Article here. Excerpt:

'Last week a hugely significant and historic debate took place in Scotland when the Parliament got round to finally discussing domestic violence against men. As highlighted in the discussions it's quite shameful that it took 11 years after the initial Liberal Democrat proposal to actually have the debate, particularly given that debating "violence against women" is quite literally an annual event.

Article here. Excerpt:

'On 4th March 2006, Claire Margaret McDonald gasped and burst into tears as a Victorian Supreme Court jury found her not guilty of the execution style murder of her husband, Warren John McDonald.

The court was told that McDonald had donned camouflage gear and lay in wait with a high-powered rifle for her husband to approach. She fired six shots, mortally wounding her husband.

McDonald successfully used the "battered woman syndrome" defence, claiming she had suffered years of abuse at the hands of her husband.

Within days, Queensland woman, Susan Falls, having probably read the media reports of Heather McDonald's stunning acquittal, decided to execute her abusive husband in the same fashion, in what prosecutors would describe as a cunning, calculated murder.'

[Alert on-line here]

Last week, June 23, Attorney General Eric Holder missed the deadline for issuing standards to prevent prison rape.

Men being raped in prison is so accepted by mainstream America that Saturday Night Live's writers saw nothing wrong with doing 4-1/2 minutes of ass-rape jokes in a sketch called "Scared Straight" that ended with Betty White saying emphatically, "Wizard of Ass"! Blogger Scott Starnes states the attitude explicitly. Under a graphic stating "Ass-Rape: It's Always Funny," Starnes asks: "Who honestly cares about criminals being ass-raped in prison?"

Ignorant callousness is an obvious problem for reformers trying to eliminate prison rape. But an even more insidious problem is the media's treatment of male victims as unworthy of concern, as NPR's Morning Edition recently did.. NPR chose to ignore the fact that 90% of incarcerated individuals are male, and instead focused their story solely on a female-prisoner's experience of prison-rape. This form of bias is so subtle that most listeners won't even notice it. But it is a classic example of the very media bias described by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book Manufacturing Consent, in which they write:

Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotion. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.

Schlafly on Kagan here. As a reminder to one and all, the Kagan nomination hearings in the Senate are in full swing. MRAs/FRAs may have reason to be concerned. She is by some accounts a committed feminist and the article implies she admires a judge who felt it was a judge's role to make law from the bench. I will refer you to the Senate Judiciary Committee web site for contact information should you have a desire to voice any concerns you may have. Excerpt:

'When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court.

The polar opposite of the U.S. Constitution, which states that "all legislative powers" are vested in the elected legislative body, Barak has written that a judge should "make" and "create" law, assume "a role in the legislative process" and give statutes "new meaning that suits new social needs."

Article here. Excerpt:

"The government unit dealing with forced marriages received 65% more calls about male victims last year than the previous year, figures show.
...
Professionals working with young people were urged to be vigilant during summer, a time when incidents increase.

Men accounted for 14% of the total number of forced marriage cases, numbering 1,682, referred to the Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) last year.

However, due to under-reporting, the figures are thought to be well below the actual number of forced marriages.'

Article here. Excerpt:

A new study by Statistics Canada using police arrest data is being widely circulated in the Canadian Media.

Some places:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/Abused+women+still+partners+dependable/2905307/story.html

http://www.vancouversun.com/life/Dating+violence+increases+most+grown+women/3215995/story.html

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/06/29/dating-violence.html

My commentary/criticism:

Police statistics on domestic violence are not representative of society and are just bad statistics.

There is a lack of willingness for boys to report violence as it is embarrassing, as well as reluctance for police to press charges against girls.

From Abusegate Bob:

The Violence Against Women Act spends $444 million each year. And VAWA-funded programs cause about 2 million false allegations. So each false DV allegation costs the American taxpayer $222 annually.

And now, President Obama is proposing to increase VAWA funding by a whopping $130 million!

The next Washington DC lobbying event will be held Thursday, July 22, the day before the Family Preservation Festival begins. Our message will be plain and simple: Stop the false allegations of domestic violence!

If you are a parent, grandparent, or other family member who has seen the harmful effects of false allegations on children, you need to come!

To pre-register, send your name, email address, organization name, and cell phone number to: rohara-at-saveservices.org

An orientation teleconference will be held in advance. Deadline for pre-registration is July 12.

Article here. Excerpt:

'It is frightening to watch the power of the state unleashed to destroy a 14-year-old boy.

He is Edwin McFarlane, the bumbling teen whose attempt to help a 3-year-old girl find her mother June 10 at a Burlington Coat Factory has him facing a first-degree felony charge of false imprisonment.

The case never has made sense. And confronted with the possibility they made a mistake in a high-profile arrest, Orange County sheriff's detectives and now state prosecutors have waged a campaign to save face by distorting evidence and smearing the kid.

When I began questioning the arrest, the Sheriff's Office told me surveillance cameras proved Edwin never contacted his mother before leaving the store with the girl, as she claimed. I checked the videos and found this wasn't true.'

Article here. Excerpt:

"Britain should stop its obsession with getting single mothers into work and pursue unemployed fathers, David Cameron's poverty adviser said last night. Frank Field, the Labour MP commissioned to carry out a review of poverty, blasted young dads who feel jobs paying less than £300 a week are not worth their while.
...
He said that in many households, the role of the father as the breadwinner had been taken over by the taxpayer. Speaking at a lecture to the Attlee Foundation, a charity working in disadvantaged areas, he claimed the debate about poverty had been 'feminised', letting feckless fathers off the hook for living off benefits and failing to support their families.
...
He said men who refused to take a job offered to them should have their benefits cut altogether.

Blog post here. Excerpt:

'Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S., Chair of the Board of Fathers and Families, discussed Fathers and Families' shared parenting bill HB 1400 on ABC's Boston affiliate WCVB on Tuesday, June 22. The story also featured longtime F & F member Rob Derosier, who told WCVB about his long, hard fight to remain a meaningful part of his daughter's life after his divorce. To watch the story, click here.
...
From ABC’s synopsis:

A bill before the Massachusetts legislature would change the direction of child custody decisions, making shared and equal parenting the norm.

When Rob Derosier welcomed his daughter into the world 10 years ago, he never expected that after divorce he’d become a mere visitor in her life.

“It’s the first time you have to drive up to a house and pick her up, and then drive up to the house and drop her off,” said Derosier. “That’s when it really hits home, when you realize your daughter really isn’t yours anymore.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'The female birth control pill, commonly referred to as 'The Pill,' is not 100 percent effective, and some women's bodies don't react well to the extra hormones. Now, finally, a new birth control option for men is in the works, which would allow partners to share the responsibility, and let guys be in control of whether or not there will be any surprises in the procreation department.

Prof. Haim Breitbart of Israel's Bar-Ilan University authored a breakthrough paper in 2006 describing how sperm survive in the uterus. Now the biochemist is taking those findings and using them against sperm. He's developed a number of novel compounds that have no affect on male sex drive, but succeed in impairing the reproductive ability of the sperm. If all goes according to his plan, a new male birth control pill could be on the market within the next five years, he tells ISRAEL21c.

You may be interested in this report (.pdf file) in which the experiences of 22 women are used to attack Australia's shared parenting rules.

I am a regular reader but did not post this at the site as for personal reasons I don't want my name associated with this particular tussle. Articles in newspapers supporting his absurd study are here. Excerpt:

'Minister for Women, Jodi McKay, today launched the No Way to Live report at NSW Parliament House.

The report by senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, Dr Lesley Laing, looks at how Australias family law system responds to victims of domestic violence, Ms McKay said.

Importantly the research and resulting report moves beyond an analysis of the law itself and analyses the way the law supports victims, many of who we know are women.

As well as being informative, the report is a testament to the courage, resilience and great dignity of the 22 women whose experiences are told in the report.

Op-ed here. Excerpt:

"...Although a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recently rejected an application to market the drug flibanserin in the United States for women with low libido, it endorsed the potential benefits and urged further research. ...
...
...In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. ...
...
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.

Article here. Excerpt:

'It seems to me that if you had deliberately devised a plot to oppress women, it couldn’t get more diabolical than this. Highly educated, progressive and enlightened mothers don’t need men to oppress them. They’re perfectly capable of oppressing themselves!

Today, the baby has become “the best ally of masculine domination,” argues Elisabeth Badinter, a controversial French feminist. Her new book (Le Conflit: La Femme et La Mère, translated as Conflict: The Woman and the Mother) argues that the moral requirements of modern motherhood – especially the back-to-nature, eco-mommy trend – have struck a blow to women’s freedom. “Women’s lives have grown more difficult in the last 20 years,” she told The New York Times. “Professional life is ever harder, ever more stressful and unattractive, and on the other hand, there is an accumulation of new moral duties weighing on women.”'