These cases always take me back to November 2003 and the murder of a friend, Julia Pemberton and her son Will (my son's school friend) by her husband, his dad. (Fortunately, the older sister was away at university at the time). I was practicing as a midwife and had just attended a birth, calling my husband to say I was on the way home. He informed me of our friends' murders.
I'd known Julia as a 'school gate mum', but also, we played badminton together. Our boys were 15 and the school (that is the children there) were severely affected. As the news filtered out of the appalling circumstances of the murder, I wept often - not least for my son and his friends who had to experience this close loss - a boy, a friend, murdered by his own dad.
It is worth looking up the details as it is one of the worst cases of a woman being ignored - Julia had been warning the police for more than a year that her husband was threatening to kill her.
I was not a close friend, and so was shocked to learn that Julia, this well educated (ironically she was a Health Visitor who dealt professionally with 'domestic violence') financially well off, gentle woman had been abused by her husband for so long. That even with her knowledge and connections, she could not save herself. I am so glad that her brother Frank Mullane never let the police get away with the mishandling of this case - his work since to advocate for women like his sister is so important.
I wanted to respond, but don't really know what to say except to pray that one day; the human collective will find the fortitude to pull back the curtain and look deeply into the root causes of the tragedies we seem unable to presently fully face.
Julie - you so clearly articulate what’s had me grinding my teeth about the reporting of this murder all week. The perpetual use of the word “tragic” alongside a seemingly happy family photo centering the killer.
It’s not a tragedy, he chose to murder his wife and daughter. The most selfish act a human can enact on another.
Those children falling through ice before Christmas, that’s a tragedy.
This was cold blooded murder that did not happen in a vacuum. As you say without scrutiny to the backstory of what was probably, as identified by Prof Jayne Monckton Smith a pattern of controlling behaviour, the public learn nothing. The dots are not joined up. These femicide killings and family annihilation murders are happening week in week out. But no, most times they are framed as isolated incidents and no wider risk to the public. (Mass shootings often start with domestic murder before the killer goes on a public rampage is a fact also rarely mentioned).
I have no idea as to the legality/due process of what will or will not be disclosed to the public about anything that happened or was known about their relationship prior to the shooting, but why can’t police or media outlets give a safety signposting message of where to go for help or reporting concerns about an individual or a situation you maybe worried about. Public awareness of what constitute coercive control and domestic abuse is still stuck in the 1970s in my experience.
Well done as usual spot on - personally I would like to see an info graphic of the stages of coercive control leading to femicidei n every doctors surgery, women's clinic and in the popular media. Whilst strangulation is ore comon I also think complaints about domestic violence need to be considered when issuieing gun licences - like they should not be granted if any DV allegation or incident on record.
Thank you, Julie, for putting into such eloquent words what I have thought and, on occasion, said. These cases of men wiping out their families - so often including daughters - have not been covered for what they are: a gigantic, brutal mantrum at the end of a series of smaller, but still brutal, mantrums. The man's suicide is just a final "up yours" to the people left behind who will never get the full closure that seeing the bastard man tried and (hopefully) convicted of murder. (I say "hopefully" because it is very easy to succeed in a plea of diminished responsibility and have the crime reduced to manslaughter with a small sentence handed down).
I don't know how to stop the act of leaving a man carrying the risk of fatality to the woman and her children (as an aside, there are many cases where the children were killed first so that the woman had to live her final moments with that knowledge), but I do know that the reporting can change very easily if there is the will to do so. A man who kills his family is nothing but scum, and it is beyond time this was properly reflected.
My own father threatened to kill me with a shotgun when I was 16 years old. Fortunately my grandmother took me in for my last two years of high school, otherwise I would have ended up on the street and who knows what would have happened. Predictably my stepmother blamed me for my father's escalating violence because if it was my fault, then she could justify staying with him. However with me out of the picture to vent on, my father threatened to kill her a year later, and she finally divorced him. My stepmother was a lawyer and yet she put up with my father's violence for years before she finally left. BTW my stepmother was incredibly abusive towards me as well, so I had little sympathy for her and still don't. But she did not deserve to be abused either.
As I age, I have become cynical about the possibility of great sweeping social change on the issue of domestic violence. I believe that social protections and laws and attitudes only take us so far. It really is up to individual women to fight back directly and be willing to support other women in fighting back as well. I understand the multiple powerful pressures which cause women not to fight back, not to leave their abusers, not to step forward and support each other etc., etc. But inevitably it is up to us women to protect ourselves and our children, because the current socio-economic-politcal unrest is bound to get worse. Which of course escalates lashing out and controlling behaviors all the way around.
Maybe it is a tribal thing or maybe age, but lately I feel very close to my own native ancestral line of women who just a few generations ago would have gutted anyone who attacked them or their children. I personally believe that is the kind of determination and attitudes we need to develop. Every woman has to make her own decisions about how to fight back and there are multiple ways to do so. But I think that many women are so afraid of acknowledging and facing their own inner violence that they would rather be martyrs to the violence of men than dare to show the world how powerfully violent they themselves can be. I mean really , what female animal in nature will not fight back viciously if she or her young are threatened? We have been 'civiilized' into being victims and convinced into believing that if we effectively fight back we are not 'good' women anymore. That is the real tragedy to me, that so many women's entire identity is wrapped up in being 'good', they would rather be killed than think of themselves as 'bad' for fighting back.
I want to be clear that I am not blaming women for being attacked! I am only pointing out that abusive men might be incentivized to become a bit more self-regulating if they knew there was a good chance that the woman they abused would seriously harm them the first chance she got.
"Civilized into being victims" and if the women do fight back and kill the man, they then suffer excessive punishment at the hands of the state, instead of being celebrated for protecting themselves and children.
That is surely so and I don't have a blanket solution to that kind of injustice. For me the biggest piece of this is teachng women to believe that first of all they have the right to fight back and then helping them figure out how to fight back effectively without being slammed by the full force of the law. They will have to be sneaky about it and every situation is different. Wierdly to me, many women will tolerate alot of abuse before they will even consider that they may need to lie, cheat, steal and/ or attack to protect themselves.
One woman I know actually confessed to assault because she punched a bully who was in her face and twice her size. She publicly expressed distress and remorse that she had punched the guy, because she said 'that was not who she was'!!! She was charged with assault and spent time in jail which is disgusting. One could blame the system and I do, but really why was she never taught to lie when necessary to protect herself? She instinctually phsyically protected herself but then was so horrified that she abdicated her power immediately afterwards by 'confessing'. There were no witnesses and absolutely no one would have believed she had punched the guy and of course she did no harm whatsoever to him physically.
I led Women Warrior Trainings for years and I ran into that kind of thinking alot. Women have been brainwashed to be passive and to feel bad about themselves when they are aggressive. That is the piece that I think only we women ourselves can change; woman to woman, mother to daughter, etc. We cannot afford to wait for laws to change and anyway smart guys figure out ways around them and can end up charging their own vicitms with assault!. I suggest that women are naturally smarter and we can change the dynamic from the inside out if we determine to do so; and encourage each other to believe that we have more power than we know..
Road kill. We can't disrupt the myth of "happily ever after" so we look away. If we face the reality of domestic violence and treat it like the public safety threat it is, we strip away the romantic gauze of denial that keeps girls and women in their places.
Interesting that the English speaking world seems behind Spain and Latin America in acknowledging and addressing femicide. Overt machismo may be easier to confront than a post feminist facade.
Of the 522,000 registered gun owners in England and Wales, over 95% are male. So it follows that when it comes to gun-driven family annihilation, it’s inevitably a man thing.
I respect your view, but disagree. Bipolar/manic depression definitely manifests as agression at times and even violence towards those one loves. Both men and women with this mental illness exhibit that kind of lashing out. And well we both love and hate those we are closest to, because we are human. This does not deny the reality of coercive control and the wrongness of femicide or the subsequent social cover-ups .
That is of course fair comment, I doubt one can rule out any form of human behaviour. My original post was my immediate and instinctive reaction, coloured by the depression and suicide (self destruction) of a very loved one. I hated the thought of depression being linked to a murdering man.
I understand and agree that using depression as a social or legal 'excuse' for abuse and murder is wrong. Especially without acknowledging the built in misogyny of the crime.
I agree with you on all your points about Pattison, Julie, but I think the term “Family annihilators” was coined by Northeastern University criminologists James Fox and Jack Levin. The term used to annoy me as a academic buzzword, catch phrase because , like the term "Domestic Violence" it deflects attention away from male violence. Rebecca Dobash a Scottish anti-male violence academic was very clear about how she disapproved of the term D.V. because it covered up or misnamed MALE violence and I agree with her. But by now the term has gotten so ingrained it's hard to stem the tide. Back in the early Seventies the term D.V. was promoted by some social workers to avoid offending or hurting the feelings of men who were often in rabid denial when confronted about their violent behavior. We radical feminists were outnumbered in our assertion that male violence should be identified. But other women thought that their work on behalf of women would be resisted and hampered if men felt threatened. Yet men always feel threatened when made to look at their own behavior.
Such a recognisable pattern. I arrived in a country town once (Australia) to find it in mourning after a man had driven himself and 2 kids into the harbour. Piles of flowers and tributes to a good family man, a footy club hero etc. I asked around and people - o so sad - thought he might have been depressed. In this case he tortured his wife by leaving her alive. It’s exactly a copy of another case of a man driving his children into a dam. Police turned themselves inside out trying to prove it was an accident.
There are so many narcissistic men who can pass as caring for their family to those outside. In fact a family only exists to validate him and to act as a background to show how superior he is and how he 'knows best'. There is no genuine feeling or love for them as individuals. If the facade of his superiority is threatened he'll do anything to prevent that including murdering them all.
Its coercive control. And the femicide or familicide is the ultimate act of control. Just so happened that this interview was recently released. It fits perfectly to your article.
Jan, thank you for answering my questions. A few further points:
- Would you be happy for fathers to enjoy the same virtual immunity from prosecution for infanticide, as currently pertaining to mothers (in the UK, at least)?
- How do you imagine I'm trying to 'coerce' people? I'm just presenting my views, as you are.
- Even after birth a baby isn't 'viable' in any meaningful sense. Medical intervention is only one form of intervention.
- Your absence of empathy for men who commit suicide (in the UK, 3-4 times more men than women) is remarkable, you transform it into 'violence by men' rather than showing any human concern for them.
- "Sexual crimes, in and out the family are overwhelming committed by men." Whenever I read the word 'overwhelming' in gender matters, it's always a nonsensical claim. For the evidence on the gendered nature of sexual crimes, I refer you to pp.51-7 of our manifesto https://cafpuk.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/279a5-221128-j4mb-manifesto.pdf.
- William Collins backs up all his points with research. I take it you won't bother to read the book?
Julie, it was, of course, predictable that you'd seek to make capital out of this case.
Let's look at more common events, shall we? We know from William Collins's 'The Empathy Gap' that:
- even after excluding the 210,000+ unborn children killed every year in this country by their mothers - 10+ million since the passing of The Abortion Act (1967) - more children are killed and harmed by their mothers than by their fathers; and
- women are rarely prosecuted for the crime of infanticide (the killing of children under 12 months of age)
Julie, would you join me in wanting to see more women prosecuted for infanticide?
Thank you. When, in your view, does an embryo or foetus become a child, and therefore worthy of protection against those who would kill him or her?
You write, "I think you'll find that child abuse in families, in all its forms, is overwhelming, almost exclusively, conducted by men." This is one of the most ill-informed sentences I've ever encountered, a truly dire example of "argument by assertion". I invite you to read Collins's book to learn the truth about such matters. Under £5.00 for the ebook edition. No feminist has ever challenged anything contained in the book, and they never will. The research is impeccable.
Let me put my question for Julie Bindel to you. Would you join me in wanting to see more women prosecuted for infanticide, and if not, why not?
No, I would not join you in wanting more women prosecuted for infantcide as I neither wish to see children killed or mothers jailed.
In answer to your question, an embryo becomes a child when viable to live outside the womb and with minimal medical intervention. I'm sure you have a different view, which you are entitled to but you are not entitled to coerce others into also holding it.
If you look at worldwide and national statistics you will find that most violence is inflicted by men, usually to other men and to themselves, self harm through alcohol abuse and suicide being two examples. Sexual crimes, in and out the family are overwhelming committed by men. One book does not make this any less true.
I agree Jan, most cases of infanticide committed by women are because the mother is suffering from postpartum depression. As for suicide, women attempt suicide three times more often than men, but are less lethal in their methods; as women more frequently use pills or poisons, while men often use guns or vehicles.
Jan, in our manifesto (pp.45-7) we cover domestic violence. A major review of the literature in 2013 (Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project) concluded that in straight couples where there is DV, about 58% of DV was bi-directional. Of the remainder, where one partner was always the sole perpetrator, it was twice as likely to be the woman as the man.
Why don't feminists these days write books on such issues as DV? Maybe because their claims that issues such as DV are 'gendered' would be torn apart by researchers. As it is, people like Julie Bindel know only too well that even their wildest claims on issues such as DV won't be challenged in the mainstream media.
thank you for an excellent article. 'see what you made me do' by jess hill is a recently published book on coercive control. it is stunning and i highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the wellbeing of women and children in the home.
"See what you made me do" - what a crystal-clear statement of women's refusal to take responsibility for their actions and inactions. So in the 2/3 of couples with uni-directional violence where women are the sole perpetrators, the men "made them do it"? I can't imagine what it must be like to be an adult woman with the moral agency of a selfish toddler.
It's about damned time society held women equaly responsible as men for their actions and inactions. No, wait. That's totally not a form of equality feminists want. No prominent feminists have EVER called for women to be held as accountable as men for their actions and inactions. Men are far more likely to go to prison for offences which, for women, would result in a suspended sentence (no punishment). And when the women commit further crimes, as they often do, they'll get more suspended sentences. On top of al this, feminists want FEWER women in prison, because of course women are saints and women only commit crimes at the behest of men. The criminal justice system operates on a drive for brutality for men and leniency for women.
These cases always take me back to November 2003 and the murder of a friend, Julia Pemberton and her son Will (my son's school friend) by her husband, his dad. (Fortunately, the older sister was away at university at the time). I was practicing as a midwife and had just attended a birth, calling my husband to say I was on the way home. He informed me of our friends' murders.
I'd known Julia as a 'school gate mum', but also, we played badminton together. Our boys were 15 and the school (that is the children there) were severely affected. As the news filtered out of the appalling circumstances of the murder, I wept often - not least for my son and his friends who had to experience this close loss - a boy, a friend, murdered by his own dad.
It is worth looking up the details as it is one of the worst cases of a woman being ignored - Julia had been warning the police for more than a year that her husband was threatening to kill her.
I was not a close friend, and so was shocked to learn that Julia, this well educated (ironically she was a Health Visitor who dealt professionally with 'domestic violence') financially well off, gentle woman had been abused by her husband for so long. That even with her knowledge and connections, she could not save herself. I am so glad that her brother Frank Mullane never let the police get away with the mishandling of this case - his work since to advocate for women like his sister is so important.
I often think of the daughter who was left...
I wanted to respond, but don't really know what to say except to pray that one day; the human collective will find the fortitude to pull back the curtain and look deeply into the root causes of the tragedies we seem unable to presently fully face.
Julie - you so clearly articulate what’s had me grinding my teeth about the reporting of this murder all week. The perpetual use of the word “tragic” alongside a seemingly happy family photo centering the killer.
It’s not a tragedy, he chose to murder his wife and daughter. The most selfish act a human can enact on another.
Those children falling through ice before Christmas, that’s a tragedy.
This was cold blooded murder that did not happen in a vacuum. As you say without scrutiny to the backstory of what was probably, as identified by Prof Jayne Monckton Smith a pattern of controlling behaviour, the public learn nothing. The dots are not joined up. These femicide killings and family annihilation murders are happening week in week out. But no, most times they are framed as isolated incidents and no wider risk to the public. (Mass shootings often start with domestic murder before the killer goes on a public rampage is a fact also rarely mentioned).
I have no idea as to the legality/due process of what will or will not be disclosed to the public about anything that happened or was known about their relationship prior to the shooting, but why can’t police or media outlets give a safety signposting message of where to go for help or reporting concerns about an individual or a situation you maybe worried about. Public awareness of what constitute coercive control and domestic abuse is still stuck in the 1970s in my experience.
Well done as usual spot on - personally I would like to see an info graphic of the stages of coercive control leading to femicidei n every doctors surgery, women's clinic and in the popular media. Whilst strangulation is ore comon I also think complaints about domestic violence need to be considered when issuieing gun licences - like they should not be granted if any DV allegation or incident on record.
Thank you, Julie, for putting into such eloquent words what I have thought and, on occasion, said. These cases of men wiping out their families - so often including daughters - have not been covered for what they are: a gigantic, brutal mantrum at the end of a series of smaller, but still brutal, mantrums. The man's suicide is just a final "up yours" to the people left behind who will never get the full closure that seeing the bastard man tried and (hopefully) convicted of murder. (I say "hopefully" because it is very easy to succeed in a plea of diminished responsibility and have the crime reduced to manslaughter with a small sentence handed down).
I don't know how to stop the act of leaving a man carrying the risk of fatality to the woman and her children (as an aside, there are many cases where the children were killed first so that the woman had to live her final moments with that knowledge), but I do know that the reporting can change very easily if there is the will to do so. A man who kills his family is nothing but scum, and it is beyond time this was properly reflected.
Great article as always Julie!
My own father threatened to kill me with a shotgun when I was 16 years old. Fortunately my grandmother took me in for my last two years of high school, otherwise I would have ended up on the street and who knows what would have happened. Predictably my stepmother blamed me for my father's escalating violence because if it was my fault, then she could justify staying with him. However with me out of the picture to vent on, my father threatened to kill her a year later, and she finally divorced him. My stepmother was a lawyer and yet she put up with my father's violence for years before she finally left. BTW my stepmother was incredibly abusive towards me as well, so I had little sympathy for her and still don't. But she did not deserve to be abused either.
As I age, I have become cynical about the possibility of great sweeping social change on the issue of domestic violence. I believe that social protections and laws and attitudes only take us so far. It really is up to individual women to fight back directly and be willing to support other women in fighting back as well. I understand the multiple powerful pressures which cause women not to fight back, not to leave their abusers, not to step forward and support each other etc., etc. But inevitably it is up to us women to protect ourselves and our children, because the current socio-economic-politcal unrest is bound to get worse. Which of course escalates lashing out and controlling behaviors all the way around.
Maybe it is a tribal thing or maybe age, but lately I feel very close to my own native ancestral line of women who just a few generations ago would have gutted anyone who attacked them or their children. I personally believe that is the kind of determination and attitudes we need to develop. Every woman has to make her own decisions about how to fight back and there are multiple ways to do so. But I think that many women are so afraid of acknowledging and facing their own inner violence that they would rather be martyrs to the violence of men than dare to show the world how powerfully violent they themselves can be. I mean really , what female animal in nature will not fight back viciously if she or her young are threatened? We have been 'civiilized' into being victims and convinced into believing that if we effectively fight back we are not 'good' women anymore. That is the real tragedy to me, that so many women's entire identity is wrapped up in being 'good', they would rather be killed than think of themselves as 'bad' for fighting back.
I want to be clear that I am not blaming women for being attacked! I am only pointing out that abusive men might be incentivized to become a bit more self-regulating if they knew there was a good chance that the woman they abused would seriously harm them the first chance she got.
"Civilized into being victims" and if the women do fight back and kill the man, they then suffer excessive punishment at the hands of the state, instead of being celebrated for protecting themselves and children.
That is surely so and I don't have a blanket solution to that kind of injustice. For me the biggest piece of this is teachng women to believe that first of all they have the right to fight back and then helping them figure out how to fight back effectively without being slammed by the full force of the law. They will have to be sneaky about it and every situation is different. Wierdly to me, many women will tolerate alot of abuse before they will even consider that they may need to lie, cheat, steal and/ or attack to protect themselves.
One woman I know actually confessed to assault because she punched a bully who was in her face and twice her size. She publicly expressed distress and remorse that she had punched the guy, because she said 'that was not who she was'!!! She was charged with assault and spent time in jail which is disgusting. One could blame the system and I do, but really why was she never taught to lie when necessary to protect herself? She instinctually phsyically protected herself but then was so horrified that she abdicated her power immediately afterwards by 'confessing'. There were no witnesses and absolutely no one would have believed she had punched the guy and of course she did no harm whatsoever to him physically.
I led Women Warrior Trainings for years and I ran into that kind of thinking alot. Women have been brainwashed to be passive and to feel bad about themselves when they are aggressive. That is the piece that I think only we women ourselves can change; woman to woman, mother to daughter, etc. We cannot afford to wait for laws to change and anyway smart guys figure out ways around them and can end up charging their own vicitms with assault!. I suggest that women are naturally smarter and we can change the dynamic from the inside out if we determine to do so; and encourage each other to believe that we have more power than we know..
Road kill. We can't disrupt the myth of "happily ever after" so we look away. If we face the reality of domestic violence and treat it like the public safety threat it is, we strip away the romantic gauze of denial that keeps girls and women in their places.
Interesting that the English speaking world seems behind Spain and Latin America in acknowledging and addressing femicide. Overt machismo may be easier to confront than a post feminist facade.
Of the 522,000 registered gun owners in England and Wales, over 95% are male. So it follows that when it comes to gun-driven family annihilation, it’s inevitably a man thing.
Exactly. Depression can drive you to destroy yourself, not people you love.
I respect your view, but disagree. Bipolar/manic depression definitely manifests as agression at times and even violence towards those one loves. Both men and women with this mental illness exhibit that kind of lashing out. And well we both love and hate those we are closest to, because we are human. This does not deny the reality of coercive control and the wrongness of femicide or the subsequent social cover-ups .
That is of course fair comment, I doubt one can rule out any form of human behaviour. My original post was my immediate and instinctive reaction, coloured by the depression and suicide (self destruction) of a very loved one. I hated the thought of depression being linked to a murdering man.
I understand and agree that using depression as a social or legal 'excuse' for abuse and murder is wrong. Especially without acknowledging the built in misogyny of the crime.
I agree with you on all your points about Pattison, Julie, but I think the term “Family annihilators” was coined by Northeastern University criminologists James Fox and Jack Levin. The term used to annoy me as a academic buzzword, catch phrase because , like the term "Domestic Violence" it deflects attention away from male violence. Rebecca Dobash a Scottish anti-male violence academic was very clear about how she disapproved of the term D.V. because it covered up or misnamed MALE violence and I agree with her. But by now the term has gotten so ingrained it's hard to stem the tide. Back in the early Seventies the term D.V. was promoted by some social workers to avoid offending or hurting the feelings of men who were often in rabid denial when confronted about their violent behavior. We radical feminists were outnumbered in our assertion that male violence should be identified. But other women thought that their work on behalf of women would be resisted and hampered if men felt threatened. Yet men always feel threatened when made to look at their own behavior.
Such a recognisable pattern. I arrived in a country town once (Australia) to find it in mourning after a man had driven himself and 2 kids into the harbour. Piles of flowers and tributes to a good family man, a footy club hero etc. I asked around and people - o so sad - thought he might have been depressed. In this case he tortured his wife by leaving her alive. It’s exactly a copy of another case of a man driving his children into a dam. Police turned themselves inside out trying to prove it was an accident.
There are so many narcissistic men who can pass as caring for their family to those outside. In fact a family only exists to validate him and to act as a background to show how superior he is and how he 'knows best'. There is no genuine feeling or love for them as individuals. If the facade of his superiority is threatened he'll do anything to prevent that including murdering them all.
Its coercive control. And the femicide or familicide is the ultimate act of control. Just so happened that this interview was recently released. It fits perfectly to your article.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2CQDXKuxsxITefDPAjE8wL?si=lVTZsfdCSIuL0DpN-HpQ3w
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-64676923
This man was sentenced to life in 2001 for killing his wife and two children. He is already being considered for 'open prison'.
Jan, thank you for answering my questions. A few further points:
- Would you be happy for fathers to enjoy the same virtual immunity from prosecution for infanticide, as currently pertaining to mothers (in the UK, at least)?
- How do you imagine I'm trying to 'coerce' people? I'm just presenting my views, as you are.
- Even after birth a baby isn't 'viable' in any meaningful sense. Medical intervention is only one form of intervention.
- Your absence of empathy for men who commit suicide (in the UK, 3-4 times more men than women) is remarkable, you transform it into 'violence by men' rather than showing any human concern for them.
- "Sexual crimes, in and out the family are overwhelming committed by men." Whenever I read the word 'overwhelming' in gender matters, it's always a nonsensical claim. For the evidence on the gendered nature of sexual crimes, I refer you to pp.51-7 of our manifesto https://cafpuk.files.wordpress.com/2023/01/279a5-221128-j4mb-manifesto.pdf.
- William Collins backs up all his points with research. I take it you won't bother to read the book?
- it's long been known that women are more likely to be abused by a female partner than by a male partner, my blog piece https://j4mb.org.uk/2022/12/09/are-women-more-likely-to-be-abused-in-lesbian-or-heterosexual-relationships/ shows the ONS data. How do you reconcile this with your "women good, men bad" narrative?
Julie, it was, of course, predictable that you'd seek to make capital out of this case.
Let's look at more common events, shall we? We know from William Collins's 'The Empathy Gap' that:
- even after excluding the 210,000+ unborn children killed every year in this country by their mothers - 10+ million since the passing of The Abortion Act (1967) - more children are killed and harmed by their mothers than by their fathers; and
- women are rarely prosecuted for the crime of infanticide (the killing of children under 12 months of age)
Julie, would you join me in wanting to see more women prosecuted for infanticide?
Mike Buchanan
Party leader
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS
Embryos are not children. I think you'll find that child abuse in families, in all its forms, is overwhelming, almost exclusively, conducted by men.
Thank you. When, in your view, does an embryo or foetus become a child, and therefore worthy of protection against those who would kill him or her?
You write, "I think you'll find that child abuse in families, in all its forms, is overwhelming, almost exclusively, conducted by men." This is one of the most ill-informed sentences I've ever encountered, a truly dire example of "argument by assertion". I invite you to read Collins's book to learn the truth about such matters. Under £5.00 for the ebook edition. No feminist has ever challenged anything contained in the book, and they never will. The research is impeccable.
Let me put my question for Julie Bindel to you. Would you join me in wanting to see more women prosecuted for infanticide, and if not, why not?
No, I would not join you in wanting more women prosecuted for infantcide as I neither wish to see children killed or mothers jailed.
In answer to your question, an embryo becomes a child when viable to live outside the womb and with minimal medical intervention. I'm sure you have a different view, which you are entitled to but you are not entitled to coerce others into also holding it.
If you look at worldwide and national statistics you will find that most violence is inflicted by men, usually to other men and to themselves, self harm through alcohol abuse and suicide being two examples. Sexual crimes, in and out the family are overwhelming committed by men. One book does not make this any less true.
I agree Jan, most cases of infanticide committed by women are because the mother is suffering from postpartum depression. As for suicide, women attempt suicide three times more often than men, but are less lethal in their methods; as women more frequently use pills or poisons, while men often use guns or vehicles.
Sorry Jan, I inadvertently replied to this as a standalone comment, please see that. Thanks.
Jan, in our manifesto (pp.45-7) we cover domestic violence. A major review of the literature in 2013 (Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project) concluded that in straight couples where there is DV, about 58% of DV was bi-directional. Of the remainder, where one partner was always the sole perpetrator, it was twice as likely to be the woman as the man.
Why don't feminists these days write books on such issues as DV? Maybe because their claims that issues such as DV are 'gendered' would be torn apart by researchers. As it is, people like Julie Bindel know only too well that even their wildest claims on issues such as DV won't be challenged in the mainstream media.
thank you for an excellent article. 'see what you made me do' by jess hill is a recently published book on coercive control. it is stunning and i highly recommend it to anyone who cares about the wellbeing of women and children in the home.
"See what you made me do" - what a crystal-clear statement of women's refusal to take responsibility for their actions and inactions. So in the 2/3 of couples with uni-directional violence where women are the sole perpetrators, the men "made them do it"? I can't imagine what it must be like to be an adult woman with the moral agency of a selfish toddler.
It's about damned time society held women equaly responsible as men for their actions and inactions. No, wait. That's totally not a form of equality feminists want. No prominent feminists have EVER called for women to be held as accountable as men for their actions and inactions. Men are far more likely to go to prison for offences which, for women, would result in a suspended sentence (no punishment). And when the women commit further crimes, as they often do, they'll get more suspended sentences. On top of al this, feminists want FEWER women in prison, because of course women are saints and women only commit crimes at the behest of men. The criminal justice system operates on a drive for brutality for men and leniency for women.