Last week I posted about the statistics from a UK abuse support organization. The numbers showed that ChildLine received more calls from children, predominantly boys, reporting sexual abuse at the hands of women, predominantly mothers. The numbers demonstrated that while the reporting of female-perpetrated abuse to authorities and law enforcement maybe be low, the actual rate of abuse is much higher. When considered with the recent arrests of three alleged pedophiles, two of whom are female and were the only ones alleged to have abused children, this can paint a very frightening picture that no adult can be trusted.

This, of course, is hardly true. Most people do not abuse children. Even though it is possible that virtually anyone could or will if in the right (or more appropriately, wrong) circumstances, the fact that most people are not child abusers should never be forgotten. It would be terrible for people to create a scenario in which every woman is considered untrustworthy based on the acts of a handful of women.

That said, I expected to see an article or two basically downplaying the ChildLine numbers and shifting the blame and responsibility off female pedophiles onto males. It took less than a week:

An expert on female sex offenders has warned against parents becoming “hyper-vigilant” in response to recent high-profile child abuse cases.

Dr Theresa Gannon – senior lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Kent – says society risks coming to a standstill if people become so cautious they feel unable to trust anybody with their children.

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“I think these high-profile cases do highlight the need to watch out for people regardless of gender but what we don’t want to get into is a situation where both males and females are vilified, because hyper-vigilancy like that would bring society to a standstill.”

The latter statement is rather curious. It reads as if Gannon thinks it is perfectly acceptable to vilify males and be hyper-vigilant against them, but not females. It stands in contrast to the numbers reported by ChildLine. It also stands in contrast to the reaction virtually any accusations involving male pedophiles or rapists conjures. There are hosts of articles about the evils of masculinity and maleness, articles about how “rape culture” drives men to rape women, articles about how people need to be wary of the men in their children’s lives, etc. At no point does one see psychologists dissuade this sort of thing. More often than not they are part it, quite frequently sharing their opinions about the untrustworthiness of males, despite the fact that the vast majority of men are not abusers or rapists.

It is difficult to imagine that if any other organization reported a 132 percent rise in unsolicited complaints about male abusers that anyone would rush to make a statement downplaying the important of those numbers.

Gannon goes on to explain her logic:

A contributor of many important publications about sex offenders, Dr Gannon recently interviewed 22 female paedophiles to try to understand how and why they abuse children.

She said: “We found that although females hold some key similarities to male sexual abusers, there are also some key differences.

“For instance, more than half of the women I spoke to worked in unison with a male offender. You rarely have men working with other men in this way.

“That was interesting because people think that if you leave a child with a male you should be extra vigilant, but less so if there is also a woman present.

“Obviously having a woman there does not necessarily mean a child is safe, so it’s just about being aware.

“Knowing these key differences is crucial for raising public awareness of female-perpetrated sexual abuse so it can be reported to the appropriate authorities.”

Interviewing 22 women convicted of child abuse is hardly substantive analysis. It bears to keep in mind that these are women who were arrested, charged and convicted (or plead guilty to lesser charges). That is a typically rare thing. The majority of victims of female pedophiles and abusers never report their abuse, so in a way using women who are serving time as the barometer for the typical behavior of female child abusers makes very little sense, particularly when one considers this:

Dr Gannon said: “It was totally up to the women who took part in my interviews whether they wanted to speak to me or not, but a lot of them just wanted to tell someone their story.

“A lot were in denial, others blamed it on a male who was also involved and others agreed that they had committed an awful crime.”

What convicted pedophile would not jump at the chance to present herself as a victim and gain attention? How convenient is it for women who rape to claim the man made them do it when the very people studying them already assume that?  What is the likelihood that these women who admit they acted on the own volition when it is possible such an admission could put their plea agreements in jeopardy or potentially result in new charges being filed, such as perjury charges?

One must keep in mind that professionals like Gannon draw their conclusions based on information from women who do not want to go to prison, do not want to receive longer sentences and women who likely perceive themselves as victims. In other words, telling professionals like Gannon that men made them do it benefits those female abusers.

It is simply amazing that on the heels of self-reported numbers that anyone would seek to downplay female abuse or try to shift the blame to men. The key factor that is worth noting is that ChildLine’s numbers are rather specific in terms of who the perpetrators are. One would think that if the majority of the cases of abuse reported to the organization involved women abusing only or mostly with men the children likely would have mentioned that at some point or have been asked about it. The fact that we do not see those numbers does not mean it is not possible that women are abusing predominantly at the behest of men, but it rather convincingly suggests that, like with male abusers, female abusers tend to act alone.

The importance of what those children reported cannot and should not be downplayed. This does not mean that people should react with the same insanity with which they respond to male abusers (which is itself completely overblown and preposterous), but that people should take these numbers as a sign that the notion women are less likely to abuse or are inherently safe is patently false. They are no more dangerous and yet no more safer than men.

Masculinity and manhood are in trouble. Over the past thirty years masculinity has gone from a respected, decently understood identity to a largely vilified, mocked and ill-understood shell of its former self. This cultural shift left one generation to question the masculine norms they grew up with while the next two generations grew up with no concise male role models. The effect of the absence of any men leading the way resulted in boys trying to sort it out themselves and women –  particularly feminists — trying to create new masculine identities to better suit their needs, all of which served to only worsen the situation.

Being such, it comes as no surprise that when young, feminist-allied men are called to describe masculinity they come up with a very specific narrative:

Wong was one of the organizers of the National Conference for Campus-Based Men’s Gender Equality and Anti-Violence Groups, a long and clunky name for an unprecedented event that took place last weekend at his school. It was the first time that young guys from around the country — guys like Wong, who recognize that the kind of masculinity they are describing is toxic for men, too — gathered to share strategies for getting college men involved in gender-based activism and discuss the work ahead.

In attendance were about 200 individuals, representing 40 colleges and two dozen organizations, many of them sporting titles like Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse, Men Can Stop Rape, and Men Stopping Violence. Notice a trend here? This contemporary movement of gender-conscious young men is largely identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. They’re not rapists. They’re not misogynists.

It is far more problematic that in the session with 200 young men brainstorming about qualities associated with masculinity none of them could  apparently come up with a single positive quality about masculinity. That puts the above mentioned groups and Courtney Martin’s article in a much different light. The men associated with the above groups are not identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. Rather, they are identifying themselves in terms of what they know feminists want to hear. This may be why feminist-allied men’s attempts to prove themselves trustworthy to feminists so often fail. Who would trust someone who only speaks of himself in the most negative terms?

That question could be asked of all men since most men also engage in a strange level of self-hatred and deprecation. For thirty years boys and men have heard the constant refrain that they are but a few steps above animals. Men only grunt and eat. Men only want sex. Men are inherently violent and aggressive. Men are incapable of reading or speaking well. Men are lazy. Men are selfish. Men want to use and abuse women.

The list goes on, yet the thing most missing from that list are the good things men and boys are.

This is not particularly surprising considering how prevalent the above refrain is. It is in every film, every television show, every song and particularly common on daytime talk shows and in media reports about gender. So it should come as no surprise that when men and boys only hear about the things they ought not be those same men and boys cannot come up with what they should be. Martin writes:

They’re also not particularly effective in imagining what they do want to be. Case in point: back to Wong at the chalkboard. The negative associations with masculinity poured off the tongues of these feminist-friendly college kids. They’ve taken Women’s Studies 101. When their buddy says, “That’s so gay,” they spit back, “That’s a sexual identity, not a dis.” They let a few tears fall during the Take Back the Night March. They devour Michael Kimmel’s Guyland and proselytize about Byron Hurt’s documentary, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. This generation is saying no to toxic masculinity.

But what are these young men saying yes too? We’ve all failed to envision an alternative.

It is curious that Martin would include herself in such a group because as a woman and as a feminist it is really not her’s or any female’s say in how men define masculinity. It is beyond bizarre to allow those who will never be a part or of adopt an identity to define it.

That said, she is correct that feminist-allied men are not particularly effective in stating that they want to be. To be honest, they are not that effective in stating what they do not want to be either. This lack of effectiveness occurs because feminist-allied men take their cues from feminists, and feminists have had nothing redeeming to say about men, masculinity or manhood. Worse yet, virtually any trait can be turned against feminist-allied men as another example of their “oppression” women, including the very traits feminists tell those men to adopt. This leaves male feminists in state in which they are damned regardless of what choices they make. They are left playing a perpetual guessing game in which the correct answer is constantly shifting — sometimes on a whim in the midst of discussion.

All this stems from a very basic point: feminists have no idea what masculinity is or why it is so important to men. They have sought to “deconstruct” it without understanding it and the effect is not unlike the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The situations were already problematic, yet they were made infinitely worse by a group of people who took it upon themselves to try to “fix” the countries and cultures without having a lick of knowledge about them. When the situation did not go as planned and the people of those countries their directed their anger at the incoming forces, the leaders of those forces were shocked and awed and felt they were being unfairly attacked when they should have been greeted as liberators.

Martin engages in a similar diatribe:

We’ve certainly got plenty of pictures of men who are stubbornly clinging to the old paradigm of maleness, and sadly, they’re not acting — think Tucker Max and Bill O’Reilly. The men’s rights movement is making reclaiming traditional manhood a compelling project for young, lost men. These activists know how to paint a vivid, if delusional, picture of the kind of man who will overcome victimization at the hands of all of us hateful feminists: He’s righteous, he’s fighting back, and most important, there’s nothing feminine about him. He is the opposite of female in every way.

While it is true that some men’s rights groups do cling to “traditional” masculinity simply because it is older and therefore considered better, it is far more delusional to think that one can strip away an entire group’s identity and replace it with catch-phrases and a host of conspiracy theories and actually believe this will work. It is also incredibly delusional to pretend that masculinity has ever been about being perceived as feminine or as a woman.

On a practical level it makes sense for men to define themselves in ways not associated with women because males and females have many biological differences that govern quite a few of our behaviors, which help shape our identities. Likewise, it is a common human tendency for groups define themselves in ways that render them different from others. People like to be able to define themselves in very specific ways, some of which include not being thought of as remotely like other groups (coincidentally, the feminist identity is exactly like this). Ironically, current femininity is defined in a way that essentially makes being a woman the opposite of male in every way, yet the latter is not only accepted by feminists, but also hailed.

Nevertheless, what some men’s rights groups and feminists like Martin fail to understand is that masculinity was historically much more diverse. The push to reclaim “traditional” masculinity is more akin to simply rebooting a computer infected with a virus (while the feminist notion of deconstruction is akin to taking a bat to the computer to eliminate the virus). The reboot does not fix the problem and likely neither would a system restore. What is needed is a virus scanner, something to go through and clean out the infected bits while leaving the rest of the system secure and stable.

The masculinity some men’s rights groups push for and the masculinity feminists push for are both extremes on the different ends of the same spectrum. The former is a too cold and aggressive extreme while the latter is a too weak and unsure extreme. Neither result in a completely rounded individual, just one who is deadened enough to keep his problems to himself or one so conflicted that he just waits to be told what to do.

Unsurprisingly, most males reject both of these, although they are more willing to lean towards the more “traditional” form over the feminist version since the former leaves them with at least a semblance of dignity and self-respect. However, it is clear that these are not enough, which is why so many boys and young men turn to videogames, movies, tv shows, music and various fantasy stories. They are looking for the role models of old, looking for the guidance they know they need and desperately want. Young men cling to films like Fight Club and 300 because these are films about men being men. Granted, Fight Club borders on satire and 300 is a heavily modernized version of the Spartans (before the famous battle apparently the Spartans were combing each other’s long hair, something hardly viewed as masculine today) . However, both films feature men essentially defining what it is to be men. In other words, men guiding other males into manhood.

That is what is missing from modern Western culture. Gone are any real role models, good or bad. The men who hearken back to the stoic figures of the Man with No Name or John Wayne films completely miss the point. Those men were not role models anyone should have followed because being governed by cold reasoning makes for a very incomplete person (speaking as someone who is governed by such things, this is quite true). A man needs compassion, caring, the ability to empathize with others and not just think of himself.

These were the qualities that were in actual traditional masculinity. Amazingly, the further in history one goes, the more one finds this complexity being expected and demanded of not only the average man, but particularly those who hold modern society’s collective appeal as the pinnacles of manhood. Knights, samurai, the Spartans, all of these men had these notions of compassion and empathy as part of their central edicts.

This is not to say that men should embrace chivalry or follow to the letter the rules found in the Hagakure. However, it is to say that in studying those older forms of masculinity boys and men may find the role models they are looking for — and they may find them without the baggage, the misandry or the requisite self-hatred and forfeiture of dignity demanded by feminists. In reading the ancient classics, mythologies and edicts boy and young men may begin to see that is not a matter of males being one step away from animals or becoming emotional wrecks, but a matter of balance and control.

As Waller Newell puts it in his introduction to his book The Code of Man:

There is a beautiful image [...] that compares the human soul to a celestial chariot riding through the heavens. [...] According to this ancient image, the charioteer stands for the human mind. The horses stand for the two most powerful of human passions, love and valor. The proper ordering of a man’s soul requires that the passions of love and valor always be guided by the dictates of reason. If the horses are not sufficiently reined in by the charioteer, if they are allowed they own way, these powerful steeds will pull the celestial chariot out of its heavenly arc, plunging it into a lower world of chaotic lust and violence. If, however, the charioteer is firmly in control of his steeds, the chariot of the soul will continue to soar upward to the celestial heights of eternal happiness, fulfillment, and honor.

But — and this is crucial to the secret of manliness — it’s not just a matter of controlling the horses. It’s not just a matter of repressing the passions by the dry dictates of reason. On the contrary: the charioteer can’t make his chariot go anywhere unless the ascent to happiness is fueled by the energy of those powerful horses. If that energy weren’t there, the chariot would just as surely crash as when the horses are out of control. So it is in the soul of a man. The mind cannot achieve happiness unless it is fueled by the passionate energies of love and daring. The point is not prudishly to suppress these passions but to direct them away from bad goals, like coarse pleasure seeking and brutal aggression, and towards constructive goals — the cultivation of those moral and intellectual virtues that enable us to be good family men, friends, and citizens. The image of the chariot evokes the proper balance of love and courage in the heart of man. A man needs to know who — and what — is truly deserving of his love. Only then will he know when — and why –  he may need to fight to defend them. The proper balance of love and daring on behalf of his family, friends, and country entitles a man to feel proud of himself, and deservedly so.

Some myths die hard. Others die quickly. The myth that women rarely sexually abuse has managed to hang on without budging all that much. However, some recent numbers from the United Kingdom show that female child rapists are hardly rare:

MORE children than ever are calling a Swansea-based helpline to report being abused by their own mothers.

The NSPCC today released new figures showing that volunteers at ChildLine’s South Wales base in Swansea counselled a total of 536 children across the UK last year about sexual abuse — 85 of them by a female.

Nationally, ChildLine counselled 12,268 children for sexual abuse.

Although figures show the majority of calls were in relation to abuse by a male, the findings show that more children are reporting assaults from a woman, usually their mother.

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At all ChildLine call centres last year, 2,142 young people across the UK told the charity they had been sexually abused by a female.

Of those callers counselled, 1,311 told ChildLine they had been abused by their mother.

The overall proportion of children calling ChildLine about a female offender has risen from 11 per cent of sex abuse calls in 2004/05 to 17 per cent in 2008/09.

Another article reported the numbers somewhat differently:

Last year ChildLine heard from 1,311 children who said they had been sexually assaulted by their own mother, representing 61% of all calls about abuse by females.

Research for the helpline found that boys were more likely to say they had been abused by a woman (1,722 cases) than by a man (1,651). In contrast, girls were over 10 times likelier to report being abused by a male (4,972) than by a female (420).

A total of 2,972 children complained that they had been sexually assaulted by their father, 45% of all calls about abuse by men.

Previous research by the NSPCC suggested that women may be responsible for about one in 20 sex offences committed against children. The analysis found that most children who disclosed sexual abuse to ChildLine last year were aged between 12 and 15, and most said they knew their abuser.

One should keep in mind that these numbers are based on calls made to ChildLine. They are not the fabrication of some men’s rights group or some study taken out of context. These are literally reports of abuse from the abused children. What these numbers demonstrate is that women, particularly mothers, are far more prone to sexually abusing children than previously thought. Or, to put it another way, women are just as likely as men to rape and sexually assault children.

The titles of the articles and of this post are technically misleading. There is no rise in women or mothers abusing children. There is a rise in children, particularly boys, reporting abuse at the hands of women. Female abusers have remained hidden largely because people assume that women are incapable of abusing children or only do so because a man forced them to. Female abusers also continue to remain largely hidden because the vast majority of the research, studies and outreach only mentions males as abusers and rapists (and typically only females as victims). The professional community also turns a blind eye to female abusers, often writing off women who abuse as emotionally unstable and therefore less responsible, less predatory and less likely to re-offend.

However, as the above numbers show, it is not a question whether women abuse. They do, and quite frequently.

While something this important should not be reduced to politics, it is necessary to mention that these numbers deal a significant blow to the feminist paradigm of “rape culture” and feminists theories about how and why rape occurs. According to the feminists, rape is an act of male oppression against women. It is specifically designed to keep women “in their place” or reduce other men to the status of women. The above numbers calls into question that view because clearly rape is not solely or vastly the domain of men. Coincidentally, feminists have no explanation for why females rape and abuse nor do they have any explanation or understanding of the impact female abuse has on the (apparently) largely male victims.

This is why it is so important not to tie issues like rape and violence into loosely defined, poorly constructed ideological theories. These numbers likely existed this whole time. It is only because of the increase in the media coverage about female abusers (much to feminists’ chagrin), a slight increase in the willingness to arrest, charge, try and convict female abusers and a slight increase in the outreach to male victims that the reality of the situation is finally coming to light. This could have happened sooner — meaning more boys and girls could have been helped, protected and saved — had sexual abuse and rape not been politicized as a tool to attack men.

That said, the most important thing to take away from this is that women, particularly mothers, do rape and abuse children and they very likely commit it at roughly the same rate as men.

When it comes to men’s issues, it is hardly surprising to find that feminists dismiss them as nonsense. It is difficult to find feminists supporting efforts to prevent visitation obstruction, efforts to raise awareness for male victims of domestic violence and rape, efforts to change biased policies that discriminate against male victims at domestic violence shelters and rape centers or efforts to have parental alienation recognized as a real problem. Feminists contend these problems either do not exist at all or are so rare they are not worth acknowledging.

Being such, Kathryn Joyce’s article about the men’s rights movement comes as nothing new. Neither, for that matter, does the complete absence of any evidence supporting the claims she makes in her article about male victimization, custody issues, abuse or parental alienation. She does not cite a single credible source for any of the claims presented, especially in regards to statistics. It is certainly not that she is incapable of searching for them because she went out of her way to link to Angry Harry’s blog in order to make a very loose connection between George Sodini and the men’s movement. Instead, it looks more like Joyce chose to engage in a generalized feminist appeal to authority, one in which she quotes from random people and presents their statements as true without bothering to double-check any of the statistics being cited.

Much of Joyce’s piece is simply a general complaint that men’s groups are starting to be taken seriously. She depreciates RADAR’s efforts and bemoans the recent rulings in West Virgina and in California that found the existing domestic violence policies in those states were applied in a discriminatory manner against men. Joyce does not look at why the courts ruled as it did or why there are studies showing an overt anti-male bias in the domestic violence community or why some courts find that domestic violence laws are being manipulated or why some people who work in the domestic violence community agree that male victims are deliberately ignored and that feminist-driven policies play a major role in that.

She goes on to question whether any of the complaints men’s groups make hold up, with her obvious conclusion being that none of them have any validity whatsoever.  She starts with this claim:

RADAR and other MRA groups base their battered men arguments largely on the research of a small group of social scientists who claim that domestic violence between couples is equally divided, just unequally reported… While some men certainly are victims of female domestic violence, advocates say the number is closer to 3 percent to 4 percent, rather than the 45 percent to 50 percent RADAR claims.

Unfortunately for Joyce, the group of social scientists who have found that women are equally violent is hardly small. The other problem with Joyce’s claim is that the 3 to 4 percent rate does not even match the results from the National Victimization Against Women Survey, which reports 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are victims of domestic violence, which places the rate male victimization between 35 to 40 percent of all domestic violence cases. This rate, however, does not factor in that male victims are far less likely to report abuse. Likewise, there are some recent studies suggesting the rate of violence between men and women is probably the same, even across age ranges.

The feminist opposition to acknowledging males as victims is two-pronged. The first is the usage of reported instances of abuse as an indicator of the actual rate of abuse against males, despite many professionals who work with male victims stating that males are far less likely to come forward or to seek help. The 3 to 4 percent rate comes from no given study or research. To the contrary, comes from the handful of cases men report to law enforcement and the few instances that men seek assistance from domestic violence shelters, the latter of which being compounded by overt misandrous policies.

The second is the unsubstantiated claim that women are abusing predominantly in self-defense. No one has ever presented any conclusive research demonstrating that when women or girls abuse their male partners that they are doing so solely or mostly out of self defense. To the contrary, a study suggests that females abuse in situations in which they are the sole abuser:

Furthermore, Whitaker discovered, of the 24 percent of relationships that had been violent, half had been reciprocal and half had not. Although more men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent) had experienced nonreciprocal violent relationships, more women than men (52 percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in ones involving reciprocal violence.

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in their study report.

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). “This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,” Whitaker and his group stressed.

Of the study’s numerous findings, Whitaker said, “I think the most important is that a great deal of interpersonal violence is reciprocally perpetrated and that when it is reciprocally perpetrated, it is much more likely to result in injury than when perpetrated by only one partner.”

The claim that these studies are taken out of context has no demonstrable basis in fact. What feminists and biased domestic violence advocates argue is little more than making excuses for female abusers because the notion that women can and do abuse does not fit into the view and the positions those people have formed. Despite there being credible evidence in front of them, feminists claim the evidence simply does not exist. This is particularly questionable reasoning because the effect of denying male victimization is that domestic violence advocates — the very people who supposed to prevent and raise awareness about abuse — send male victims the message that the advocates both do not want to help them and that the abuse males experience is deserved because it is an act of self-defense.

That is a very dangerous position to take because it means a host of boys and men will continue to suffer in silence solely because it is politically inconvenient for feminists and domestic violence advocates to help them. This does not just have an effect on males either, because this sentiment carries over to domestic violence in the gay community. The absence of services for male victims and the failure to acknowledge female abusers allows the abuse to continue and perpetuates a host of myths about who can be a victim.

The absence of any support for Joyce’s claims is worsened by other feminists latching onto Joyce’s claims and repeating them over and over. Already several prominent feminist websites have linked to Joyce’s article, each one adding a bit more misinformation as they applaud the piece.

Ultimately, this is not an issue of attacking feminists, but of acknowledging misandry and anti-male policies. What Joyce’s article shows is that feminists are invested in the denial of male discrimination and victimization.  It has nothing to do with the veracity of the research presented or veracity of men’s and boys’ experiences because all of those are outright dismissed. This is an issue of politics, of pure political control. The more the public and the courts acknowledge the validity of men’s groups’ complaints, the more feminist messages and policies will be challenged. For the last thirty years feminists have dominated the gender discussion and painted a very skewed, very specific picture. They have gotten comfortable with that position of power, and like anyone in that position, they want to protect it. The problem is that this is done at men’s and boys’ expense. Real men and real boys face a host of issues that should and likely would be acknowledged if it were not for feminists and various advocates positing that males do not have any legitimate problems.

Feminists present the situation as a zero sum game in which people must choose between feminists or men’s groups. What feminists fail to realize is that acknowledging male victimization, acknowledging parental alienation and acknowledging misandry in no way detracts from any of the negative experiences women have. The situations are not mutually exclusive; both situations can be true at the same time. All Joyce’s article did was demonstrate the methods some people use to perpetuate the current situation of inequality.

From the article:

A 40-year-old Hooper woman was charged Monday with allegedly raping and having oral sex with her 14-year-old foster son several times in October.

According to charging documents filed in 2nd District Court in Ogden, Jennifer Ann Montag told police to investigators that she and the boy had intercourse and oral sex several times at her home between Oct. 10 and 26.

Montag is charged with two counts of first-degree felony rape and three counts of first-degree felony forcible sodomy after someone reported the alleged abuse Oct. 28.

Weber County deputies interviewed the boy at the Ogden Children’s Justice Center. He said he didn’t want to get his foster mother in trouble but acknowledged she had asked him not to “disclose information which could ruin the family or put Montag in jail,” court documents state.

At the same time, detectives interviewed Montag, who confessed to some allegations, court documents state. When police later told her one of the boy’s siblings told a Department of Child and Family Services caseworker that the teen admitted to having sexual encounters with Montag, she confessed to more allegations, court documents state.

The actual title of the article is “Mother charged with allegedly having sex with foster son.” That was sad headline to go with considering the woman is a) his foster mother, not his mother, and b) the first line of the article states that she is first-degree felony rape and sodomy. There was no reason for the writer to play that sort of game with the facts by casting the situation as consensual sex.

What this particular story shows is that while female pedophiles may seek out their victims in different ways than male pedophiles, both use the same tactics to keep their victims silent. This woman told her foster son not to tell because it would ruin the family or put her in jail. It is only because the boy confided in one of this siblings that the abuse stopped. Had he not told, there would likely have been no reason for DCFS to suspect this woman. The question now is whether she has done this before to other foster children. Chances are this is not the first time she has abused a child.

It is important to notice the ways in which female predators remain invisible. One of the ways they do this is by taking on roles that society greatly values and would not necessarily look at. Female predators already have an advantage by virtue of their gender, and they can bank on that by presenting themselves as mothers or motherly figures. They are the least likely to be suspected, and consequently the most likely to receive sympathy or benefit from the presumption that they are crazy and therefore not responsible for their actions. Granted, most women who prey on children probably have not planned it out that far in advance. However, it is unlikely that as women they are not aware of the fact that their gender provides them with a certain level of protection.

This is not to say that we should be as suspicious of women as we are of men. Society’s treatment of men in this regard is completely reprehensible and actually does very little to curb sexual abuse since the majority of people who abuse children are people the children already know. Rather, the point is that we should not wholly ignore women who take an interest in children. We should not completely write that off as acceptable or go so far as to automatically assume that only “crazy women” rape and abuse children.

From the article:

During a prolonged standing ovation, the Texas exonerees were brought forward one by one. By the time the introductions were done, 14 men and one woman, each having served years in prison for crimes they did not commit, stood together on a stage at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“On this panel there is 200 years of incarceration,” one of them, Anthony Robinson, told a large crowd of students, educators, relatives and government officials. “Two hundred years of suffering. Two hundred years of ignoring a problem that is screaming to be dealt with.

“You have a chance to make a phenomenal difference,” said Robinson, who was wrongly convicted of rape. “This is a cause.”

Wrongful convictions are the greatest tragedy of the justice. There is no telling how many innocent people are servicing time or have serviced time for crimes they did not commit. The majority of the cases mentioned in the article were overturned due to DNA evidence. One must wonder, however, of the dozens of cases the Innocence Project gets sent that have no such evidence proving a person’s innocence. This is particularly problematic in rape cases where in most cases there is nothing but the accuser’s testimony as evidence. There are more cases in which evidence from the crime scene of murders or robberies has been lost or destroyed. These are situations in which the innocent have no means of proving it.

More often than not prosecutors are hesitant to redress cases of wrongful convictions, so it is quite impressive that one District Attorney was willing to join in the fight:

They also praised Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins, whose office joined the Innocence Project to investigate innocence claims and expedite exonerations. More prisoners have been cleared in Dallas County than in any other U.S. county.

“Dallas has a head start on the rest of the country,” said Robinson, who spent a decade in prison and became a lawyer after his exoneration. “Do not let his term pass away. Do not let the voice of reason and justice be silenced because they do not like to look at the faces they tried to throw away.”

If more District Attorney offices took the same initiative there is no telling how many cases of wrongful conviction would be revealed.  While some cases result from questionable witness testimony and sloppy or falsified police work, some result directly from prosecutors and District Attorneys playing politics with cases and going ahead when they know their cases have problems, either with the evidence or the witness testimony. Part of the issue here is that there are no real penalties for taking questionable cases to trial. What happened to Mike Nifong is extremely rare. The same holds true for law enforcement officers and officials. They made get reprimanded, possibly suspended without pay, but typically do not lose their jobs and very rarely face any substantial criminal charges that would result in any prison time. Some of the cases that we have seen might not have gone through if there were real consequences for playing race politics or flat-out lying.

And ultimately it is the state — the prosecutors and their offices — who are responsible for wrongful convictions, not only because they are the ones who bring those cases before judge and jury, but also because they are often the ones who are most loath to acknowledge wrongful convictions. This does not mean there are no prosecutors who care about the wrongfully convicted, only that most seemingly go out of their way to pretend it never happens. There are no apologies, the most basic human gesture, given or extended, no attempts to change the system or policies. That is one of the key reasons why some many innocent people end up in prison, and this is just with cases in which it can be later proven via physical evidence the person is innocent.

Anthony Robinson was correct: this is a cause. It is one all people should support because time and time again we have seen it takes next to nothing for the wrong person to end up spending decades in prison.

I posted about the plight of the bacha bereesh two years ago. Boys in Afghanistan are kidnapped and forced to dress as women and dance, but it more often leads to the boys simply being sex slaves who are routinely raped by tribal warlords or whoever owns them. In the two years since the first article I read about this there has been very little mentioning of it. I have not once seen a news segment about it, nor have I heard it mentioned in any of the discussions about the conditions in that country.

It appears that, like in many other instances, the rape and abuse of boys goes largely ignored.

That was why I was rather surprised to see an article featured on CNN about this, and more surprised that it included victims. The overall situation is fairly bad because rape victims are treated horribly in that part of the world, including male victims, and because some of the boys may end up looking and behaving more like women than men, which puts them in greater danger. One of the boys described his experience with police:

Farhad said that he was taken from a party by four police officers one night and almost gang raped at the station Before their commander walked in and stopped the assault. But then, “He said if I wanted to be set free I should give him my money and my mobile,” Farhad said. “I had no real choice, so I gave him my money and mobile.”

Despite the society finding the rape and abuse of these boys terrible, very little is done and very few organizations reach out to help the boys and men who were victims or who remain victims (like the two young men interviewed). They are generally stuck in the abusive situation, having nowhere to turn or go.

Hopefully the CNN report will help raise awareness about this problem so that boys and men do not continue to suffer in silence.

Abuse network ringleaders jailed — The two men at the centre of Scotland’s largest known child abuse network have been jailed for life. Neil Strachan, 41, attempted to rape an 18-month-old boy while 38-year-old James Rennie sexually assaulted a three-month-old. Strachan was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years in prison, while Rennie was ordered to serve at least 13 years. Police said the operation had led to more than 200 suspected paedophiles, 70 of them in the UK, being identified. Six other men had already been sentenced for their involvement in the network.

‘Abuse rabbi’ returns to Israel — The leader of a Jewish sect has been extradited from Brazil to Israel to face charges of abusing children in a purification ritual to expel demons. Elior Chen fled in 2008 after two boys, aged 3 and 4, were taken to hospital with severe injuries. One is in a vegetative state with brain damage. It is alleged young children were beaten, burned and made to eat faeces at his home in the occupied West Bank.

Archdiocese didn’t publicize priest’s abuse cases, group says — The head of a group that fights child abuse by priests said today that Catholic officials in Detroit failed to publicize the abuse cases of a Catholic seminarian from Detroit who had previously abused children, but is now working as a priest in the Philippines. And it said that a former member of a Detroit-based religious order continued to teach in classrooms despite allegations of abuse.

Bruised, burned boy, 5, dies; mother beat him, police say — A 5-year-old boy who police believe endured years of abuse died Saturday, one day after being hospitalized with head injuries and cuts, bruises and burns over his entire body. The boy’s mother, who gave birth to Arshon Baker while she was in prison, was arrested and was being held on suspicion of felonious assault. Police said more-serious charges could be filed against Angel Glass, 24, when they complete their investigation. Glass told police on Friday that she beat her son because he pulled on her dress to get her attention, said Lt. Thomas Stacho, a police spokesman.

Dayton woman admits to sex with boy — 55-year-old Gloria Murphy pleaded guilty to one count of gross sexual imposition of a person under the age of 13. The charge is a third degree felony and is punishable by up to five years in prison. A very frail looking Gloria Murphy answered to the charges in Judge Mary Katherine Huffman’s courtroom on Friday, October 23. Her other charge, rape of a child, was dropped under a plea agreement.

Families of boys who burned teen were all troubled — By the time they reached Deerfield Beach Middle School, four of the five young teenagers accused of setting a classmate on fire had already grown up in a fractured world where crime or violence was a fact of life. Most were raised in families in which one or both parents have numerous criminal arrests and a history of domestic abuse. In several cases, court records show the parents have drug or alcohol problems. And investigators say all five boys, ages 13 to 16 — have had brushes with the law.

Rape and the culture of fear — Rape is a serious, pervasive problem, and I’ll get back to discussion of the crime itself in a little bit, but first I have to address the societal response: the culture of fear. In several of these diaries and many of the responses, men posting about male victimization are dismissed or marginalized because men do not have to live their lives in constant fear that some stranger will rape them.

South Plains has state’s second-highest per capita rate of child abuse — The South Plains region holds the second-highest per capita rate of child abuse in the state. Lubbock led all Texas counties with 1,540 of the 70,589 child abuse cases statewide last year, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. “Child abuse is a huge problem,” said Johana Scot, executive director of the Parent Guidance Center, an Austin-based advocacy group. “And it is not just in Texas, it’s everywhere.”

Texas Polygamist Women Called “Pimps” — [Flora Jessop] told “The Early Show Saturday Edition” co-anchor Chris Wragge “it really doesn’t” surprise her that the men are being put on trial, “because of the nature of the abuses that we’ve been talking about for years. And I’m just happy to see that they are going to trial. What I’m upset the most about, I think, is the fact that none of the women have been indicted, as well. ” … I think that the women were nothing but pimps on that compound and giving their daughters over to these perverts knowing what was going to happen to them.”

The Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project — A poster of a domestic violence victim stares at passersby from inside the Family Justice Center on Commonwealth Avenue with the words “He Loves me . . . Not” in black block letters surrounding the man’s eye. A quick glance will not reveal the most important part of the poster: the eye belongs to a man. Inside the Family Justice Center, a door with domestic violence informational pamphlets posted on it opens into the public office of the Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project. The nonprofit GMDVP has been supporting victims and survivors of abusive relationships since a gay male survivor started it in 1994.

West Jordan teaching aide faces sex abuse charges — A former West Jordan Middle School teaching aide faces sex abuse charges after she was arrested on suspicion of having sexual relations with two 15-year-old male students. 31-year-old Andrea Billingsley was arrested on Tuesday and booked into the Salt Lake County Jail, suspected of 2 counts of felony sodomy, 3 counts of sexual abuse and 2 counts distribution of harmful materials to minors.

Woman admits to rape of boy — A former Fort Gibson woman entered a blind plea Tuesday to rape of a 14-year old boy. Melissa Jo Wilson was 33 when the rapes took place between June and August 2008. A blind plea means prosecutors did not offer a plea and Wilson chose to leave her fate up to a judge rather than face a jury trial.

Yorktown woman sentenced for sex with teen, other crimes — A Yorktown woman could spend as few as 145 days in the Delaware County jail after pleading guilty to sexual misconduct with a minor and three other felony charges on Monday. Lana Kay Elsworth, 25, was arrested in August 2007, accused of having sex with and providing drugs to a 15-year-old boy who told police that he and other juveniles went to Elsworth’s house to consume alcohol and drugs.

One of the problems feminist faces as a group is winning over men. They face this issue with women as well, but the feminist movement as a whole is far more antagonistic towards men than it is towards non-feminist women. This antagonism often results in men avoiding feminists altogether or severely limiting their interactions with them. Among men, feminist concepts and theories garner more eye-rolling and laughing than sympathy. It is due in large part to the latent, sometimes blatant, misandry that is an integral part of feminist ideology.

The misandry plays itself out in a myriad of ways, although it is most often open criticism of anything remotely related to males or masculinity. This can range from feminists criticizing complaints from men about women working in certain places to feminists attacking efforts to raise awareness for male victims of rape and domestic violence. This feminist hostility leaves many men with the perception that have nothing positive to say about men, which in turns leads men to avoid feminists and feminism at all costs.

However, few movements can gain the level of social control feminists hope to eventually have by winning over small pockets of people. Despite all the policy changes (many of which negatively affect males) feminist have achieved, despite the Women’s Studies departments at most colleges and despite the slow seeping of their rhetoric into pop culture, feminists remain a relatively small, largely unpopular social movement. Simply put: they need to win men over to continue to grow as a movement. This is not to say that feminists are particularly concerned with men’s issues or that they would or do support them. The reality is far to the contrary, and one would be hard-pressed to find feminists supporting shared parenting, opening men’s shelters for abused men, granting male rape victims access to rape centers or supporting organizations like Male Survivor or The Domestic Abuse Hotline for Men and Women. Rather, it is simply a matter of practicality. They cannot have the level of impact they want if men do not support them.

One feminist, Clarisse, tries to address the issue of the lack of male involvement in the feminist movement:

I’m about to assert something that makes me nervous, because I worry that people are going to stick me in the “asshole MRA” box. Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t think that women have it better, overall, than men do. But I do wonder whether it might be good for feminists to acknowledge that — although we don’t experience nearly as much privilege as men — there are a lot of advantages women experience that men don’t.

Because women aren’t seen as threatening, we have an easier time doing confrontational things like approaching strangers on the street. Because women aren’t seen as fighters, we stand a lower chance of being mugged than men do. Because women are seen as emotional, we’re given a huge amount of social space to consider and discuss our feelings. I can work with and be affectionate with children far more easily than a man could. I can be explicit and overt about my sexuality without being viewed as a creep.

I believe the word that best fits what she describes is privilege, in this instance female privilege. Among feminists there is quite often very careful side-stepping to avoid equating anything women do with something feminists have deemed the domain of males. Feminists are very careful not to call female-0n-male physical violence “abuse,” very careful not to call female-on-male sexual violence “rape” or “sexual abuse” and very careful not to call female-over-male advantages “privilege.” This is despite that in every one of those instances the acts or experiences of women meet the feminist definitions of abuse, rape and privilege.

She goes on to explain, despite acknowledging her privilege as a woman, why those advantages are not really positive things:

Of course, it’s worth noting that the advantages women experience are almost always the flip side of unfortunate stereotypes. For instance, one might say that women get more social space for emotion because we’re stereotyped as irrational and hysterical.

The same holds true for the advantages men experience. The vast majority of them are the flip side of unfortunate stereotypes. For example, one might say that men get more social leadership positions because we are stereotyped as being stoic and unmoved by emotion. The effect of this is that far more men than women are placed in incredibly dangerous, life-threatening situations with the expectation that they will not be affected by whatever happens. The same false notion helps perpetuate the silence of male victims of rape and abuse, of men and boys returning home from war, of men and boys suffering from depression, of men and boys suffering in toxic relations. As a result of the perception that males are all-powerful, a whole host of issues are created and/or perpetuated.

While she does acknowledge that her privileges as a women, regardless of their cause, do benefit her, most feminists do not. The feminist complaint that men are thought of as stronger, smarter, more logical and more capable never seem to factor in that most are completely false notions based on ridiculous stereotypes. Feminists also fail to acknowledge that they participate in continuing many of those stereotypes, particularly when they frame those who discuss men’s issues like father’s rights, male victimization, male rape and the boy crisis in schools as “whiners” or “MRA assholes.” The message feminists typically send to men, whether they are non-feminist men or anti-feminist men is that as a group males have no valid complaints. The male perspective is one that need not be acknowledged they are the “oppressing class.”

Again, the issue feminists really face is one of universal acceptance, i.e. getting men, who are largely turned off by feminism, to accept the ideology at face value. Clarisse mentions this problem:

I’ve had an enormous number of experiences trying to discuss feminism/sex/gender with men in which the men tensed, bristled, and closed me out. I don’t think it was always because those guys couldn’t stand the thought of losing their privilege, either. I think a lot of dudes have been led to feel that they have no place in gender discussions — that those discussions will always be about what men are doing wrong, and that no one’s prepared to work with them where they are.

All groups have outsiders. Movements inevitably form themselves around oppositional forces. As someone who’s spent her share of time feeling feminist rage, I’d say that being filled with feminist rage is totally understandable. And seriously, don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving unfeminist guys a free pass. I’m not happy about the fact that so many men are apparently alienated from feminism because us radicals are too confrontational — or too uncomfortably correct — for their fragile masculine egos to handle. (I’m being sarcastic! Mostly.) I’m really not happy about the fact that I’ve got to think about marketing anti-oppression — in a just universe, wouldn’t anti-oppression market itself?

But at the same time, I’m a realist. I know this isn’t a just universe, and I want to use tactics that’ll achieve my goals. Which are: I’d really like to find more men at my side in the sex and gender wars. I’d really like to talk to more guys who don’t see ideas stamped with feminism as an attack — rather, as an opportunity for alliance. Plus, if we’re going to think in terms of cold hard tactics, it’s worth noting that normative men hold most of the power in America. (That’s part of what we’re complaining about, right?) So swelling our ranks with The Oppressive Class means we can ruthlessly use their power for good.

Well, firstly, calling the people one would like to be one’s allies “The Oppressive Class” is an excellent way of ensuring they will want nothing to do with you. Generally speaking, people do not ally themselves with those who frequently insult them, even if in (mostly) jest. The main reason feminists cannot win over most men (or women) is because it is very clear what the feminist position is. While Clarisse tries to imply otherwise, it is obvious from her above comments that her position as a feminist is that men’s concerns, men’s feelings, men’s identities are less relevant or irrelevant compared to those of women. Male rage has no place in feminism; it is wholly invalid. Telling men that their experiences will not be given the same weight or value or insight as women’s experiences will simply make men turn away.

Men’s reaction to feminists is reminiscent of a line from the film Fight Club.

Norton’s Character: When people think you’re dying, they really listen to you instead of just…
Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter): Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.

More often than not, when feminists invite men in,  feminists are simply waiting for their turn to speak. They do not listen nor do they often appear willing to listen. Part of that is a result of their ideological views which typically place boys and men as lesser than females, both in terms of social and literal value. Part of that is the “feminist rage” which typically gets extended towards all males regardless that the vast majority of men do women no harm. The other part is the privileges afforded women in society and particularly in the feminist movement. Their voices and their concerns trump those of males.

It also does not help that for the most part feminists have nothing positive to say about masculinity, nor does it help that their negative views have seeped into society and pop culture, leaving very few positive portrayals of men or boys, especially fathers.

While Clarisse may be genuinely concerned with discussing masculinity, it is clear that she is not particularly open to actually doing that because it would require her to dial back her political views and the issues on men’s terms. It seems more that, like many feminists, she wants to define the problem, define the terms, define the rules of discussion and define the solution. Her problem, like many feminists, is that most men are not (for lack of a better word) stupid enough to walk into that. The feminist position on masculinity and males is perceived as an attack because it is an attack. If anyone reversed the situation and applied the same principles and views feminists hold against to men on women, feminists would certainly call those people hostile towards women, such as they do with Christian and Islamic faiths.

To answer her question about how to broker discussions about masculinity with men, the best suggestion would be to lose the tone that turns men off. People will be more willing to listen to you if you are more willing to listen to them. If it sounds like you have already made up your mind before men even speak, chances are that none of them will have anything to do with you because they likely will not think you are actually interested in anything they have to say.

From the site:

I know you all are aware that 2009 has been a very hard year to all non-profit organizations. Here at Male Survivor it has not been any different. Our donations have decreased and some of our members have not been able to renew their memberships. We have tightened our financial belts and continued to look for other sources of support.

Part of that focus has been to put together a team that is working on finding funding for the website, the conference and the Weekend of Recovery program. If you have any experience in successful grant writing and are willing to donate your time to us, please contact me at president@malesurvivor.org and I will put you in touch with the development team to work on that project.

Even with the belt tightening, we also need to ask you for your financial help now. Please consider making a donation to Male Survivor. Currently you may do so through the Supporters/Donor tab on the home page or at https://www.malesurvivor.org/register/register. Or there is now a donate button available to make it easier to donate when you first arrive at the site. Gifts of any size are needed. Please do not think that you cannot make difference. If you are able to donate $8.34 per month, that is $100.00 a year. Your donation can be set up to charge your credit card or bank account automatically each month. Every donation counts.

There are other ways you can help as well. If you have a personal contact at a charitable foundation and are willing to make a personal introduction for the development team, that introduction will help. If your employer supports non-profits, ask if they will consider a gift to Male Survivor. Some companies (Wal-mart and Bright House Networks are examples) have a program where they will financially contribute to non-profits that their employees support with their time. If you have gift cards to office supply stores, grocery stores or others, send them to us and we can use them to buy supplies. If you have a company who gives in kind services, we may be able to use that for the conference, Weekend of Recovery or administrative parts of Male Survivor. Many credit card mileage programs will allow you to make donations using the points you have accumulated. As you can see, there are many ways to help.

Please consider making a donation today. Donations can be to the general expenses of Male Survivor or designated to the endowment fund or to the Memorial Fund which supplies scholarships to the Weekend of Recovery program.

Thank you for continuing to support Male Survivor.
_________________________
Ken Followell