Our thanks to Ray for this. A Scottish judge with a backbone has given a custodial sentence to a young woman on a single count of making a false rape accusation. About damned time a judge did this. Far too many women walk free from court with suspended sentences. The sentence is only for 22 months, and doubtless she’ll walk free long before that. We’d wish the sentence to be for at least five years, to send a clear message to women considering making false rape accusations. From the article:

Aberdeen Sheriff Court heard at the time how she had falsely accused her grandfather of raping her when she was a child so she could get her hands on inheritance money. She eventually admitted she had made up the sex attack claims – but only after her innocent grandfather had spent time in a police cell following the allegations. The false claims wasted dozens of hours of police time and cost taxpayers more than £3,000.

At the time, sheriff Graeme Buchanan told her: ‘False allegations of rape and other sexual offences are very serious because they put doubts in the minds of jurors in genuine cases and they subject innocent people such as Mr Ritchie to a terrifying ordeal of suspicion and investigation by police.

‘What you did to Mr Ritchie was truly evil and despicable and there is only one appropriate sentence for this behaviour and that is imprisonment.’

During her sentencing, she showed no remorse as she left the court dock in handcuffs – smiling at her friends in the public gallery.

We keep hearing the narrative from judges along the lines of this one, that ‘false allegations of rape and other sexual offences are very serious because they put doubts in the minds of jurors in genuine cases…’. Does anyone think that these women care about that for one second? And surely any reasonable juror should have doubts – what’s the alternative, considering women as incapable of lying? Only after exercising reasonable doubt can jurors come to a considered view on whether rape allegations are ‘genuine’. So the narrative is utterly pointless on two counts.

Let’s return to the last sentence in our extract:

During her sentencing, she showed no remorse as she left the court dock in handcuffs – smiling at her friends in the public gallery.

How does that square with the final sentence of the article?

Representing the former Aberdeen Royal Infirmary staff nurse, solicitor Lynne Freeland said her client was aware she had ‘torn lives apart’ with her greedy, selfish and cruel actions.

I guess she was ‘aware’ that she’d ‘torn lives apart’, but just didn’t give a damn. And what compensation will her grandfather get for the vile allegations she made against him, leading him to be detained in a police cell? None.

The first Tory MP to jump ship and join UKIP, but not the last, we predict.

Our thanks to Nigel for pointing us to this piece by Julie Bindel in the Guardian. In common with all radical feminists she inhabits a parallel universe to our own, in which all victims of interpersonal violence (IPV) are women, all perpetrators men. When I debated with her at Durham University earlier this year, I mentioned some of the official statistics on IPV, which consistently show around 40% of victims are men. Her response was to assert I was claiming an equivalence between women reporting being the victims of extreme violence, such that they were in fear of their lives, with men reporting their partners ‘nagging’. She returns to this familiar theme at the end of her Guardian article:

Many women experiencing this type of abuse will not know what coercive control actually means in law. Not because they are stupid, but for the simple reason that most behaviours defined as such are so commonplace in unequal heterosexual relationships that women have been told to put up with it, and that they are usually to blame.

This law would be used by those men who would categorise what they describe as “nagging” as coercive control.

In reality, it would be almost impossible to prove coercive control in a court of law, which means that only the most extreme cases will be acted upon. Most women who report it therefore will be left with the already widely held belief that those who report domestic violence are exaggerating or unhinged. Rather than tying us up with even more unworkable legislation, let us push even harder for the current laws to be used to arrest, charge and convict those men [our emphasis] who are currently getting away with violating those they claim to love.

Ms Bindel erroneously branded me a liar during the Durham debate, and phoned me to apologise for having done so. I asked her to apologise publicly, given that the lie had been stated publicly in front of an audience of 250+ students, but she declined to do so. I then published this account of the matter.

Not one of the feminists to whom we’ve awarded ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ awards – Ms Bindel isn’t one of them, at this stage – has ever retracted her lie(s), let along apologised. We’ll shortly be presenting Caroline Criado-Perez with her second ‘Lying Feminist of the Month’ award, for an utterly absurd claim – one commonly stated by feminists, despite being debunked many times – she made in the online edition of the New Statesman. Her first award certificate is here.

A thought-provoking piece from Jack Barnes, an American MHRA who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Detroit conference.

An interesting video, and as always with AVfM, the comments stream is well worth catching. Dean Esmay posted this:

Based on most research, this is a much more typical portrayal of what most intimate partner violence looks like than almost anyone in contemporary society believes.

Our thanks to Ian for this. Jean-Claude Juncker, unelected President-elect of the European Commission, is pressurising countries to submit women for top posts. From the article:

Britain will be denied a key role in the European Commission this week unless David Cameron replaces his male candidate with a woman, the body’s new president has indicated.

Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday expressed his frustration that “despite my repeated requests”, most governments, including Britain, have put forward men for the most important positions in Europe.

He warned that the European Commission would be “neither legitimate nor credible” without more women and said that female candidates would have “a very good chance” of getting one of the top jobs.

Sources close to Mr Juncker, whose appointment Mr Cameron attempted to block, said that the remarks were directed at, among others, the British Prime Minister.

Interesting.

We’ve just learned of an interesting new website, Science vs. Feminism. We were particularly impressed with Sex Differences in General Intelligence, the most insightful piece we’ve read on the issue in a long time. We wish the site every success.

A short but interesting article.

One of the recurring frustrations faced by MHRAs is the pat response that ‘you can’t make generalisations about men and women’. This makes debate all but impossible. If you try to explain the reasons why few women wish to become engineers, you’ll be told that there are surely some AMAZING female engineers, and all they need is some role models and incentives (e.g. the £22,750 sponsorships available only to female to Brunel engineering postgraduate students) and in time there will be as many female engineers as male engineers. It’s never considered relevant that only a minority of female engineering graduates become engineers – they tend to prefer more cushy, better-paid lines of work, nearer home – and of the women who do go into engineering as a career, the vast majority who have children will quit the profession. Meanwhile the life chances of men who’d have made long careers in engineering – perhaps thereby supporting partners and children – have been dashed.

The government has earmarked £30 million to encourage (i.e. bribe with taxpayers’ money) more women into engineering. I recently read a government report on suicide, published in January 2014 – Preventing suicide in England: One year on. First annual report on the cross-government outcomes strategy to save lives. It relates the statistics about male suicide, and describes six research projects in which £1.5 million are being invested. Not one of the six projects was specifically concerned with the male suicide rate, now 3.5 times higher than the female suicide rate. The government is investing 20 times more money in persuading women to become engineers, than it’s spending on researching suicide.

The £30 million ‘investment’ will result in more female engineers and fewer male engineers. The male unemployment rate has long been higher than the female unemployment rate, and unemployment is known to be a major driver of suicide among men (but not women). So the government is spending £30 million on an initiative to push women into lines of work they don’t want to enter, at the same time driving up male unemployment and therefore male suicide.

Suicide is the #1 cause of death of men below the age of 50, and the suicide rate is particularly high among young men.

I’ve digressed again. AVfM has just published an excellent piece by Karen Straughan (GirlWritesWhat) on the topic of gender generalisations. As always, Karen nails the subject. Enjoy.