Our thanks to Mike P for this. Any father who’d committed the violent crimes Nasreen Knight did would be considered a danger to his children, and probably never see them again. Magically, because vagina, the children are the key to Knight’s early release. The start of the piece:
A millionaire city trader who attacked her husband with a knife after he had an affair has been freed on appeal by top judges – so she can be with her children after just three months in prison.
Nasreen Alexandra Knight, 37, cut Julian Knight’s hand with a blade, broke his glasses, repeatedly punched him and rammed her car into his after finding out he was having a relationship with her former friend, Erika Hillyer.
Mother-of four-Knight also threatened to kill her husband’s new partner, who was forced to hide after Knight turned up drunk at her ex’s £1million farm house in Hough on the Hill, Lincolnshire, and hunted around the property for her love rival with a knife.
She also punched Ms Hillyer and tore out clumps of her hair before she was arrested.
The narrative that fathers should “step up to the plate” is an outrageous one, given how many fathers are denied access to their children by malicious ex-partners in league with the corrupt family court system. So when the narrative comes from Mr Justice McFarlane, who will replace Sir James Munby as president of the family division in the High Court next month, the outrage is doubled.
A piece by Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson (why do male journalists so rarely cover such family issues?) in today’s Times:
Fathers must be encouraged to “step up to the plate” and play a more active role in their children’s lives after warnings that boys are joining gangs to find male role models, according to Britain’s new top family judge.
Mr Justice McFarlane, who will take over as president of the family division of the High Court next month, said it was important for children to have a relationship with both parents even if they were separated.
“The role of fathers in families is important,” he told The Times. “A decent role model and two parents can be important positive influences. We need to make sure, where possible, that the child has a decent relationship with both parents.”
Asked whether absent fathers could be a factor in the rise of gang culture, he said it was important for all fathers to play a role in their children’s lives. “There is always a father and children need to connect with them. It’s even harder when there may be three fathers for a mother’s three children. It’s quite difficult for the fathers to come in, but they might have something to offer.”
Although he stressed that he was not an expert on gangs, he said: “Fathers are just as important as mothers, if you are a child, genetically and in terms of your identity; they are 50 per cent of you, they are another pair of hands, another brain, another option. They may be more able at a certain time to help the child. It’s a matter of encouraging them to step up to the plate.”
Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is among those who have suggested that the absence of a father is a factor driving some boys into gangs.
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said that boys needed role models and that “in the absence of a father, young men can draw their masculine identity from their peers”. The former minister, who conducted a review of the treatment of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system, said that higher paternal absence in some black communities made boys vulnerable. He blamed “colonial slave pathologies” going back hundreds of years.
“There’s a phenomenon in Caribbean communities called baby father — that way of describing your husband comes right back to slavery. It’s basically that he doesn’t own his child, because he could be shipped around. Those issues ricochet down generations, they exist in African-American communities, Caribbean communities and they play out in this country. That’s not an excuse for not parenting your child, or stabbing an individual, but they are important pathologies in families.”
Mr Justice McFarlane said that there was a “crisis of numbers” in the courts as a result of the growing number of children taken into care. “After Baby P, a colleague said it was a tsunami but it wasn’t — the water level has risen,” he added.
Adoptions, however, have fallen by about 20 per cent since a ruling by Sir James Munby, the outgoing president of the family division, that social services must provide “proper evidence” that all alternatives had been considered.
Mr Justice McFarlane said that he supported Sir James’s ruling but insisted it “wasn’t intended to make adoptions go up or down. It was meant to set out for the judges the process of analysis they had to go through.”
The courts should not determine a “correct” number of children being adopted, he added. “We don’t want a particular number of adoptions, high or low; we want the right outcome in the particular case.”
Sir James has called for a reform of divorce law to end blame between couples and the “hypocrisy” of the system. Mr Justice McFarlane said of no-fault divorce: “I am not going to be drawn on that save to say you won’t find a single family judge that is against it.”
The law is evolving, he said, pointing to surrogacy, which is controversial because the woman giving birth is treated as the legal mother and has the right to keep the child. “The law has to provide a structure and solutions for family life. Our understanding of family life has changed radically.”
A piece in today’s Times by Kat Lay, Health Correspondent. It’s stated in the article that surveys suggest women spend an average of £156 a year (£3 per week) on sanitary products. It follows that the cost of sanitary products of ALL women – rich, poor, those in between – should be paid for by taxpayers, mainly men.
Doctors have adopted gender-neutral language to argue that sanitary products should be handed out free to all “menstruating people”. [J4MB: Hmm. If only there was an English word to describe “menstruating people”.]
The British Medical Association will begin lobbying the government “to implement the free provision of sanitary products” after delegates at its annual conference in Brighton voted overwhelmingly for the proposal.
“While largely experienced by women, period poverty is also an issue in the lives of transgender and non-binary people,” Eleanor Wilson, the medical student who proposed the motion, said. She was explaining that her speech would be gender neutral.
It comes a week after Cancer Research UK dropped the word “woman” from its cervical screening campaign. It instead urged “everyone aged 25-64 with a cervix” to go for their smear test. Critics accused the charity of putting identity politics above public health, warning that not everyone was familiar with the term cervix.
The motion said: “Reliable access to sanitary products is essential for the health and wellbeing of the menstruating population.” However, it noted, “the current system for distribution can leave those most vulnerable with no option other than to go without”.
Campaigners say that homeless women and domestic abuse victims may be unable to find the money they need to buy sanitary products. Surveys suggest that women spend £156 a year on average on the products.
Ms Wilson said that the move would “make the statement that access to sanitary products is a basic human right”.
A piece in today’s Times by Richard Ford, Home Correspondent:
Two new jails are to be built, the prisons minister announced yesterday as he said that the government would come under pressure from longer and “more brutal” sentences.
Rory Stewart said that the Ministry of Justice was planning for the prison population to rise by about 10,000 to 93,000. Officials were working to a “worst-case scenario” because sentences were longer, offenders more prolific and, over the next 15 years, victims of crime were likely to demand tougher sentences for burglary and causing death by dangerous or careless driving.
He said that he would like to significantly reduce “if not eliminate” sentences of 12 months or less, but admitted that this may not apply to violent and sexual offenders. There is no legislative slot to introduce such a change.
David Gauke, the justice secretary, has urged judges to use sentences of under a year only as a last resort.
The two new prisons will be built on the sites of those that have closed at Glen Parva in Leicestershire and Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. They are part of the government’s £1.3 billion scheme to create up to 10,000 more prison places and Mr Stewart said that another four jails would be built in years to come. The jails, along with a block in the grounds of Stocken prison in Rutland, will provide 3,500 spaces.
Companies will be invited to bid to build and run the Glen Parva prison while Wellingborough will be built by the public sector but run by the private sector, the justice ministry said.
Mr Stewart told MPs on the Commons justice select committee that he hoped construction at Wellingborough would start by early next year.
Earlier he had told MPs that the prison service believed the recent fall in the inmate population, to its lowest level in eight years, was likely to be reversed because of longer sentences and more prolific offenders.
The public’s increasing suspicion of “perceived elites” would fuel demands for longer and “more brutal sentences”, he said. “That will express itself in more and more focus on victims. We can see this already in people coming forward all the time with more legislation. Probably the most dramatic example is going to be around sentences for people killed in car accidents, death by dangerous driving, death by careless driving.”
If someone is convicted of causing death by dangerous driving, the law does not consider that they killed with intent. However, last year ministers announced that the maximum sentence would be increased to life to reflect the seriousness of the crime.
“We are moving to a situation where victims are increasingly saying ‘If you kill someone, that feels to the victim like murder’, ” Mr Stewart said. “There will be a groundswell probably between now and 2030 for people saying ‘domestic burglary is an absolute taboo, we don’t tolerate domestic burglary’ and people are going to push for longer sentences on this.”
• Hundreds of female offenders will avoid jail under plans published today to cut the number of women in prison. David Gauke, the justice secretary, wants more female offenders to be given community sentences in place of jail terms of less than 12 months. As a test, five residential centres will be set up in which women at risk of a short prison sentence can live while they are rehabilitated. About 3,800 women are in prison in England and Wales.
Our thanks to Douglas for this. The idiotic response from Baroness Williams of Trafford, a Conservative life peer:
The Government has no current plans to appoint a Minister for Men and Boys. The fact that we have Ministers for Women but no Minister for Men does not reduce our commitment to ensuring equality for everyone. It simply acknowledges that, even in 2018, the UK has not yet reached full gender equality and that we need to deal with some very specific and deep-rooted problems.
We are and will remain committed to ensuring gender equality works for men and boys, as well as for women and girls.
British officials discriminated against a transgender woman who was refused the female state pension because she wished to remain married “in the sight of God”, judges ruled today.
The ruling from the European Court of Justice, which potentially affects dozens of other trans women, follows a Supreme Court hearing in 2016 on a case brought by MB, then 68, who had transitioned from male to female but chose as a Christian to stay married. That decision blocked her entitlement to a state pension when she reached 60.
Under the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, trans people acquire the right to change their gender formally by obtaining a full “gender recognition certificate”. However, a certificate could not be issued to a married person who did not have their heterosexual marriage annulled.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (European Court of Justice) in Luxembourg ruled that a person who has changed gender cannot be required to annul their marriage in order to receive a retirement pension at the relevant age of their acquired sex.
MB, who married in 1974, began to live as a woman in 1991 and underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1995 but did not apply for a gender recognition certificate.
She says that she preferred to stay married to her wife and the mother of their two children “in the sight of God”.
When she reached her 60th birthday in May 2008 — having lived as a woman since 1991 and undergone gender reassignment surgery in 1995 — MB applied for a state pension but was refused on the basis that she was legally still a man and should therefore wait for the male pension at 65.
MB lost her case at the Court of Appeal in 2014, when judges upheld a decision by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to refuse her a female pension on the basis that she remained legally a man. She then appealed to the Supreme Court, which referred the case to Europe for guidance.
The lawyers who acted for MB pro bono, Jacqueline Mulryne of Arnold & Porter and Chris Stothers of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, said: “We are delighted with today’s judgment, which vindicates our client’s determination to challenge the unlawful and discriminatory decision of the UK government to refuse to recognise her change of gender or to pay her state pension.
“After almost a decade, MB will finally be paid her pension and recognised as a woman by the government. This is a small decision but it has great importance in the move towards increased equality and respect.
“The court rightly recognised that the DWP’s treatment of our client, in requiring annulment of her marriage before recognising her gender and paying her pension, was directly discriminatory and could not be distinguished by the desire to avoid same-sex marriage.”
“The case now returns to the Supreme Court to apply the ruling, although we are hopeful that the DWP will apply the ruling and recognise our client’s gender without any further delay.”
Lord Pannick QC, who acted for MB, said that he was delighted for her, adding that “the judgment is of importance in emphasising that less favourable treatment of those who have undergone gender reassignment will be treated by courts as a form of direct sex discrimination”.
The case went to Europe after MB asked the Supreme Court in London to overturn the Court of Appeal decision. The justices, Baroness Hale, with Lords Wilson, Sumption, Toulson and Hodge, were divided and referred the issue to the Court of Justice of the European Union for guidance.
Under the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013, which came into full force in December 2014, a full gender-recognition certificate can be obtained without a marriage having to be annulled, providing that the applicant’s spouse consents. The provisions are not retrospective, however, which is why MB was denied a pension from the age of 60.
Michaela Strachan has told The Mirror that Chris Packham’s pay check is “none of my business” but that she “wouldn’t be upset” if he was paid more because “you cannot pay for his knowledge”. Good on her, I bet it’s pleasant and liberating to be free from petty, deluded and bitter feminist grievances!
A piece in today’s Times. Written by two female journalists, the article fails to mention that most of the children on drugs such as Ritalin are boys.
The use of Ritalin and other “smart drugs” has more than doubled in the past ten years, prompting the chief inspector of schools to warn that parents are trying to medicate away children’s bad behaviour.
Almost 1.5 million prescriptions for the drugs — used to tackle attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and to boost concentration — were dispensed by the NHS last year compared with fewer than 700,000 a decade earlier. The treatments are often referred to as chemical coshes.
Amanda Spielman, the head of Ofsted, said it was implausible that so many more young people were suffering from the attention disorder and needed medication to control their symptoms. “The fact that it seems to have become the norm for a whole swathe of the social structure to medicate as a response to behavioural problems feels like a very big warning signal,” she told The Times.
“If there’s that many behavioural problems, what is it telling us about what ought to be preventable? Is it located in the family? Is it located in the education or the peer group? You don’t just want to try to block out the symptoms, you want to say, is there something that can be solved?”
Other experts, including the child psychiatrist Mike Shooter, say that some parents seek a diagnosis because it reassures them that they are doing all they can to help their children. “It helps reduce the stigma of their child’s behaviour among family, friends and teachers,” he said. He called the diagnosis of attention disorder “very overdone”.
However, a mother from south London whose son was prescribed Ritalin at 11 said that it made school bearable. “Ritalin is not a silver bullet,” she said. “It did not solve all his problems, but after years of struggling at school it really helped. He could not sit still in the classroom and used to run out of the room. It really helped with those basic things. He would go on and off it . . . but when he was off, it was very reassuring to know it was there.”
There are fears that some middle-class parents exaggerate their children’s symptoms to get the drugs because they improve concentration, and their use often results in children getting 25 per cent more time to sit GCSEs and A levels. Ms Spielman said that pupils should not be taking medication to improve exam performance. “These are not exams designed for an Übermensch [superhuman] generation,” she said.
Medication may moderate behaviour, but some children taking it might simply need more attention at home, she suggested. She had been shocked by the “astonishingly high” number of children on medication in one Ofsted focus group in a deprived part of Essex. She emphasised, however, that the problem was not limited to the underprivileged.
Her comments come on the second day of The Times’s investigative series on Britain’s Lost Children, which has uncovered high levels of gang membership among youngsters. Youth workers say that young people in gangs are combining drugs such as Ritalin with cannabis — a combination that some fear could be fuelling knife crime.
The surge in prescriptions to treat the attention disorder in Britain mirrors the situation in the United States, where there was an 83 per cent rise in sales of the drug between 2006 and 2010.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) estimates that about 500,000 schoolchildren — 5 per cent — have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with greater prevalence of the condition among looked-after children and those known to the Youth Justice Boards. It says that medication should be used as a last resort because of the risk of sleeplessness, weight loss and headaches.
Tony Lloyd, chief executive of the ADHD Foundation, said that it remained an undiagnosed problem but added: “ADHD medication helps children in terms of cognitive function — it does not teach morals, conscience, values or citizenship. There’s a real need for parents to understand what their responsibilities are.”
Justice for Men & Boys 