Our thanks to Mike P for this, an interesting piece by Martin Daubney in yesterday’s Telegraph. An extract:

Having trained as a criminologist and counsellor and worked on front-line services with troubled men for over 20 years, Shaljean says her immersive and compassionate approach led to an awakening. “I’d worked a lot in anger management and change and started to piece together the affects of absent fathers when I was working across the domestic abuse, probation, homeless and addiction sectors. I started to ask: ‘Why are they like that?’ I saw the common thread of absent dads.

“The facts are startling: 1.1 million young people are growing up with little or no access to fathers. These men have less empathy and are more likely to go on and offend: 76pc of our prison population had an absent father. Some 84pc of the homeless population are men. Three quarters of suicides are men. If these statistics were reversed [applied to women], we would be out on the streets of Westminster picketing now. But we’re not.

“So as a mother of three boys, I decided to start Lads Need Dads”.