Our thanks to J for this.

The 2010 Coalition Agreement committed to re-introducing anonymity for suspected sex offenders, until and unless convicted. This commitment was later predictably reneged upon, resulting in a series of ‘fishing expeditions’ where the police reveal the name of suspects for whom there is insufficient evidence for conviction, in the hope others alleged victims will present themselves, and another show trial can begin. Mark Pritchard is only the latest in a long line of men who’ve been hung out to dry, and not even charged with an offence.

From the article:

Asked about the issue, Prime Minister David Cameron told the Heart FM radio station in Wales: “It’s something we’ve looked at in the past and there are some real issues with it. So I think it needs very careful thought before going down that road.”

The coalition government floated plans to extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants in England and Wales shortly after taking power in 2010 but these were soon dropped amid criticism from Labour and campaigners against sexual violence.

For ‘Labour and campaigners against sexual violence’, read ‘feminists’. Did Mark Pritchard make any public calls for suspect anonymity before he personally suffered from an allegation? And would David Cameron’s views on the matter change, should he be subjected to a false rape allegation? Of course.

We cover the issue of anonymity of suspected sex offenders on pp 55,56 of our election manifesto.

An interesting piece by Dean Esmay. I’ve left a comment, and invite you to do likewise.

Our thanks to R for this.

Suicide is the leading cause of death of men under 50, leading to 26% of those deaths. We should not be surprised that divorced men kill themselves at such a higher rate than divorced women. They’re assaulted financially by divorce courts, and ripped out of their children’s lives by ‘family’ courts. Anyone who has spent more than a short time supporting men denied access to their children will have worked with men who subsequently killed themselves. It’s also known a lack of support available for male victims of domestic violence is contributing to the male suicide rate. How could it not be?

The male:female suicide rate differential almost doubled between 1982 and 2012, from 1.69:1 to 3.3:1. The government has no interest in male suicide. Central government is spending £1.5 million on six studies researching into suicide, none of them charged with specifically investigating male suicide. Meanwhile taxpayers are spending £30 million – 20 times as much – encouraging women into engineering. Suicide is covered in pp46-48 of our general election manifesto.

A lengthy article but well worth reading to the end, as we’d expect with anything from William Collins. He starts with this:

In this long article I take a look at what is being done to encourage women to take up STEM professions in which they are the minority. Specifically I will concentrate on mechanical engineering and physics. My purpose is to contrast this with what is being done to encourage men into a profession in which they are the minority, namely teaching.

We note his support for an option for boys to be taught in predominantly male environments, a position he shares with Herbert Purdy and Chris McGovern, who leads the Campaign for Real Education. We support the idea too, as you’ll see on pp15-17 of our election manifesto.

One of our campaigning activities in the months prior to the general election in May will be extensive door-to-door leaflet drops, starting in late January or early February. The three seats are a little to the north and west of Nottingham, and at this stage we anticipate teams of three or more people working together. If you can help us with this activity, please email me mike@j4mb.org.uk, and let me know whether you’ll be free to help us on weekdays or weekends, or both. Thank you.

Our thanks to R for pointing us to this piece in the Express. Note the gender-neutral term ‘parents’ in the headline. 94.8% of the ‘parents’ are fathers. Some interesting comments from Matt O’Connor of Fathers 4 Justice.

I’m only one of many MRAs who believe that the phenomenon of MGTOW – Men Going Their Own Way – is going to be one of a small number of key game-changers in the battle for men’s human rights. So it is with pleasure that I report the first publication in AVfM’s publishing venture is a book by Peter Wright and Paul Elam, Go Your Own Way: Understanding MGTOW. It’s available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book, priced at £6.58. Both men know a great deal about the subject, so a good read is assured, and you’ll be supporting AVfM with your purchase. I’ve just ordered my personal copy.

If you click on the Amazon ‘Look Inside’ functionality you’ll see a good deal of the start of the book including the Preface by Tom Golden.

It’s possible to read Kindle books even if you don’t have a Kindle e-reader. Amazon offers excellent and free-to-download software for computers, providing (in my view) a superior reading experience to e-readers.

Our thanks to S for pointing us to this short video. You know feminism is in serious trouble, and fast losing its support base, as well as the battle of ideas, when prominent feminists such as Tammy Bruce start seeking to recruit family-oriented women – a group they’ve relentlessly assaulted, decade after decade, and continue to assault – and seek the appeasement of men, and engagement with them.

Doubtless some men, and some organisations purporting to campaign for men’s and boys’ human rights, will respond to feminists’ calls for appeasement and engagement. No matter. We know who those men and organisations are, and they’re already held in contempt across the MHRM.

J4MB will never be appeased by feminists, nor engage substantively with them. We won’t be satisfied until their evil ideology has been consigned – as a politically influential ideology – to where it should have been consigned decades ago:

The dustbin of history.

Well worth reading.

Janet Bloomfield has written about 13 reasons women lie about rape, Hannah Wallen has written about 6 dangerous rape myths, and of course we mustn’t forget the 10 reasons false rape allegations are common.

Following our public call three days ago for Vera Baird QC to resign as Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria – on five different counts – we thank a supporter for sending us a photograph of a poster in Newcastle, at the bottom of which is Vera Baird’s name, and the logo of Northumbria police. The poster declares:

If she’s drunk, she can’t legally consent.
Sex without consent is rape.

If the first statement is true, then surely the following must be true, too:

If he’s drunk, he can’t legally consent.

So when a drunk man and a drunk woman have sex, is neither consenting? Or maybe they’re raping each other simultaneously? Arguably, both these absurd propositions follow from the first line on the poster.

Legally, however, even when a sober woman has sex with a drunk man it isn’t rape, because of how the Sexual Offences Act 2003 is worded – an Act passed by a Labour government, of which Vera Baird was a member. Rape perpetrators can only be men, according to the definition of rape employed in the Act, although we know from major surveys that men ‘being made to penetrate’ women – in the published guidance of the Crown Prosecution Service,  ‘a female equivalent of the offence of rape’ – is far more common than popularly believed. And, of course, men will bear financial responsibility for children conceived during their sexual abuse.

We cover the issue of sexual abuse of men by women in our general election manifesto, pp31-37. The CPS guidance on ‘a female equivalent of the offence of rape’ is on p36. Needless to say, the ‘equivalence’ doesn’t extend to equivalence of maximum custodial sentences.

Feminist thinking in the area of women’s consent to sex with men, as with so many other areas, infantilises women, robbing them of moral agency. It cynically exploits the gynocentric societal paradigm that men are ‘actors’ and women ‘acted upon’. It’s why people struggle to see men as potential victims of sexual abuse or domestic violence at the hands of women, regardless of the evidence.

There’s a vast amount of evidence on the abuse of men by women, it grows with each passing year, yet it continues to have no impact whatsoever on government policies. In relation to domestic violence, there is virtually no provision of state support for male victims, nor provision of treatment for female perpetrators. The justice system has virtually no interest in pursuing cases of women’s sexual abuses of men – nor of children, for that matter.

Alison Tieman, a Canadian men’s human rights advocate – a Honey Badger – produced an illuminating video on the theme of men being ‘actors’ and women being ‘acted upon’ – here. I met Alison during the AVfM Detroit conference on men’s issues and found her delightful, as were all the Honey Badgers. I look forward to this year’s conference, details of which will be released shortly, I understand.