We invite you to vote however you deem appropriate in the online poll in an article in the Metro. A tip of the hat to those people (including Belinda Brown) who’ve publicised the poll.
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Our thanks to John for pointing us to this.
In August HEqual captured a tweet from Jane Garvey – here – in which she expressed amusement at an insulting description of Philip Davies for the talk about anti-male sexism in the justice system, which he gave at the second International Conference on Men’s Issues.
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We submitted a report to the Health Committee inquiry on suicide prevention – here – showing that the key driver of male suicide is the state, through its actions and inactions. We requested the opportunity to give oral evidence to the committee, a request which was denied.
The committee’s 28-page interim report has just been published – here. From the ‘Introduction and Summary’ (p.3):
1. The scale of the avoidable loss of life from suicide is unacceptable. 4820 people are recorded as having died by suicide in England in 2015 but the true figure is likely to be higher. The 2014 suicide rate in England (10.3 deaths per 100,000) was the highest seen since 2004, and the 2015 rate was only marginally lower at 10.1. Suicide disproportionately affects men, accounting for around three quarters of all suicides, but rates are rising in women. It remains the biggest killer of men under 49, [our emphasis] and the leading cause of death in people aged 15–24.
2. Suicide is now the leading cause of death directly related to pregnancy in the year after mothers give birth – the latest Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths, published this month, reveals that between 2009 and 2014 111 women in the UK died by suicide during or up to a year after pregnancy. There are also rising levels of suicides in prisons and particular concerns about the risks following release from prison. [our emphasis]
The conflation in one paragraph of 50 words concerning suicides related to pregnancy in the space of six years (2009-14), and 19 words concerning suicides in prison – overwhelmingly men – is bizarre, even more so when you know the latter suicides are far more common… but comparative numbers aren’t provided here.
111 suicides of women ‘related to pregnancy’ in the course of six years equate to about 18.5 per year. What is the figure for suicides in prison? For this you need to click on the link to a report by the Howard League for Penal Reform. From the Background (p.2):
The prison population of England and Wales was 85,242 in January 2016 (Howard League, 2016). In 2014 there was a marked increase in suicides in English and Welsh prisons, when 89 prisoners took their own lives. This was the highest number of suicides since 2007. In 2015 another 89 prisoners took their own lives (Howard League, 2016).
The number of suicides in prisons has remained high for two years, and by the end of March 2016 there had already been 27 self inflicted deaths in our prisons (MoJ, 2016). Additionally rates of both self-harm and assaults have risen (Ministry of Justice, 2015).
The bottom line? Suicides of (overwhelmingly male) prisoners account for about five times as many deaths every year, as of women in the year after their pregnancies. Why, then, do we find more coverage of the latter phenomenon in the Health Committee report, along with numbers, followed by little coverage of the former, and no numbers? The committee is more concerned over female suicide than male suicide, that’s why. And that in a society that is meant to be ‘equal’.
You will search in vain for recognition in the report that more men than women commit suicide because of differentials in highly stressful life events caused by the state’s actions and inactions e.g. denial of access to children following family breakdowns, a lack of support for male victims of domestic violence, homelessness… and so much more. Much of the report’s language is couched in mental health terms, and for men we get the predictable victim blaming and subtle allusions to ‘toxic masculinity’, including this example (p.8):
14. We should embrace innovative approaches that reach out to those in distress in order to offer an alternative before an avoidable loss of life to suicide. Supporting this group of people who are vulnerable to suicide involves tackling the stigma that persists – particularly for men [my emphasis] – in talking about emotional health…
From p.6 of the report:
8. The clear message given to us by stakeholder groups is a simple one—implementation of the Government’s 2012 suicide prevention strategy has been characterized by inadequate leadership, poor accountability, and insufficient action. Over the past four years, there has been a failure to translate the suicide prevention strategy into actual improvements.
From p.16, ‘Conclusions and recommendations’:
1. The refreshed suicide prevention strategy must be underpinned by a clear implementation strategy, with strong national leadership, clear accountability, and regular and transparent external scrutiny.
The government clearly took no notice of the 2012 suicide prevention strategy, why should it take any notice of the next one? From the same page:
3. Our evidence suggests that there are three distinct groups of people at risk from suicide, and different approaches are needed for each:
The most obvious ‘distinct group’ – men – is not deemed worthy of mention.
This report is, as we predicted, a whitewash. It doesn’t move on from the plain facts – suicide is a highly gendered problem, affecting mainly men – to considering how to reduce the male suicide rate.
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Sarah Wollaston (C, Totnes), the chair of the committee, and her colleagues (7 of the 10 are women) simply don’t care enough about men killing themselves in large numbers, to do anything about this long-running tragedy.
If the situation were reversed, and three-quarters of suicide victims were women, Sarah Wollaston and her colleagues would care greatly, and the state would invest enormous resources to bring down the female suicide rate.
One welcome consequence of our articles on genital mutilators, and those of A Voice of Men, is that links to them appear high on Google searches. Anyone doing a search of ‘Dr Joseph Spitzer’ will find this high on the first page.
The phenomenon persists for a considerable time. In March 2016 we protested outside the Thornhill Clinic in Luton, the leading private MGM clinic in the UK. It remains the largest ever anti-MGM protest in the UK, a video (9:19) is here. On the first page of a Google search today you’ll find two pieces dating back to January 2016, Gary Costanza’s piece for AVfM about Dr Murtaza Khanbhai (who still works at the clinic) being placed on the Known Genital Mutilators directory – here – while our link to their piece is here.
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If everyone who read this gave us just £1 – or even better, £1 monthly – we could change the world. Click here to make a difference. Thanks.
On 2 November we emailed a letter including a FOI request to the Home Office, the department with responsibility for the police. The FOI request:
1. Do you accept that MGM is illegal in the UK? If not, what makes it legal?
2. If you accept MGM is illegal, why are the police not bringing prosecutions?
The Home Office response ended with the following ‘kick into the long grass’:
The Department of Health leads on the issue of male circumcision. Your letter has been transferred there for an official reply.
We sent a follow-up FOI request to the Home Office, and a few days ago we received a letter from a woman at the Department of Health. It begged more questions than it answered, so we’re about to send her department a letter with five new FOI requests, details here. The document consists of:
– the letter with the new FOI requests
– a detailed critique of the woman’s letter
– our original letter and FOI request sent to the Home Office
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Our thanks to Gary Costanza at AVfM for this.
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An interesting piece in the Guardian, which I’m posting to share a short extract (1:58) from Philip Davies’s 70+ minute speech. The piece includes five paragraphs of his comments, more than you’d expect from the paper.
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We applaud Philip Davies’s efforts today to stop the bill ratifying the ideologically-motivated Istanbul Convention. A short BBC piece is here. The first paragraph alone justifies Davies’s efforts:
Conservative MP Philip Davies says he disagrees with the “fundamental premise” of a bill urging the government to ratify an international agreement on combating violence against women, because it does not mention violence against men at all. [our emphasis]
The end of the piece:
The bill on ratifying the 2012 Istanbul Convention, put forward by the SNP’s Eilidh Whiteford, later passed its first parliamentary hurdle by 135 votes to two.
Ministers said they supported the bill but would seek to amend elements of it later during its parliamentary passage.
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A tip of the hat to Martin Daubney for this.
In November 2015 Daubney interviewed Davies for the Telegraph, an interesting piece. If only the paper published more pieces like it, rather than the stream of feminist-compliant propaganda pieces it does.
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Justice for Men & Boys 