So what do you expect if you have something called an ‘Equality Minister’? She will impose gross injustice wherever she can in the interests of a coercive and preposterous ideology. Harriet Harman’s proposal that companies should positively discriminate in favour of women job candidates (ie discriminate against men) is yet another example of the way in which feminism got hijacked and turned from a campaign for fairness for women into an onslaught against men. Her proposal is not only totally unfair — job candidates should be appointed on grounds of merit, not chromosomes – but is based on the false premise that the gender pay gap proves that women are the victims of systematic discrimination in the workplace.

But this is simply untrue. Granted that there are indeed specific instances of discrimination against women, the generalised claim is false because it ignores the differences in behaviour between women and men at work. As academics such as Professor Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics have long argued, such iconic feminist causes as the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘gender pay gap’ are in very large measure the outcome of the choices made by women themselves.

Of course there are exceptions, but in general women have very different expectations from men about work. That’s because many women have another set of competing priorities – child rearing. As a result, they tend to want to work part-time. Even those who work full-time tend not to put in the same hours of overtime and so forth that men do because they are less interested in getting to the top of their profession — mainly because unlike men they don’t usually define themselves through work and have less interest in power and status and all those guy things. All these factors mean that even if they are doing the same jobs as men they are not doing it in the same way. So why should they expect to be paid the same?

In fact, women are not exactly going to the barricades over this issue. It’s only Harriet Harperson and the sisterhood who are agitating about this because it’s all part of their anti-man agenda. It’s an economic variation on what they did to rape law, whereby they forced through changes which loaded the legal dice against male defendants in rape cases because the conviction rate in such cases was said to be ‘too low’. But that presupposes that the men in such cases are all guilty and their female accusers never tell a lie – two propositions which have been proved over and over again to be wrong, quite apart from ditching the presumption of innocence which helps define a free society. Nevertheless the law was changed and pressure continues to be applied to make even more changes to get the rape conviction rate up. Because whether in the workplace or the bedroom, as we know, all men are guilty of the oppression of women.

It is a great mistake to write off Harriet Harman, as many do, on grounds of demonstrable stupidity. She is one of this administration’s great survivors. One of the reasons she has survived has been her ruthless use of the woman card against men who haven’t got the cojones to stand up against this gender bullying. Let’s hope that this time, with the business world up in arms, her latest wheeze is dismissed with the contumely it deserves.

This morning we see in the press yet one more plank in the Government’s campaign to vilify and demoralise boys. Psychologist Linda Papadopolous published her report on the sexualisation of youngsters. Commissioned by the Home office, the report finds what everyone already knows, that children are exposed to inappropriate sexual images. The sub-text to the report, however, is that girls are victims of sexual abuse and boys are to blame.

The facts of domestic abuse are studiously ignored as this band-wagon rolls on. The British Crime survey shows that young men, rather than young women, are the group most likely to experience domestic abuse. The recent NSPCC survey, published as part of this same campaign, concluded that while 25% of girls experienced violence in relationships, so did 18% of boys.

While the evidence points to domestic violence and domestic abuse being something which impacts on boys and girls in approximately equal numbers, all of the attention is given to girls as victims and boys as abusers. This is not true academic reporting, and the likes of NSPCC and Linda Papadopolous should be ashamed of their part in it. The fact that they were paid out of a programme called “violence against women and girls” gives a clue to the findings they were expected to come up with, and they dutifully wrote what the pay-master wanted. They would, after all, hope to get more work from this source, wouldn’t they?

The simple fact is that this campaign is nothing more than propapaganda, driven by a feminist core within Government, and it is crushing and oppressing the spirit of our young men and boys.

A British Airways Policy which presupposes that only men are paedophiles. Don’t they read the papers?

Hear the interview

It is boys rather than girls who are disadvantaged these days in schooling. They are the ones who need encouragement, so why visit a single-sex school, and why make it girls rather than boys?

Teaching styles are increasingly geared towards the way girls learn, boys are excluded from school in increasing numbers for stepping out of line; should we be surprised if they feel second class in our school system, and de-motivated, and might they see Ms Obama’s visit and her words as one more slap in the face to them. Did she reflect on the impact this visit might have on boys who see it in newspapers or on TV?

Giving advantage to women and girls is no longer about creating equality by raising them to a level playing field. The pendulum has swung the other way, but we have a generation of professional women who are programmed to see females as disadvantaged victims, and are unable to see them in any other light.

I met my wife-to-be about thirteen years ago. Straightaway she seemed very clingy and constantly required reassurance that I loved her, but I wasn’t too worried by this as she’d had a difficult childhood with parents who didn’t seem to care that much about her.

We were married a year after we met. It was then that the real problems started, her personality seemed to change overnight. Instead of becoming more secure and less needy – as I’d hoped she would – she became obsessively jealous and had to control everything I did.

It was about two weeks after we were married that she first hit me. It seems stupid now, but I can’t really remember what she hit me for. Perhaps I was being slow or didn’t do something the way she wanted, I don’t know.

After that it became more and more frequent, most days she would find a ‘reason’ to hit me (although I can’t really call it a reason as I often hardly knew what she shouting about). She would shout and curse at me for ages, calling me stupid and threatening to leave me. At the same time, she would threaten to kill herself if I left her!

Usually she’d hit and kick me on my arms, chest and legs, I only ever got a bruise that showed on my face once or twice.

I felt very ashamed that she was treating me this way, I knew that I should leave the relationship but couldn’t bring myself to confront her. Somehow, I think the control she had over me made it very hard for me to do things I knew she’d disapprove of. I don’t really understand it even now.

I never told anyone what went on, and certainly never told my friends, I used to just pretend that things were OK.

After about a year of this she said she wanted to have a baby. Alarm bells started ringing in my head – I knew this wasn’t right but somehow couldn’t tell her. She changed her behaviour and began to treat me like she had when we first met.

Hoping things were getting better, and afraid to refuse, I agreed. Our daughter, Sharon, was born two years after we were married.

But as soon as Sharon was born the violence restarted worse than ever. I used to just ‘switch off’ into my own world when she was raging at me, it was the only way I could cope. She was jealous of her daughter – sometimes I’d be changing a nappy and she would just hit me and demand attention for herself. I simply concentrated on getting through each day and caring for Sharon.

After two more years I just couldn’t take this any longer. I didn’t want Sharon to be raised in this environment and somehow told my wife I wanted a divorce.

All hell broke loose. She threatened to tell the Police I’d raped her if I didn’t do what she wanted. At last I finally got the courage to escape, leaving everything.

I was distraught to be leaving Sharon, but it was the only way I could think to give her a ‘normal’(non-violent) life. After that, my wife only allowed me to see Sharon for a few hours a week, and when she found a new boyfriend a year later, she just stopped all contact.

I went to the courts to get access, but my wife just lied and said I’d been violent to her so the courts denied any contact. It’s very hard to deal with my ex-wife, I’m so traumatised, every time I deal with her I start to cry and shake.

I tried again in court a few years later, it was an uphill struggle all the way. Sharon was too frightened of her mum to tell the social worker that she wanted to spend more time with me. She doesn’t like her step-dad and has run away from home twice, coming straight to me.

I’m now seeing her every other weekend, she’s 10 now, and can’t wait until she’s 12 so she can get her wishes listened to. The time we spend together is like a sanctuary for us both.

My solicitor tells me that if the domestic violence were the other way around – with me hitting my wife – I would probably never see my daughter again. But violence from the mother is ignored by the courts. I suppose it just doesn’t fit their simplistic ideas about domestic violence in the home and women always being the victim.

Although her mother hasn’t been physically violent towards Sharon, I’m always there for her and remain vigilant in case it starts. Hopefully we can get through the next years without major problems, until Sharon can make choices for herself.

I don’t want Sharon to hate her mother. She loves her mum, but knows only too well what she’s like. She wants to live with me and still see a lot of her mum. Not too difficult surely?

Nobody – of either sex – should have to put up with domestic violence in a relationship. If the system weren’t so gender biased, I’m sure Sharon would be much safer now and I wouldn’t feel like we are both still being abused every day.

I’m just looking forward to the time when Sharon can make her own choices.

(Identifying features have been changed to protect the individuals involved).

But the one I’d like to draw your attention to today is a real gap, revealing a very big difference between the genders in the UK. One I will call the suicide gap.

It is not widely known that about three times as many men as women commit suicide each year in the UK. This ratio has changed slightly throughout recent years but occurs across all age groups about equally. The peak difference is the 30-39 age group where there are 4 male suicides to each female.

For example, in 2005 3,223 men and 1,113 women committed suicide in England & Wales. (Mind Factsheet http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Factsheets/Statistics/Statistics+2.htm)

Our current survey into family law suggests that being denied a relationship with your children is a major risk factor in suicide. Disturbingly, 36% of survey respondents who are applying for contact with their children in the family courts report suicidal thoughts and a surprising 7% say they actually attempted suicide.

Figures for attempted suicide for the population at large are hard to come by, but the best estimate I could find puts it at about 0.1% of the population. This means a parent denied access to their children could be about seventy times as likely to attempt suicide as the general population!

This does seem supported by anecdotal reports which often attribute two male suicides a week to loss of their children after divorce or separation. In fact, (in light of our survey results) this strikes me as likely being very likely a serious under-estimate.

We can only guess how many of these suicides every year are attributable to family law issues, but we do know that far more men than women are denied contact with their children with 95% of contact applications in the courts being made by men.

Perhaps this simple fact accounts for most of the suicide gap?

“The passing of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill this week raised quite a few concerns for me, not least the further downgrading of the role of the father in families and society today”.

Why should it concern me? I am after all a woman, a single parent, and if I were to really look at the description of terms, a liberal feminist, since I believe that men and women should be considered equal in terms of law and society. So I should be jumping for joy. But I’m not. In fact what I am, is very worried about our children and the state of our society.

Recently Mr Justice Coleridge stated that “We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps.” And that judges are witnessing a “never-ending carnival” of human misery, and almost all of society’s social ills can be traced back to the collapse in family stability.

Our family law system is a shambles, claiming to have the ?best interests of the child’ at its heart when in reality it has successfully aided resident parents with their own desires placed at the forefront, and greedy lawyers with huge amounts of money guiding their lack of principles, to legally destroy the lives of millions of children in our country, and leave them not only without one of their parents in their lives but also lacking half of their entire family and identity.

Undeniably some changes in family law were most definitely necessary. After all the traditional system long discriminated against women and gave them no rights to their person, property or children. The balance needed redressing, but no-one should be more equal than others under the law and that is just what our family law system delivers in reality and why the balance needs to be redressed again. It is necessary because our children are suffering and dying as a result of many of its shoddy secretive practices with a winner takes all ideology which causes harm to our children and certainly can not be deemed as being in the best interests of the child

A myriad of research now highlights the fact that children brought up without the influence of both of their parents in their lives are more likely to commit suicide or self harm and suffer from depression or other mental health problems. They are also at much greater risk of taking drugs, behaving antisocially, committing crime, ending up in prison and of underachieving in school and leaving school with no qualifications.

Added to this a new study by researchers at Rochester Medical Centre, New York, surveyed 1,619 children and found that children who have been separated at any point from one of their parents scored significantly worse both on their ability to learn new tasks and their pre-literacy skills. The study, carried out by paediatricians in the U.S., held that children of divorced or separated parents are “at increased risk of learning difficulties”.

This new research, and numerous pieces of old research studying thousands of children brought up in single parent households and those brought up by both a mother and a father, brings into question why our family courts so often use the ?best interest of the child principle’ to reduce the number of parents in a child’s life to one when clearly being parented by two parents enhances their well-being and is ultimately much better for their long term welfare and best interests and society’s best interests too.

A recent report from UNICEF placed the UK bottom of the league of 21 industrialised nations for child well-being and deemed our children to be the unhappiest in Europe, this raises further concerns as to the welfare of our children and we need only to look at our government and its policy on the family to see why.

As a previous Labour voter it distresses me to need to criticise a Labour government, but the evidence of a decaying society where children are confused, unhappy and sometimes out of control and where young people and adults alike fear for their lives as a result leads me to that criticism. It is time to stop the rot and to heal our children and families and thereby improve the lives of us all. Government policy on families will not do that, but then many politicians don’t want it to and so have embarked on a catastrophic crusade to demonise fathers and remove them not only from the lives of their children but from having a beneficial role in society too.

And it’s no wonder they pursue that policy at our peril, after all Harriet Harman, Labour Deputy Leader as well as Minister for Women, yesterday declared in an interview that marriage was ‘irrelevant’ to public policy and described high rates of separation as a ‘positive development’, as it reflected ‘greater choice’ for couples – well what about the children?

Further to this, in 1990 Harriet Harman co-authored a report with Patricia Hewitt and Anne Coote entitled “The Family Way” which criticised the family unit and mothers who stay at home and questioned whether men were an asset to families at all and whether “the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion”

Added to this attack on men as members of a family, we have Ms Harman and Margaret Hodge, ex Minister for Children and, according to her list of responsibilities on her UK Parliament biography, Human Right’s Champion, involved in the wrongful removal of hundreds of children from their families aided by the secretive processes of the family court system. Incidentally, as Labour Leader of Islington Council, Ms Hodge was also accused of turning a blind-eye to child sex abuse allegations of children in care in the borough, so I for one worried when Tony Blair put her in charge of even more children’s lives.

With such pedigrees from our Labour MP’s can we really feel certain that our government truly has the welfare of our children at its heart especially since the path has long been set towards the destruction of traditional family life?

That is just one of the questions I asked myself when I looked at the Human Embryo and Fertilisation Bill, a Bill which, in my view, clearly proposes to eliminate the need for a father. The Government does argue that research evidence shows that it is the quality of parenting that counts, rather than gender of the parents, unfortunately the study quoted as research for this Bill looked at only a small group of 70 children to support its view and even then the study only followed the children until they were two so showed no evidence on the long term outcomes for those children. They then totally ignored the evidence of numerous other pieces of research showing that the opposite was in fact true.

One facet of the Bill which enshrines in Law the fact that IVF can be used to create a child without the need for a father to be a part of the relationship may on the surface seem only fair to same sex couples who wish to parent a child, and I personally would not take issue with that, and indeed know many same sex couples who would make excellent parents should they have that opportunity, but my concerns centre on the fact that the next logical step in the process of the removal of the need for a father in IVF would be to remove the word ?Father’ from birth certificates and then perhaps even ?Mother’ and to replace them with terms such as “birthing parent” and “supporting parent”.

Similar moves are currently already being considered in Australia where a controversial new Bill is being debated that will in-fact remove the word ?father’ from birth certificates. The Bill will basically give the lesbian partner of a woman who has a child after becoming pregnant by a fertilisation procedure, the legal position of a married woman’s husband. The terms “birth mother” would replace “mother” and “both parents” would replace “the father and the mother” on birth certificates. Some MPs are apparently concerned that the role of fatherhood would be undermined by the bill and I would share that concern.

With the fact that the removal of the need for a father in IVF cases has now been enshrined in law, the term supporting parent, or something of its ilk will appear via the backdoor route of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill since the political correctness of the 21st century could not possibly discriminate against the minority of ?supporting same sex partners’ by allowing the term father to remain on a birth certificate, it just wouldn’t be fair would it?

Well neither is the current family law system which allows a child to be denied the right to be parented by two parents. It could be argued, and probably will be, that the removal of the need for a father prior to conception from the IVF rules will aid the removal of the best interest of the child principle as being the standard in child custody and contact cases since, if a father is not necessary before birth why should it be necessary after separation?

As for the child and the damage that the loss of a father from their life does to them, well Ms Harman obviously doesn’t care about that, since she, and her feminist cronies and emasculated male colleagues want to put the rights of the woman far beyond the needs, rights and desires of the child with no consideration of the rights, duties or responsibility of both parents towards their children or society.

Strange thing for a woman to say perhaps, especially as I have already stated that I am a single parent, (and in my opinion I’m quite a good one), and I do not hold the view that people should remain in unhappy marriages just because society dictates it or they have no other choice, I have never even been married so it would be hypocritical of me to argue that way. However, I do hold the view that, unless there is a legally proven good reason why it should not be the case, a child should be parented by two parents, whether they live together or not, or get on or not. I know that is not always an easy course to take since I have done it myself without recourse to law, lawyers, residency or anything else of a legal ilk. Perhaps the fact that I was the child of divorced parents and experienced the unhappiness of that situation helped me to put my children’s needs ahead of my own in the shared parenting stakes, it certainly helped my resolve when the going got tough because I knew the alternative would be worse for my children.

I believe strongly that when we have children we have a duty to protect and care for them and a responsibility to them, and to society, in regard to their upbringing and welfare. I further believe that when allegations of abuse are made, be they sexual, emotional, physical or neglect, that they should be investigated fully in a criminal not family court, to ensure the safety of all, most especially our children, and to ensure that abhorrent false accusations are not rewarded with full custody and no contact but are instead punished as perjury, since they would then have to be made in open court.

I do not believe that one parent has the right to eliminate the other from a child’s life because they don’t want them in it and by the same token I do not believe that one parent should be allowed to disregard their duties and obligations to their child because they don’t want a part in the child’s life. It took two people to create that child and, if one person didn’t want a child they should have ensured they used contraception to prevent its conception, because those two people should both be responsible for the child and its parenting.

To you who do not feel this situation will have any bearing on your lives, especially the women amongst you, I say Beware! Maybe the family law system benefits you now but that may not always be the case. Your sons and grandsons certainly will not benefit from the secretive practices of our family law system and neither will their children. You may be one of those who in the future will have the horrors of this system turned against your family and if that is the case you may never see your grandchildren or great grandchildren again. Unfair legislation has, as the past shows only to well, the capacity to turn on us all.

And beyond this, well once the system has gotten rid of the fathers, there is only one parent left to go and then the state will have all our children to itself, (despite its appalling record on ?looked after children’).

Beyond fantasy you might think?

Well, let’s face it the adoption targets managed to net quite a few lovely babies straight from maternity wards as well as pretty young children for the adoption market, before they were abolished after sustained outcries by prominent figures at some of the cases involved. And now we have some MPs backing ?Stonewall’ proposals to have the words dad and MUM removed from early learning stage books, to be replaced by the term Carer because not all children have a mum and a dad! Sounds reasonable maybe, until you really think about it and then, given what is happening to fathers now, it should scare the hell out of you. It does me!

I do not want to see any downgrading of a father’s role in a child’s life and nor do I wish to see any downgrading of a mother’s role just to comply with political correctness gone mad. I certainly do care for my children, but I love them too and that far exceeds the role of a carer. Perhaps if the Feminazi members of our government dispensed with their nannies and spent more time with their own children instead of deriding those parents who want to be with their children as much as they possibly can be, they would understand why so many fathers fight to stay in their children’s lives after separation or divorce.

The balance in our Family Law System must be redressed now, not in favour of men or women, but in favour of the real long term best interests of the child who should have the right to be parented by both of their parents, and in doing this not only the welfare of the child but also that of the family and society as a whole would benefit. It’s time our politicians stopped allowing themselves to be ruled by fascist feminism at its worst and swapped political correctness for common-sense policies, then we will all benefit, not just the minority at the expense of reason and justice.

Tracey Wilkinson
Equal Parenting Alliance Committee
23 May 2008