Media Groupthink
The aftermath of the tragic death of Ashling Murphy has seen a fresh wave of anti-male sentiment in which media groupthink reached new levels of absurdity.
In the rush to condemn “male violence against women” some claim to see a pattern in the killings and declare they are not random; this even appeared in an Irish Times editorial.
But one saner article pointed out that the last murder of a woman by a man unknown to her was that of Jastine Valdez in 2018 and the Garda Commissioner also stated that such acts are rare.
The onslaught was led by the National Women’s Council in comments on RTE radio on Friday.
NWC whipped up emotions at this difficult moment with the phrase “male violence against women” used prominently to attack men, to spread blame. This was then picked up by other journalists. It came up in the Irish Examiner, in RTE, in the Irish Times including in editorials. The word “misogyny” was thrown about with abandon as though men as a collective were guilty.
Man-hating has become a feature of far too much writing of late
The phrase “male violence against women” or simply “violence against women” has figured in the radical feminist literature for decades; it is a phrase which places guilt for crimes by some men against women collectively and squarely on the whole male population. This is further affirmed by the demand that boys be “socialised” or instructed while at school to desist from violence against women. No corresponding demand is made on girls.
The phrase “violence against women” or VAW appears in the VAW Act in the US, in the Istanbul Convention here and elsewhere in Europe, and constantly in the literature of the UN where UN Women occupies a commanding role and benefits from enormous sums of UN money. Indeed it was the UN which instituted November 25 as International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Note that although the great majority of victims of violence are men, the UN did not institute an International Day for the Elimination of Violence. This does not accord with its ideology which does not give a damn about men and boys; it is most certainly not inclusive.
It should also be noted that the Istanbul Convention was drawn up by the Council of Europe, a so-called human rights body which in a better and much earlier period drew up the ECHR.
All of which goes to show that international bodies have been infiltrated and poisoned by the ideology of radical feminism. This has been going on since the 1980s at least.
International bodies have been infiltrated and poisoned by the ideology of radical feminism
Who does NWCI Represent?
The NWCI is a highly privileged body which has benefited hugely from State funding for fifty years, which has never been required to account for itself and before which politicians quake and the craven media cowers and defers at every turn.
The question has never been asked : Who does it represent?
Does it represent women? Certainly not on the issue of whether men can become women simply by signing a piece of paper as the Gender Recognition Act provides. A survey has shown that only 17% of the population support the GRA.
Does it stand for free speech? No, it calls for the denial of representation by politicians and the media to those who oppose the above Act.
Has it ever conducted a survey to determine what women want on this issue? No, instead it prefers to lecture women on what they should want whether that be on gender self-identification or on preference for career over family.
Yet the NWCI has been state funded since 1972. It has never been required to account for its spending or its activities in all that time. It acts like a state within a state with regular and the most deferential access to the media.
NWC has regular and completely uncritical access to the media
In 2020 it got €552,000 from the Department of Justice, €141,000 from the HSE and €90,000 from Pobal; in all a total of €840,000 from the state. This level of funding has been constant for many years.
Violence committed by women
But there is another side to the violence issue that is never discussed by the biased media and their craven allies and that is the violence and abuse committed by women. This is both considerable and surprising. We consider two areas: Domestic Violence and the Abuse and Maltreatment of Children.
The DV issue is now much better understood and the surveys carried out across numerous countries display a remarkable consistency. So much so that groups like Women’s Aid and Safe Ireland cannot come up with credible surveys that support their case. The great majority of surveys show that men and women perpetrate DV at comparable rates and across all types. They also contradict the image so beloved of most media: that of the male batterer and the helpless innocent female. The majority of DV is bidirectional. Indeed surveys from the NISVS in the US in 2010 and 2015 show that women commit more violence than men: 58% of DV is bidirectional and of the rest women commit two thirds. The 2010 findings showed that over the previous 12 months, 10.7% of women suffered coercive control as against 15.2% of men. Naturally the craven and lying media will not inform the public of this, nor has Tusla taken it into account either. This again is not surprising; Tusla is also utterly biased and its DSGBV section should be disbanded.
The figures and surveys quoted above refute the lie that Domestic Violence is gender-based. It is not.
If more evidence was needed we also know that lesbian violence is at least as frequent as heterosexual. Indeed once again the NISVS survey does contain a lifetime rate of any violence by an intimate Partner: Lesbian 44% ; Gay 26%; and for heterosexuals: Women 35%; Men 29%.
This is a wide difference which again the public is never told about.
Surveys quoted above refute the lie that Domestic Violence is gender-based. It is not
One area of general abuse in which girls/young women excel is known as Relational Aggression; it consists of verbally destroying another’s reputation. It includes direct and indirect acts such as threatening to end a friendship unless a peer complies with a request; using social exclusion as a retaliatory behaviour; spreading rumours to encourage peers to reject a classmate. It has been studied by the psychologist Nicki Crick who wrote extensively about it.
A short account of Crick’s work is here .
She found that 17.4% of girls displayed relational aggression as opposed to 2.0% of boys, while almost the reverse was true of physical aggression.
The Abuse and Maltreatment of Children
The US government has been tracking this topic for many years. The huge sample size gives an accurate picture of the dynamics which may be hard to find elsewhere. Survey 2020 can be found here:
Briefly Sixty-nine percent of victims are maltreated by a mother, either acting alone (40.8%) or with a father and/or nonparent (28.2%).
Table 3.17 also shows that 44.1% are maltreated by the father either acting alone (21.5%) or with a mother and/or non-parent (22.6%).
Another study from 2006 has similar figures. The U.S. National Survey on Child Maltreatment (Gaudiosi, 2006) had a sample of 718,948 investigations of child abuse; 57.8% of the perpetrators were women, and 42.2% were men. It looked at homicides:
Of child homicides, 60% involved the mother either acting alone or in concert with another perpetrator, whereas just 40% involved the father (Gaudiosi, 2006, Figures 3-6 and 4-2).
The Trocme study was carried out in Canada. In this study of 135,573 child maltreatment investigations conducted by Health Canada (Trocme et al., 2001), biological mothers (as compared to biological fathers) were the more likely perpetrators of physical abuse, neglect, emotional maltreatment, and multiple categories of abuse.
The consistency of the findings is very significant. We do not know of any similar surveys in Ireland.