Radical Feminists, Science and the Rule of Law
With all the extreme craziness in the world a lot gets obscured. That’s particularly true of the older, better-established craziness that tends to be covered up by the newer strains that, simply by their novelty, seem more exotic and therefore attract more attention. That very fact though, makes the older madness more dangerous; like a toxic fungus, it thrives in darkness.
I refer of course to extremist feminism that is as hard at work overturning the basics of civilization as ever. One of those basics is the rule of law and its keystone, due process of law. Another is science.
So, in Canada three weeks ago, an amazing 250 feminist organizations sent a letter to the Minister of Justice arguing that the very concept of parental alienation should be scrubbed from the law and facts demonstrating PA should be, in all cases, inadmissible in court.
Now, feminists have been at this for a long time. Their arguments are loony as a matter of law, science, children’s welfare and that of society, but also, amazingly enough, for the cause of feminism itself. For those organizations, it’s a tour de force of just barking madness.
As most people who’ve been involved with family court reform know, parental alienation occurs when one parent tries to turn a child against the other parent without just cause. It’s a simple concept and one that family court judges and the lawyers who practice before them know all too well. It’s also familiar to mental health professionals, custody advisers and the like.
PA is dangerous to children, particularly young ones, because the alienating parent pressures them to believe to be true what they experience to be untrue – that the other parent doesn’t love them, harms them, etc. In very young children who don’t have a firm grasp on the difference between reality and unreality, that can create mental/emotional strains that can do lasting damage.
In any case, the whole purpose of parental alienation is to remove one loving, capable parent from a child’s life and that alone risks damage to the child’s psyche.
When they try to remove evidence of PA from courtrooms, those feminist organizations necessarily seek the harming of children and emotional damage to mothers and fathers alike. They claim that allowing evidence of parental alienation into child custody cases empowers fathers at the expense of mothers, but the fact is that parental alienation is not the sole province of mothers; fathers do it to. So, if the feminist campaign were to succeed, it would end up harming those alienated mothers and their children. It would also tend to increase sole maternal custody, i.e., the extremists’ goal. But they might consider the fact that single mothers with children in the home are by far the poorest members of society.
This is what feminists want? Someone once said, “scratch a feminist and you uncover a misogynist every time,” a point to which there’s considerable validity.
The science on parental alienation is vast and growing. No serious researcher doubts that some parents seek to alienate their children from the other parent or that family courts and mental health care providers must be vigilant to identify the process and stop it as soon as possible.
But perhaps the salient feature of the feminist attack is their intention not simply to cast doubt on PA and, they would hope, gain the upper hand in the battle of experts in court, but to prohibit admission of any and all evidence of it. That can only mean that they have so little confidence in their own claims – that PA is “pseudoscience,” that it’s a nefarious plot by fathers, that mothers never alienate their kids, etc. – that they can’t risk them being tested in court. About that of course, they’re right. Those claims are so well-known to be false and not even worth discussing that a scorched-earth approach is the only one with a chance of winning.
As usual, extremist feminist ideology trumps facts, logic, the well-being of children and much of feminism itself.
And so it is in Australia. There, the intrepid and wise Bettina Arndt reports a series of actions by feminist lawyers that directly contradict both the canon of legal ethics and the oath they took to be allowed to practice. Those include publicly promoting perjury, prejudicing a jury against a (what else?) male defendant, presuming the guilt of criminal defendants (as long as they’re male), discriminating against (who else?) males in hiring practices, attempting to railroad innocent men accused of rape, and successfully lobbying Parliament to return child custody cases to the bad old days of the 1970s when, for all intents and purposes, fathers never got custody.
That’s all true despite some of those lawyers being fired for their misbehavior and slammed by judges. Loudly and proudly, they announce that they don’t care. As in Canada, feminist ideology is its own reward and everything else be damned.
Then it’s on to the United Nations where the Special Rapporteur, one Reem Alsalem, was dispatched to the UK to report on violence against women and girls (and of course not against men and boys). Needless to say, her report was breathtaking, not due to the level of violence against women, but in its utter disregard for the truth.
There are about 60 million people in England and Wales. In 2022-23, 416 males and 174 females were victims of homicide there. For a bit of perspective, that’s about 1/7th the homicide rate of the U.S. Of course even one homicide victim is one too many, but the fact remains that a female victimization rate of 0.58/100,000 women and girls is among the very lowest in the world.
As to domestic violence, the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance reports that,
A survey of UK university students found 7% of male students and 15% of female students admitted to being physically aggressive with their dating partner.
A 2015 study in London revealed nearly identical levels of physical victimization by a partner in the past year: Males: 62%; Females: 65%.
The UK Office of National Statistics recently reported, “The overall prevalence of any physical injury to victims of partner abuse was greater for male victims (22.2%) than female victims (13.6%).”
In other words, as in most of the Western world, men and women commit and are victimized by domestic violence about equally. Did Alsalem’s report mention any of that? Of course not. That’s because, as is so often the case, facts contradict the extremist feminist narrative and therefore must be ignored.
Worse, and again as usual, that narrative ends up hurting the very people feminists supposedly care about – women and girls. Science on DV long ago established that most DV is reciprocal and that about 70% of that is initiated by women whose male partners then retaliate. Therefore, the single best way any country can reduce the rate of DV against women is to teach them to control their anger and refrain from hitting first.
But, as before, that message runs counter to the feminist narrative, so extremists like Alsalem stick with the narrative to the detriment of everyone, including women.
Did I mention that, under the surface of radical feminists lurks a misogynist? Yes, I believe I did.
Did I mention that radical feminists continue to seek to undermine two of the basics of Western civilization – science and the rule of law? Yes, I did that too.