:

http://www.ceskapozice.cz/en/news/society/czech-mens-group-says-railway-wrong-lines-women-only-compartments

Will we ever see women-only compartments on trains in the UK? Of course we will. And you can be very sure women will get proportionately more carriages, and more comfortable carriages. Before long most or all of the female passengers will be sitting down throughout their journeys, while most or all of the male passengers will be standing. Why?

Because when it come to privilege the female train only ever goes forward, and the male train only ever goes backwards.

Xmas is almost upon us, and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank our followers for their support of J4MB over the last 10 months. Public interest in our arguments – as reflected in the number of ‘hits’ on this website – has been growing strongly month by month. We’ve worked hard to expose the many assaults on the interests of men and boys, and to develop forward practical proposals to improve their lives (and in turn the lives of women and girls). With just 500 days remaining before the 2015 general election, you can be sure we’ll be working even harder next year.

One thing above all would do a great deal to increase public awareness of our arguments, and that’s exposure in the mainstream media. At the moment the single thing which would do most to give J4MB exposure in the mainstream media would be an appearance at the first international conference on men’s issues, in Detroit, in late June.

I’ve been invited to speak at the event, and my presentation will be video recorded along with other presentations. We recently started an appeal to raise £1,000 to cover the cost of flights – ‘A Voice for Men’, the organisers of the conference, will be covering other costs. We’ve had a number of donations, but we’re still some way from hitting the target. As things stand I won’t be going to Detroit, and a golden opportunity for exposure in the mainstream media will be missed. So I ask you again to donate what you can afford, even if it’s £1. The link is here https://j4mbdotorgdotuk.wordpress.com/donate. Thank you again for your support.

 

Our thanks to a number of supporters for pointing us to a piece in today’s Daily Mail (link below). Social workers operate on the assumption that women’s claims of being victims of domestic violence are always to be believed, even in the complete absence of evidence to support their claims. It’s a charter for malicious women to manipulate the system to their advantage in order to abuse men and children, and they do so with relish.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2528681/High-Court-Judge-Dont-believe-claims-domestic-violence-parents-rewrite-history-making-accusations-against-other.html#ixzz2oOWxl8Jl