MenAreGood
Teen Violence - When Ideology Trumps Data - 3 Bias Against Men and Boys in Psychological Research
tgolden
April 15, 2023

 

 
The first project we will examine is a study on teen relationship violence from Great Britain.  The study consisted of both a written survey and subjective interviews of selected teens. The survey portion of the study was fairly conclusive in finding that teen relationship violence was experienced by both boys and girls. An “ad campaign” was created as a result of this work. Surprisingly, the ad campaign is designed to help only girls who were victims of teen relationship violence while focusing on boys only as perpetrators. This stunning neglect of male victims and female perpetrators is in stark contrast to the numbers of the research survey of this study which showed males to be victims of teen relationship violence and girls to be perpetrators. Let’s start at the beginning of the story when this issue first caught my attention.

A friend emailed me a link a couple of months ago to an article from Great Britain about teen violence. The friend was worried that the article was biased against boys. Here’s how it started:

  • Teenage boys were urged not to violently abuse their girlfriends in a new Government campaign launched today.
  • TV, radio, internet and poster ads will target young males aged 13 to 18 in an attempt to show the consequences of abusive relationships. It is part of a wider effort by ministers to cut domestic violence against both women and younger girls.
  • Research published last year by the NSPCC found a quarter of teenage girls said they had been physically abused by their boyfriends.
  • One in six said they had been pressured into sex and one in three said they had gone further sexually than they had wanted to.

I was a bit taken back by the article considering the recent research on teen violence which has been finding that relationship violence in teens is fairly symmetrical with both boys and girls being perpetrators and victims. This article was offering a very different perspective from the studies I had been seeing. It was clearly assuming that the girls were the primary victims and the boys the primary perpetrators which reflects an archaic and outdated stereotype about domestic violence. It made me wonder exactly what was happening. I read several more articles online about the ad campaign mentioned in the first article and was shocked to see that the focus of the campaign was indeed solely to help girls and to “teach” boys about not abusing their girlfriends.

In each of the articles there was a reference to the research findings that drove the ad campaign. I decided to go back to the source and see what the original research had found.

The original study was sponsored by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) of Great Britain and was in two parts. The first part was the “full report” and was a detailed 209 page research report explaining methodology, results, implications and conclusions. The next was the Executive Summary which was a 10 page summation of the findings of the full report. It was a quick read meant to give people the essence of the larger document. I read through the “full report” and then the executive summary. It was striking to me that the data in the full report actually showed that boys were victims of teen violence. The original news article I had read had mentioned that the research had found that 25% of girls said they had been physically abused by their boyfriends. What the news article omitted saying was that the same research had also found that 18% of boys had said that they had been physically abused by their girlfriends. This meant that this research found that almost half of the victims of teen relationship violence were boys! Somehow this important fact had been omitted from the news report.

There were plenty of other headlines that could have been drawn from the data of the full report that showed the boys to have been victims and the girls perpetrators but they were nowhere to be seen in any of the news articles. Here are a couple of examples of headlines that could be written from the data of the full report:

  • 25% of those reporting physically forcing their partners into having sexual intercourse were girls – Table 15 page 82 full report
  • Nearly three times as many girls reported using SEVERE violence in relationships. table 11 – page 75 full report
  • Over three times as many girls reported using partner violence in their relationships table 10 page 74 full report
  • Over 1/3 of those reporting being pressured into kissing, touching or something else were boys. table 6 page 66 full report–
  • Nearly half (42%) of the victims of teen relationship violence were boys 
Table 3 page 44 full report
  • Nearly one third of the victims of severe violence were boys
Table 4 page 45 full report
  • Twice as many girls reported physically forcing their partners into “kissing, touching, or something else” more than a few times. Table 13 page 82 full report

This is just a sampling of the sorts of findings in the full report. It is obvious that their survey clearly indicated that teen relationship violence was not gender based and both the victims and the perpetrators were both boys and girls. However, what I found after reading both the full report and the executive summary was that the full report had data that showed boys to be victims and girls to be perpetrators but the executive summary seemed to have considerably less information about male victims and female perpetrators. In fact the executive summary seemed to focus more on female victims and male perpetrators.

I found myself wondering how this transition could take place. Boys were shown to be victims in the original study, often not in as great a number as the girls but victims all the same. Generally the boys comprised about 25-42% of the victims. Certainly not the majority but also not a small number that could be ignored. But ignore them they did!

The NSPCC introduced this research to the media via a press release. We can see the same tendency of moving away from focusing on boys when looking at the words in the press release. What started in the full report as an apparently egalitarian look into teen relationship violence progressively looked less so in the Executive Summary and now with the press release it looks to have moved one more step towards focusing solely on girls. Here’s the opening of the press release. Note the focus on “girls only” in both the headline and the first paragraphs:

Teen girls abused by boyfriends warns NSPCC
Press releases
01 September 2009
A third of teenage girls in a relationship suffer unwanted sexual acts and a quarter physical violence, reveals new research(1) launched today (01 September 2009) by the NSPCC(2) and the University of Bristol(3).


The survey of 13 to 17-year-olds found that nearly nine out of ten girls had been in an intimate relationship. Of these, one in six said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse and 1 in 16 said they had been raped. Others had been pressured or forced to kiss or sexually touch.


A quarter of girls had suffered physical violence such as being slapped, punched, or beaten by their boyfriends.

Girls are highlighted repeatedly in the press release. If one only read the press release you might assume that the boys were incidental and that the girls were clearly the identified victims of teen relationship violence. The boys actually did get mentioned in one paragraph (one out of 18 paragraphs, eleven of which were about girls). Here it is:

Nearly nine out of ten boys also said they had been in a relationship. A smaller number reported pressure or violence from girls. (Only one in seventeen boys in a relationship reported being pressured or forced into sexual activity and almost one in five suffered physical violence in a relationship).

Note how the boys victimization is minimized with words like “a smaller number” and “only one in seventeen.” Keep in mind that the “smaller number” referred to in the second sentence was 18% versus 25% which had been the figure for girls. While 18 is smaller than 25, it is not that much smaller. Another important difference is that the girls 25% stat was mentioned in the opening sentence of the document (and indirectly in the headline) while the boys 18% stat was mentioned as an afterthought in parentheses. Yes, the boys percentage was smaller but it seems very obvious that this press release is trying to marginalize the victimization of boys.

Note that the press release mentions that one in 17 girls had been raped. This works out to about 5.8% of the females surveyed. What they don’t mention is that the same table in the full report that showed that 5.8% of girls were raped also showed that 3.3% of the boys were also raped. This stat never made it beyond the full report. The press release mentions the rape of girls but is completely silent on the shocking statistic that 3.3% of the boys were raped. The fact is that their data from the full report shows boys comprised over one third of the rape victims. Not a word about this.

It now seems easy to understand how the media articles focused so exclusively on girls and ignored the needs of boys. They likely only read the press release and maybe a part of the executive summary. The press release might very well have been the only document they read about the study and it clearly focused almost exclusively on girls while ignoring the needs of boys. How bad did it get in focusing on just girls? Here is a sampling of typical headlines from actual news articles on this research and ad campaign:


Many Girls’ Abused by Boyfriends
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8230844.stm

Third of teenage girls forced into sex, NSPCC survey finds
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/sep/01/teenage-sexual-abuse-nspcc-report

1 in 3 Teenage Girls Tell of Sexual Abuse by Their Boyfriends
 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1210375/One-teenage-girls-physically-abused-boyfriend.html

Teen Girls Abused by Boyfriends Warns NSPCC 
 http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6524.html

 

Almost every headline I found focused on girls as victims. I never found one headline that focused on boys. The articles would occasionally mention that boys were vulnerable but the main thrust was surely the girls vulnerability and victimhood.
The ad campaign is the real world response to the findings of this research using TV, radio, internet and poster ads in attempts to change behaviours of teen relationship violence. It is where the theoretical ends and the actual support and tax dollars begin. Inexplicably, the focus of the ad campaign is entirely on girls as victims of relationship violence while boys are seen as the problem and are taught to not abuse their girlfriends. Somehow the original research had shown that both boys and girls were victims of relationship violence and by the time we made our way to the media articles and then to the ad campaign we find that the original data is all but forgotten.
How did this happen?



The Full Report and then boys disappear

The full report offers an abundance of data that shows that boys are victims of teen partner violence but somehow the recommendations of both the full report and the executive summary seem to focus primarily on girls. Here’s a quick summary extrapolated from the full report:

According to their survey:

72% girls reported experiencing emotional violence
51% of boys reported emotional violence
BOYS WERE 41% of the victims of emotional violence in teen relationships

25% of girls experienced physical partner violence
18% of the boys experienced physical partner violence
BOYS WERE 42% of the victims of physical partner violence in teen relationships

31% of girls experienced sexual partner violence
16% of boys experienced sexual partner violence
BOYS WERE 34% of the victims of sexual partner violence in teen relationships.

So the boys ranged between 34-42% of the victims as recorded in the survey, The full report states this loud and clear in the data but then with the recommendations of both the full report and the executive summary and then the press release the boys seems to simply disappear. Why could that be? The researchers fail to explain fully the reasons for this but if you read between the lines you can find that they offer two reasons. The first is that the survey responses indicate that girls are more “impacted” by relationship violence than the boys. There is a question on the survey that asks about emotional reactions to the violence and the girls were much more likely to check the boxes that indicated they were scared/upset/humiliated. The boys were more likely to check boxes that said they were angry/annoyed or the box that said there was no effect on them. The researchers seem to have taken this difference and decided that since the girls were more “impacted” from the experience of violence that they should be the ones to get the attention and services. There are a number of places in the full report where this is implied. Here is one:

This research has demonstrated that a fundamental divide exists in relation to how girls and boys are affected by partner violence, and this divide needs to be a central component in the development of professional responses to this issue.

Just what does “professional responses to this issue” mean? They don’t say but we can only assume that they are suggesting that girls receive more attention and services due to their being more impacted by the violence. Considering the recommendations focus on girls and ignore the needs of boys I think the above assumption is a good one. I would be happy to be corrected on this assumption if I am incorrect.

The researchers seem willing to basically ignore their own substantial evidence that boys are victims of violence simply because the girls have a greater emotional reaction. Here’s another quote:

These findings are further elaborated on in the interview data where girls consistently described the harmful impact that the violence had on their welfare, often long term, while boy victims routinely stated they were unaffected or, at the very worst, annoyed. These results provide the wider context in which teenage partner violence needs to be viewed.

Let’s keep in mind that the above quoted interview data, which we will examine later, included only 62 hand-selected girls and 29 similarly selected boys. Importantly, only one of the 29 boys was a victim of non-reciprocal violence so making generalizations based on the interview data is likely unreliable especially considering the survey data was collected from over 1300 teens. Note also that by saying “the wider context in which teenage partner violence needs to be viewed” we can only assume the researchers are again suggesting that girls be given preference in services and aid. What we do know is that the data on violence against boys is ignored in the recommendation sections and also in the ad campaign. The following quote gives us a bit more clarity regarding the views of the researchers:

Intervention programmes need to reflect this fundamental difference by ensuring that the significant impact of violence on girls’ wellbeing is recognised and responded to, while enabling boys to recognise the implications of partner violence for their partners and themselves.

This statement clearly shows that the researchers believe that the girls should be treated differently and intervention programs need to “reflect” the difference that girls are more impacted by the violence.

But are girls more impacted? I am not so sure. Let’s start by looking at the actual question on the survey:

3 How did it make you feel when force was used against you? 

scared/frightened 
angry/annoyed 
humiliated 
upset/unhappy 
loved/protected 
thought it was funny 
no effect

“If you don’t see it, it must not exist.”

The researchers stated that the answers to this question showed a big difference in boys and girls responses about the impact that the violence had on them. They don’t give the raw data about the responses and don’t offer the numbers each sex chose for each answer but they give us the summary saying that girls were much more “impacted.” There are very good reasons for that. This question is a set up since boys and girls will naturally answer it very differently. The creators of this question seem to fail to understand the hierarchical nature of boys and their strong natural reluctance to show any lack of independence. If the boys had checked “scared/frightened”, “humiliated” or “upset/unhappy” they would be admitting that they were less than independent. This is usually avoided while a choice such as “no effect” or “angry/annoyed” would be much more likely in order to maintain their image. As Warren Farrell would say “The weakness of men is the facade of strength: the strength of women is the facade of weakness.”

The men and boys are much more likely to choose a response that will portray them as strong. If this is correct it is easy to understand how boys’ responses might not accurately convey their degree of hurt or upset. It is very possible that the boys who checked the “no effect” box were just as impacted by the violence as their female counterparts. With these sorts of questions it leaves us simply not knowing. To suggest the direction of future services based on the responses to this question would be very risky and likely give very poor results.

I wonder if the researchers would think that a rape victim who claimed there there was no impact on her would not need support services? Would clinicians simply ignore her? No, I would bet they wouldn’t. If a group of domestic violence victims claimed that the violence had no impact on them would they quickly assume that group did not need support services? No. Then why would they dismiss the trauma of boys simply because they have marked a survey question differently and reported to be less upset? They would realize that people have very unique responses to trauma and that not having an immediate or verbal emotional reaction to a trauma does not in any way indicate that that person should be ignored. That is simply ridiculous.

Having worked with trauma victims for many years I know very well that some people will sometimes not even begin to feel the negative impact of a trauma for months and others for years. Restricting services for victims of trauma due to their response seeming to show less emotional impact is one of the zaniest ideas I have heard for some time. Denying services to a birth group for this reason seems to simply be bigoted.

Are the researchers biased against boys?

There are numerous indications, in addition to what has already been described, that the researchers have an anti-boy bias. There are the obvious dismissals of the survey data that shows boys to be victims of partner violence and the complete focus on girls as victims. But there are a number of more subtle clues in the study that seem to indicate a disdain for boys.

When they did mention boys as victims the report tended to minimize their experience. Here is a quote:

Boys’ experiences of violence
Little evidence existed to support the possibility that boys, although they were negatively affected by their partner’s violence, felt unable either to voice or to recognise their vulnerability. Boys minimised their own use of violence as “messing around”. Boys also reported the violence as mutual, although they often used disproportionate force compared to their female partners.

Rather than comment on the experience of the boys to violence the researchers focus on whether they could “give voice” to the negative affects of their partners violence. This seems to be a weak attempt to show that boys could indeed voice their concerns about being victims of violence and since they were able to voice that response they must not be “held back” by traditional masculinity from being able to express their vulnerability. The unspoken assumption seems to be that since they can voice the pain they are not holding back due to traditional masculinity and simply aren’t impacted by the violence. It just doesn’t matter while for the girls it really does matter. These seem to be distractions from the reality that the boys have been victimized. Reading the above paragraph will give the reader a sense of how the boys were treated differently in this study. Their pain was minimized and rationalized by claiming the were really not so impacted. The thrust is to say that boys do experience violence from their female partners but they aren’t so negatively impacted! They are able to voice or recognize their vulnerability. It is well known that men and boys will try to minimize any sort of hurt or injury and try to maintain an independent stance. This by no means indicates they are not impacted, it just means that will try to not let you know it. It is for this very reason that we need to take a different approach with boys who may be victimized but this study seems to prefer to simply ignore the pain of boys and focus just on the girls.

Messing Around

The quote above states that “Boys minimised their own use of violence as “messing around.” The full report affirms that boys label their own violence as “messing around” 56% of the time. This is given later in the recommendations section as a reason that boys should be taught about being aware of their violence. (see below) But what about the girls? When you see that boys are singled out for this perception of “messing around” you would think that the girls would not explain their own violence in that manner. Not in the Alice in Wonderland environment of this study. Actually by the researchers own numbers the girls labelled their own violence as “messing around” 43% of the time. Just 13% points below the boys. You would think that both boys and girls would need to learn about their own violence but somehow the only ones that need to learn are the boys! That is an anti-boy bias.

Here is the quote:

“However, although intervention programmes should ensure that the needs of both girls and boys are recognised, it is important that the wider experiences of girls remain a focus. In addition, boys’ minimisation of their own use of violence – by dismissing it as “messing around” and justifications based on mutual aggression – needs to be challenged.”

Why would the boys need to be challenged about this and the girls not? The boys said their violence was “messing around” 56% of the time and the girls said their violence was a slightly lower “messing around” 43% of the time. Clearly a strong bias in favor of girls and anti-boys.

The researchers went a step farther than just recommending that girls victimisation should be the focus. The researchers made the claim that boys lower scores on the impact question actually made them more dangerous to their female partners. Here is a quote:

If boys view the impact of their victimisation as negligible, they may also apply this understanding to their own actions. Thus, they may believe that their partners are also unaffected by their use of violence.

The implication here is that the boys ignorance/insensitivity of the impact of violence against them shows that they would be less than sensitive to their own violence used against a partner. I don’t believe that for a second considering almost every boy has had it drilled into their brains that they are never to hit a girl. Let’s use the same sort of reasoning but apply it instead to girls. According to the survey the girls suffer a much greater emotional impact from being victims of violence. Yet by the girls report, they use violence three times MORE in relationships than boys even though they know it’s negative impact and is hurtful. This would lead us to believe that girls are aware of the power to hurt others with violence and choose to do so far more often than boys. This doesn’t put the girls in a particularly good light now does it?

Thus, from these findings it seems conclusive that partner sexual violence
represents a problem for girls, while boys report being unaffected.

That pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

Boys are more violent! When the subjective trumps the objective

The survey was supposed to be the main source of data but in some ways the researchers seem to put much more stock in the subjective information they had obtained via the interviews. While the survey in the full report showed clearly that the girls were three times more likely to report using violence in relationship suddenly the researchers are exclaiming that there was a clear consensus from the girls that boys used physical violence in relationship more often than girls. Here’s the quote:

“There was a clear consensus within girls’ accounts that boys used physical violence in relationships more often than girls. This common understanding regarding the gendered nature of physical violence was reported by almost all girls, whether they themselves had experienced violence or not.”

This is from page 94 of the full report and shows the researchers evaluations of the girls interviews. The most glaring part of this is that the survey portion of the study showed clearly that girls were 3-6 times more likely to report being violent in relationships and yet the subjective data drawn from the interviews claims that there was a “common understanding regarding the gendered nature of physical violence” for “almost all girls” that “boys used physical violence in relationships more often than girls.” This is a huge discrepancy when one half of the study shows girls to report being much more inclined to be violent than the boys and the other half claiming that “boys used physical violence in relationship more often than girls.” This demands an explanation but there was little to be found. The closest the researchers come is to use the hackneyed claim that girls high rates of violence in relationships is due to their using violence as self defense. But if you look at the numbers this claim falls flat on its face. The facts are that 25% of the girls reported being violent in relationship compared to 8% of the boys. When you subtract the percentages of violence claimed to be in self defense from both boys (30%) and girls (44%) you find that 14% of girls were violent in relationship and 5.6% of the boys for reasons other than self defense. That’s nearly three times more girls than boys. (-30% of 8%= 5.6% and -44% of 25%= 14%) Not making this an important point in this research is very suspect. This difference is huge. Girls reported almost three times as often that they perpetrated violence in their relationships and yet there is a claim that almost all girls believed boys used “physical violence in relationship more often” and this leads us to the idea that girls are in need of services and boys in need of changing their behaviors? Baffling. Clearly misandry.

One partial explanation of this is shown in the following quote:

Only 6 per cent of boys, compared to a third of girls, claimed that they were negatively affected by the emotional violence they experienced. This gendered impact disparity upholds Stark’s (2007) contention that coercive control, which many of our components of emotional violence reflect, is made meaningful only when placed within a gendered power understanding of intimate violence. Thus, although girls had used emotional violence, without it being underpinned by other forms of inequality and power, their attempts were rendered largely ineffectual.

Incredibly, this section seems to be giving girls a pass for their emotional violence. The pattern continues: When girls are perpetrators they are given excuses, when boys are victims they are ignored and minimized.

Reporting oddities

When you look closely at the section about girls reporting more frequent perpetration of violence in relationship you notice something very odd.  Look at the following paragraph and note the researchers choice of words.  Note that girls “report” and boys “admit” (emphasis mine):

Page 74 More girls reported using physical violence against their partner than did boys; this represented a significant difference (x2 (1) = 60.804, p<.001). A quarter (n=148) of girls compared to 8 per cent (n=44) of boys stated that they had used some form of physical violence against their partner. Looking first at less severe physical violence (see table 10), the vast majority of girls (89 per cent) reporting the use of physical violence had used it once or a few times. Only a few (11 per cent) used it more frequently. Similarly, the small proportion of boys who admitted using physical violence also generally used it infrequently (83 per cent).

Perhaps the words “report” and “admit” have different meanings in Great Britain but here in the US they aren’t usually the same.  Report generally means to make a statement or announcement.  The word admit however has a different spin.  Often it has more to do with conceding or confessing.  One assumption from the wording the researchers  have chosen would be to think that they simply didn’t believe what the boys reported.  In other words they would only concede or admit to a certain amount of violence.  Basically, implying that they are not telling the entire story. This is of course conjecture on my part but it simply seems like more anti-boy bias.

The Interview Section

As was previously explained the research had both a quantitative section and qualitative section. The qualitative section consisted of semi-structured interviews which included the utilization of five vignettes. The vignettes were stories that were told to the participant and then the stories relevance was discussed as a part of the interview. The stated goals of the researchers was to use the quantitative survey to gain data and use the interviews to enhance their understanding.

The researchers claimed that they had problems in getting participants for the interviews in the manner they had originally planned so they switched mid-stream to a different approach described below:

“We therefore moved to a system whereby researchers observed which young people seemed to be engaging with the survey. They then asked those young people if they would like to take part in the interview stage.”

So they hand picked the interview participants based on their own subjective impression of whether the young person was “engaging with the survey.” This sounds to me to be a direct invitation to a very biased sample.  Then you find out that the choices they made of those who were “engaging in the survey” were 62 girls but only 29 boys.  You also find that of the 29 boys only one had experienced being a victim of non reciprocal violence in relationship! Makes you wonder about their ideas of “engaging in the survey.” Needless to say the boys section describing the interviews was only 22 pages long while the section about the girls was over 60 pages.  Even with such a short section for the boys most of the writing was about boys violence not their reaction to being victims of violence. Girls victimization was highlighted as was boys violence. Even in the section on boys as victims.

The Vignettes

When I first started looking at the issue of this survey I emailed the folks at NSPCC and asked for a copy of the original questionnaire and copies of the vignettes.  They were kind enough to email me both.  I had suspected that the vignettes would be slanted towards the girls and so I was not surprised to see that the stories were mostly about boys possessiveness, shouting, name calling, violence, and sexual pressuring.  Only one story of the five portrayed the female as the perpetrator and in that story the perpetrated act was very mild.  The girl (and her cronies) stole the boys cell phone, made unkind comments the next day and then apologized.  In the other vignettes we see boys being violent or pushing girls into sexual behaviors that they don’t want.  In one we see the girls using violence, but in self defense.  To the researchers credit the first three vignettes have questions following the story which ask if this sort of behavior might also exist in the opposite sex.  Inexplicably they omit that important question on the final two vignettes which focus on sexual demands.  This is highly suspect and leads one to guess that their ideological bias may have disallowed them to see boys as sexual victims and/or the girls as perpetrators.  Interestingly their data from the full report shows that girls freely admit to sexually pressuring their male boyfriends so this again leaves us wondering why they would avoid the question in the interview section.

Would the researchers tolerate a set of vignettes that showed 80% of the perpetrators to be female and the only male perpetrator was portrayed as having stolen a cell phone and then apologized? I would bet we would hear loud rants about inclusiveness and marginalization and they would be correct!  It seems to me that these vignettes seriously marginalized the boys in this survey and likely left them feeling misunderstood and left out since their situations were simply not portrayed, acknowledged or included.

I was thinking that an alternative to these five stories could have easily been to keep the five stories as is but for the girls tell the story with female victims and male perpetrators and for the boys  use the same stories but do the opposite and tell it from the boys perspective.  It would take a little bit of editing but I think it would have been much more effective and would have left both boys and girls with a sense that their side of the story was heard and understood to exist. Victims are much more likely to come forward when they see that their plight is acknowledged. Maybe a possibility would have been to use neutral names for all parties in the stories and therefore not even know the sex of the offender or victim!   Another option might have been to have six stories with three being male perpetrators and three being female perpetrators.  One story each for the three categories of violence.  I think any of the above would have been an improvement over what they used.

The fact that girls were portrayed in four of five vignettes more as victims and boys more as perpetrators and that any suggestion about girls perpetration of sexual pressuring was absent seems to be more evidence that the project has been impacted by an ideology that prefers to see women/girls as victims and men/boys as perpetrators.  If we allow this sort of bias to continue in our midst we are failing both our boys and our girls.   If we allow it to continue in social science research literature then we are surely in trouble.

Recommendation Section

Here’s a brief look at the recommendations section of the executive summary.  There is only one paragraph in the recommendation section that mentions boys.  Here it is:

Impact of teenage partner violence – the gender divide
The impact of partner violence is indisputably differentiated by gender; girl victims report much higher levels of negative impact than do boys. This is not to imply that boys’ experiences of victimisation should be ignored. It may be that boys minimise the impact of the violence due to the need to portray a certain form of masculinity. However, although intervention programmes should ensure that the needs of both girls and boys are recognised, it is important that the wider experiences of girls remain a focus. In addition, boys’ minimisation of their own use of violence – by dismissing it as “messing around” and justifications based on mutual aggression – needs to be challenged.

This paragraph is baffling. Let’s break it down. Here is the first section:

The impact of partner violence is indisputably differentiated by gender; girl victims report much higher levels of negative impact than do boys. This is not to imply that boys’ experiences of victimisation should be ignored.

It first makes a claim that partner violence is differentiated by gender and that girls experience more negative impact, implying that boys should be ignored. Then they deny that they mean to ignore boys.

It may be that boys minimise the impact of the violence due to the need to portray a certain form of masculinity.

They offer a possibility for an explanation.

However, although intervention programmes should ensure that the needs of both girls and boys are recognised, it is important that the wider experiences of girls remain a focus

Then they ignore their own explanation and aver that the “wider experiences of girls” (whatever that means) should take precedence.

In addition, boys’ minimisation of their own use of violence – by dismissing it as “messing around” and justifications based on mutual aggression – needs to be challenged.

Then they finalize things by saying that the emphasis on boys should be their violence and especially their minimization of their own violence as has been previously discussed.

I find this paragraph to be very vague and unclear. I am guessing this is intentional since what they really want to say is likely girls are worthy victims and boys are not is hard for them to put into words since it would clearly leave them looking bigoted. Being vague and obfuscating is a much safer strategy and it still gets the job done! One thing is clear after reading it: The reader is sure that for whatever reasons, girls need to get the lions share of services and help and boys need to shape up!

Is the ideology of the researchers driving their focus on girls?

If you look at this from purely a marketing standpoint these researchers have accomplished a remarkable feat. They have been able to create a document that has been labelled a “study” which has found objective data and then made conclusions and recommendations that ignore their own data. They took it a step farther and got the conclusions and recommendations printed in a vast number of media articles which established to millions of viewers, listeners and readers that their “half-stories” were actually facts. Truly amazing when you think about it.

One can only assume that the researchers are aging feminists who are addicted to the outdated and disproven idea that domestic violence is simply dominated by males who batter and women who are victims. We have seen from the Straus article how grossly inaccurate that ideology has been and the extent to which its adherents would go to propagate such mis-information.

I have always thought that science was designed to gather data and then use that data to adjust your theory and ideology based on the new discoveries and information.  It seems to me in this case that rather than science being used to shift ones ideology it is the ideology that is governing science and determining which data should come forward and which not.  This is very dangerous ground for humanitarians and those who want the best for all victims.

In the case of this study it seems likely that the researchers had a pre-conceived idea that girls were victims and boys the perpetrators. When their own data didn’t affirm such stereotypical assumptions they strained to find a way to convert their data into a message that was harmonious with their pre-conceived ideas about violence (girls are worthy victims and boys are perpetrators). This was done by making the repeated claims that girls are more impacted by the violence and because of this the girls needed to be the focus of attention and services. This claim is hollow and anemic. Most any thinking person can look at that idea and see that because one group gets more upset by a problem that in itself should not negate some victims from getting services and attention.

There were so many parts of this study that seemed misandrist to me that I literally could have written another twenty or thirty pages. I will spare the reader such a burden and leave it to others to have a detailed look and make their own comments. Leave it to say that this study is a shining example of the evils of letting an ideology steer research and the resulting public services and the manner in which the general public is brainwashed by hearing only half the story.

I think that this study also shows the dangers involved in allowing ideological zealots a platform to intentionally mold public opinion to their own version of what is real. We need to use caution when accepting studies as being “scientific” and have a much finer net to discover which studies may be biased due to the ideological underpinnings of its authors. Frankly, any high school science student should be able to read this study and and explain clearly how it is lacking. Our media and our governments are sorely failing to do just that.

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tgolden@tgolden
April 02, 2026
Are Family Courts at War with the Constitution?

In this conversation, I sit down with longtime scholar and author Stephen Baskerville to take a hard look at modern family courts, no-fault divorce, paternal rights, and the assumptions behind shared parenting. Stephen argues that what many people take for granted in divorce and custody law may be far more troubling than they realize—not only for fathers and children, but for the rule of law itself. Join us in this challenging and thought-provoking discussion that raises questions most people never hear asked.

Stephen's Substack
https://stephenbaskerville.substack.com/

01:02:28
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tgolden@tgolden
March 30, 2026
Blame it on the Manosphere

This short video takes a humorous look at the current panic among feminists and the media over what they call the manosphere. In reality, the manosphere is one of the places where their false narratives are being exposed. What we are seeing now is the creation of a straw man—something to blame, distort, and use as a distraction from the truth that is coming to light. More and more people are waking up to the game and beginning to see the hostility and self-interest that have been there all along.

(This video was produced largely with AI. I wrote the script, and the music and images were AI-generated.)

Men are Good!

00:03:05
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tgolden@tgolden
March 23, 2026
From Description to Smear: The Guide to the Manosphere

Today’s video is a lively and revealing conversation with Jim Nuzzo about the growing panic over what the media and academia call “the manosphere.” Together, we take a close look at a new Australian guide for teachers that claims to help schools deal with so-called misogynistic behavior among boys. What we found was not careful scholarship, balanced concern, or genuine curiosity about boys. What we found was a familiar pattern: boys portrayed as the problem, their questions treated as threats, and their frustrations dismissed before they are even heard.

Jim brings his scientific eye to the discussion, and that makes this exchange especially valuable. We talk about the sudden explosion of academic and media attention on the manosphere, the way fear is being used to drive the narrative, and the striking absence of empathy for boys who feel blamed, dismissed, and alienated. We also explore something the guide never seriously asks: why are boys drawn to these spaces in the first ...

00:48:43
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JuanGoodman@JuanGoodman
March 14, 2026

This is on point and even this will be seen as anti woman

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tgolden@tgolden
March 02, 2026
Men Don't Grieve the Way You Think

I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Jason MacKenzie, who runs the Man Down Substack—a publication dedicated to men and their unique paths to healing.

Many of you may not know that I spent many years working directly with men who were grappling with trauma and loss. Through that experience, it became strikingly clear to me that men and women are often treated very differently after a loss. Those early observations opened my eyes to the broader ways men face discrimination, misunderstanding, and hardship in our society. I hope you find the conversation interesting and worthwhile.

https://www.mandown.tools/p/men-dont-grieve-the-way-you-think?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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tgolden@tgolden
February 27, 2026
Are Some Women Waking Up?

This was sent to me by an alert viewer and shows a woman calling out the feminist lies about men being privileged. What do you think:

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tgolden@tgolden
April 06, 2026
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They Took Away Recess—And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled


For years, schools have acted as though more learning comes from more sitting, more compliance, more desk time, and more control.

But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.

And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.

One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable—a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.

That matters for all children.

But it matters in a special way for boys.

Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.


Recess Is Not Separate From Learning

One of the most persistent myths in education is the idea that recess takes time away from learning.

The better way to say it is this: recess helps make learning possible.

The brain cannot sustain focused attention indefinitely. Children need a break in cognitive demand. They need contrast. They need a change in setting, activity, and pace in order to come back ready to concentrate again. That is one reason the evidence on recess remains so steady. Newer reviews find positive effects especially in behavior and classroom functioning, while finding either positive or neutral effects on academic outcomes rather than academic harm. The CDC’s current guidance likewise says recess supports students’ mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

That fits ordinary human experience.

Many of us remember exactly what recess did for us. You got outside. You ran. You played. You argued over the rules. You laughed. You blew off steam. Then you came back into the classroom feeling more alive and more ready to focus.

That was not wasted time.

That was recovery time for the brain, and practice time for life.


The Overlooked Power of Unstructured Play

This is the part too many adults miss.

Recess is not valuable only because children move their bodies. It is valuable because, at its best, it gives children unstructured play.

And unstructured play is one of the great training grounds of childhood.

In the classroom, adults set the agenda. Adults decide what matters. Adults define the rules, the timing, the task, the outcome, and the acceptable behavior. In physical education, the same thing usually happens. But during recess, children often have to organize themselves. They have to decide what to play, how to play it, who goes first, what counts as fair, what to do when someone cheats, and how to keep the game going when conflict arises.

That is not trivial.

That is where children learn to negotiate, cooperate, improvise, resolve conflict, advocate for themselves, accept limits, and sometimes lead. Reviews of unstructured play and playground play consistently describe benefits in children’s decision-making, problem-solving, emotional regulation, peer interaction, resilience, and creativity. Even when researchers note that freedom can sometimes bring more visible conflict or disruptive behavior, that is not necessarily evidence against play. It is often part of the process by which children learn how to handle themselves and one another.

In other words, recess is one of the few places left in childhood where children get to practice self-government.

They learn how to make a world with other children in it.

They learn how to form rules, bend rules, defend rules, repair ruptures, and keep a shared activity alive without adults hovering over every move.

That is deeply educational.

In some ways, it is more educational than much of what passes for education now.


Why This Matters So Much for Boys

For many boys, recess is not just pleasant. It is regulatory.

A school day built around silence, sitting, verbal restraint, and passivity fits some children far better than others. Boys who are high-energy, physically expressive, or inclined to think through movement are often treated as though they are defective learners rather than differently wired learners. Recess gives those boys something they genuinely need: a chance to move, reset, experiment, compete, collaborate, and return with a better chance of succeeding in the classroom.

The newer research does not justify saying that only boys benefit from recess, or that every boy benefits more than every girl. That would be too broad. But it does support saying that recess is especially important for many movement-oriented children, and that boys, on average, tend to be more physically active during recess. That alone should make us cautious about cutting away one of the few parts of the school day that so clearly fits the needs of many boys.

And this is where the larger cultural issue enters.

For a long time now, schools have been moving toward a model of childhood that rewards the qualities girls more often display in classroom settings: stillness, verbal compliance, behavioral neatness, and early self-containment. The more schools define those qualities as the norm, the more ordinary boy behavior gets framed as a disruption.

Then schools remove recess, narrow the outlets for movement, and act surprised when boys do worse.

That is not insight.

That is a setup.


High-Performing Systems Do Not All Worship Seat Time

One of the assumptions behind cutting recess is that more time in class must automatically mean more learning.

But that assumption has never been as obvious as administrators pretend.

Countries such as Japan, Korea, and Finland have shown that academic success does not depend on keeping children seated for as many minutes as possible. On PISA 2022, Japan and Korea both outperformed the United States across math, reading, and science, while Finland outperformed the United States in math and science. In some of these countries, children may get as much as fifteen minutes of recess for every hour of instruction. That does not prove recess alone explains their success. Many factors shape educational outcomes. But it does call into question a deeply held assumption—that the way to improve learning is to take movement, play, and reset time away from children.

The deeper point is not that America should copy another country mechanically.

It is that high-performing systems do not all treat children as if the road to excellence is endless confinement.

Some of them appear to understand a truth we have forgotten: children need rhythm. They need intensity and release. Focus and reset. Work and play.


The Case for Recess Is Stronger Than It Looks

One reason recess has been easy to cut is that adults often think of it as optional. It sounds soft. It sounds unserious. It sounds like something schools can sacrifice in the name of rigor.

But the evidence does not point that way.

Recent reviews continue to find benefits in behavior, social functioning, physical activity, and well-being, with either positive or neutral effects on academics. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy on recess was reaffirmed in 2023, and it argues that recess should be considered a necessary break in the school day for optimizing a child’s social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development—not something to be withheld for punishment or extra academic drills. CDC guidance likewise continues to support recess and points schools toward evidence-based strategies rather than retreat from it.

That is worth pausing over.

The mainstream evidence base is not saying, “Recess is a luxury, but maybe a nice one.”

It is saying something much closer to this: recess supports healthy child development, improves important aspects of school functioning, and should not be casually taken away.


What We Need to Recover

We need to recover some sanity here.

Children are not improved by endless management.

They are not made healthier, wiser, or more teachable by removing one of the few parts of the day that allows them to move freely, improvise socially, and reset their minds.

And boys should not be treated as defective girls.

If a school system is built in ways that pathologize normal boyhood, then that system should be questioned. If it keeps cutting away the very things that help many boys regulate and engage, then it should not be surprised when boys disengage, resist, or fall behind.

Recess is not a distraction from education.

It is part of education.

Not because it is sentimental.

Because it is developmental.

Because it supports attention, behavior, social learning, and physical well-being.

Because unstructured play teaches things adults cannot easily teach from the front of the room.

And because one of the simplest ways to help boys in school may be to stop taking away one of the few parts of school that still makes sense to them.

Read.
Write.
Arithmetic.
And recess.

That is not a joke.

That is closer to wisdom than much of what passes for reform.

Men are good, as are you.

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tgolden@tgolden
March 27, 2026
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When Schools Teach Children to Dislike Boys
How healthy male traits get recoded as disruption—and how teachers may help turn classmates against playful boys



When Schools Teach Children to Dislike Boys

How healthy male traits get recoded as disruption—and how teachers may help turn classmates against playful boys

There is a painful possibility that few people want to consider.

What if many boys are not failing school?

What if school is failing boys?

Not because boys cannot learn. Not because boys are less capable. Not because boys are defective.

But because many of the traits most natural to boys are now viewed through a lens of suspicion.

Energy becomes hyperactivity.
Rough play becomes aggression.
Humor becomes immaturity.
Nonconformity becomes pathology.
Spontaneity becomes disruption.

In other words, healthy boyhood is increasingly being interpreted as a problem.

And once that happens, boys do not simply get corrected more often. They get socially downgraded. Their standing falls. Their confidence falls. Their sense of belonging falls. And, as some research suggests, adults may even help teach other children to see them negatively.

That is a very serious matter.


The deeper issue is not just schools. It is culture.

Schools do not invent these attitudes out of thin air. They reflect the broader culture. And for many years now, masculinity itself has been treated as suspect.

Male energy is often spoken of as dangerous.
Male aggression is discussed as if it has no healthy form.
Male spaces have steadily disappeared or been delegitimized.
Fatherhood has been culturally minimized.
Normal male assertiveness is frequently recast as toxicity.

When a culture repeatedly sends the message that masculinity is something to fear, schools absorb that message too.

So when boys show up as boys—active, physical, funny, impulsive, competitive, loud, resistant to passivity—they are not always seen as healthy male children in need of guidance.

Too often, they are seen as little problems to be managed.


Boys are often at a disadvantage before the lesson even begins

The research here is striking.

A broad review of teacher-student relationship studies found that teachers report more conflict with boys than with girls, and that female teachers report less closeness with boys than with girls. That means many boys are entering school environments in which they are more likely to experience friction and less likely to experience warmth. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Another study looking at kindergarten and first grade found that girls experienced more teacher closeness than boys across both school years, while boys with disruptive behavior tended to experience more conflict with teachers than comparable girls. (sciencedirect.com)

That should have set off alarm bells.

Imagine the public reaction if the research had shown that teachers consistently felt closer to boys and more distant from girls. There would have been outrage. But when boys are the ones receiving less closeness and more conflict, the culture mostly shrugs.


The traits many teachers prefer do not sound much like boys

One older but revealing line of research found that teachers tended to prefer students who were described as rigid, conforming, orderly, dependent, passive, and acquiescent. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20151346)

That list is worth pausing over.

Rigid.
Conforming.
Orderly.
Dependent.
Passive.
Acquiescent.

That is not a portrait of lively development. It is a portrait of easy classroom management.

And it does not sound much like the average healthy boy.

Many boys are more physically restless, more impulsive, more rough-and-tumble, less naturally compliant, and more likely to regulate themselves through movement and action. That does not make them broken. It makes them boys. But if the school environment quietly rewards passivity above vitality, then many boys will end up being treated as if their very nature is inconvenient.


The playful boys study should have changed this conversation

One of the most revealing studies on this issue looked at children identified as especially playful.

These children were not mean, antisocial, or emotionally disturbed. They were marked by five very positive qualities: physical spontaneity, social fluidity, cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and a sense of humor. In plain language, they were energetic, socially fluid, imaginative, enthusiastic kids who enjoyed laughing and could take a joke. (frontiersin.org)

And here is what makes the findings so important: other children generally liked these playful kids. They were seen as popular. They were preferred playmates. Their peers did not initially experience them as disruptive or problematic. (frontiersin.org)

There were also equal numbers of playful girls and playful boys.

That matters.

It means the later negative reaction cannot simply be explained by “playfulness” alone. There were playful girls too.

But the teachers did not respond to the boys and girls in the same way.

The playful boys were the ones increasingly seen as disruptive. The playful boys were the ones who acquired the “class clown” label. The playful girls did not receive the same negative response, even though they were equally playful. (frontiersin.org)

That is one of the most important parts of this research because it makes the double standard harder to deny.

The issue was not merely playful behavior.

The issue was playful boys.


The word the researchers used was “antipathy”

The researchers did not use mild language.

They wrote that “one of the most significant discoveries of the study was the antipathy held by teachers for playful boys from the earliest primary grade.” (frontiersin.org)

Antipathy means a deep-seated dislike or aversion.

That is a stunning word to find in research about young boys who were characterized by joy, humor, spontaneity, imagination, and social vitality.

Other children liked them.

The ​teachers often did not.

That should trouble anyone who cares about children.

Because once an adult repeatedly communicates irritation, contempt, or aversion toward a child, the issue is no longer simple discipline. The adult is helping define that child socially. The child begins to feel it. Other children begin to absorb it. A reputation forms. A role gets assigned.

This boy is fun.
This boy is too much.
This boy is a nuisance.
This boy is the problem.

That is how shame begins.


What happened by third grade is chilling

The most disturbing finding came next.

In first and second grade, the playful children were still generally seen positively by their peers. But by third grade, the playful boys experienced a dramatic reversal. The children began drawing a sharp distinction between playful boys and playful girls, and the playful boys came to be seen as the least preferred playmates and as having the lowest social status.

Think about how serious that is.

These boys had not suddenly become cruel.

They had not become dangerous.

They had not changed into bad children.

What changed was the way they were being seen.

And the researchers strongly suspected that teachers had helped cause that shift, directly and indirectly shaping both the boys’ self-perceptions and the perceptions of their classmates.

That means an adult’s bias may have helped take boys who were initially popular and turn them into social liabilities.

That is not a minor classroom issue.

That is the manufacturing of rejection.


This starts to look like relational aggression against boys

I have spent decades as a therapist, and emotionally abusive systems often work in a very particular way: they turn people against one another. They poison perceptions. They shape alliances. They quietly designate one person as the problem and then let the group do the rest.

When I read this research, I see something disturbingly similar.

Teachers do not have to announce their bias openly for children to absorb it. Children are exquisitely sensitive to adult cues. They notice who gets warmth, who gets annoyance, who gets repeated correction, ​who gets eye rolls, who gets labeled, who gets the benefit of the doubt, and who does not.

Over time, children learn how to rank each other accordingly.

So when a teacher repeatedly treats playful boys as irritating or disruptive, the other children are not blind to that. They learn from it. They internalize it. And in this case, they appear to have acted on it.

That is why this is so serious.

The boys were not merely disciplined.

They were socially reclassified.


Boys are too often being judged as defective girls

This is, in many ways, the heart of the problem.

Boys are often measured against a behavioral ideal that fits girls more comfortably, and then penalized when they do not match it.

Need for movement? Problem.
Need for rough play? Problem.
Less verbal style? Problem.
High energy? Problem.
Resistance to passive conformity? Problem.
Humor under pressure? Problem.

At some point we have to ask a basic question:

What if many boys being labeled are not disordered at all?

What if they are simply boys in an environment that has become increasingly unfriendly to boyhood?

That does not mean boys need no discipline. Of course they do. Boys need guidance, structure, accountability, and mentoring. They need adults who can shape their energy, not shame it.

But shaping is not the same as pathologizing.

And guidance is not the same as contempt.


Many men remember exactly when this began

I suspect many men reading this will recognize something here.

They can remember the moment when their energy stopped being seen as vitality and started being seen as trouble.

They can remember the feeling that the girls were “right” and they were “wrong.”

They can remember being funny one year and “disruptive” the next.

They can remember realizing that being a boy felt, somehow, politically incorrect.

A great many boys were not crushed by open cruelty.

They were crushed by chronic misreading.

And that may be one of the most damaging things schools do.

Because once a boy starts to believe that his natural way of being is unwelcome, he often begins to pull back from school, from learning, and sometimes even from himself.


We should stop asking what is wrong with boys and start asking what is wrong with the lens through which we view them

The real issue here is not whether boys need to grow up well. Of course they do.

The real issue is whether adults can still recognize healthy masculinity when they see it.

Can they recognize exuberance without calling it pathology?
Can they recognize roughness without calling it danger?
Can they recognize humor without calling it deviance?
Can they recognize a playful boy without turning him into a problem?

Until we can do that, boys will continue to pay the price for adult confusion.

And many already have.


Research

Barnett, L. A. (2018). The Education of Playful Boys: Class Clowns in the Classroom. This is the playful boys study, including the findings on teacher antipathy, the different treatment of playful boys and playful girls, and the reversal in peer attitudes by third grade. (frontiersin.org)

Spilt, J. L., Koomen, H. M. Y., & Jak, S. (2012). Are boys better off with male and girls with female teachers? This review found that teachers report more conflict with boys, and that female teachers report less closeness with boys than girls. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Horn, E. P., et al. (2021). Trajectories of teacher-child relationships across kindergarten and first grade. This study found girls experienced more closeness with teachers than boys across both school years. (sciencedirect.com)

Schlosser, L. (1980). Sex, Behavior, and Teacher Expectancies. This cites the teacher-preference traits: rigid, conforming, orderly, dependent, passive, and acquiescent. (jstor.org)

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tgolden@tgolden
March 19, 2026
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Father Exclusion: The Invisible Injustice

A note before the article:
Nick O’Hara has written something deeply painful, deeply human, and deeply important.

His essay is not simply the story of one father’s heartbreak. It is also a window into a much larger injustice that far too few people are willing to see, much less name. We hear constant discussion about “absent fathers,” but almost no discussion of fathers who are absent against their will—fathers who love their children, fight for them, and are still pushed out by systems that seem unable, or unwilling, to protect the father-child bond.

That is what makes this piece so powerful. Nick is writing from the raw center of his own experience, but he is also giving language to a reality that many men live in silence. His story is heartbreaking, but it is not merely personal. It raises urgent questions about parental equality, about the invisibility of fathers in family law and public discourse, and about the cost children pay when a loving parent is treated as expendable.

I am sharing this excerpt because I believe his voice deserves to be heard. The full piece is considerably longer, and I hope you will follow the link at the end to read the rest on Nick’s site and help bring more attention to his work.

If we are serious about justice, compassion, and the well-being of children, we must be willing to look at realities that make people uncomfortable. This is one of them.



Father Exclusion: The Invisible Injustice

The search for my abducted child reveals a wider silence on parental inequality

Nick O’Hara

Mar 02, 2026

 
My son in December 2021, the last time I saw him. He was abducted in June 2023, disappearing somewhere in the USA

Your children are not your children

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you

– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

My son and I are strangers. He turns seven soon and I’ve never celebrated his birthday with him. I have never read him a bedtime story. I don’t know if he is safe. I don’t even know if he is alive. I am a father needlessly separated from my child, and society makes me invisible. After years of holding my tongue and getting nowhere, I feel compelled to convey what it is like to be completely excluded from your child’s life in a culture that leaves virtually no space for fathers in my position.

We often hear about absent fathers, but rarely about those who are absent against their will: men erased from their children’s lives without justification. I call this “father exclusion”. It’s a term I have coined because I can’t find any official language or descriptor for fathers in my position. Despite impacting many families, it barely registers in our public discourse. No data seems to be collected on father exclusion. No politicians seem interested in addressing it. No one even names the problem.

Father exclusion is not a fringe issue. It is extremely harmful to families and society; a systemic failure so pervasive it becomes invisible. We talk a great deal about irresponsible fathers, but what about those of us fighting with everything we have to be in our children’s lives, only to be systematically shut out? This silence is institutional, cultural and statistical. It has consequences: for children, for fathers like me, for our understanding of parenthood itself.

One goal in sharing my story is to advance a rationale argument in favour of gender equality in parenting, guided by the humanist case for balanced parental rights.

Western culture’s current obsession with “toxic masculinity” prefers to cast men as villains, leaving no room to acknowledge that fathers can be victims of discrimination, or that many are unjustifiably pushed out of their children’s lives. Many people take offence at the suggestion that father absence is detrimental to our children, despite the evidence that it is. So, any attempt to raise fathers’ rights is met with discomfort, defensiveness or even aggression: if it is acknowledged at all. For the main part, it is met with silence.

I know this silence intimately. It helps prevent my son from knowing my love.

When he drew his first breath in Brooklyn seven years ago, I was thousands of miles away in the United Kingdom, unaware of his arrival because his mother had cut off contact with me. What began as a conventional path to fatherhood – ultrasounds, excited plans of being present at the birth – unravelled into a nightmare. Every attempt since then to be part of my son’s life has been blocked, defied or ignored by his mother, enabled by systems that treat paternal bonds as optional, granted or withheld at the mother’s discretion.

I later discovered that my estranged wife had given our son different names to those we’d agreed upon. She omitted my name from his birth certificate and provided a false address to give the impression that she lived in New York; presumably in order to align with her falsified Medicaid forms. In fact, she is a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and lives there with her two older children, whose father she also denies access.

Or at least, they did live in Trinidad. Almost three years ago, my son was abducted by his mother. To evade the increasing scrutiny of Trinidad and Tobago’s Family Court and Children’s Authority, she disappeared with all three children and is hiding somewhere in America. I do not know if they are safe, in good health or whether they attend school.

When I met my ex, in our initial interactions, she told me her first husband had abused her and their children, claiming serious offences. I felt sympathy and wanted to help. She said she reported each incident to the police, to create a record. Though to what end, I couldn’t figure out: she never wanted to take legal action, only to have a record of complaints.

Her story became increasingly inconsistent and I started noticing contradictions that grew more absurd. When I questioned her, she sometimes responded by suggesting that I was paranoid, other times she insisted I was losing my memory. It was only later that I recognised this as gaslighting.

While married and briefly living in Trinidad, it began to feel that she had only wanted me there so that I could support her and the kids while she continued not to work at all. However, tightening immigration restrictions meant that I couldn’t get a work permit and the strain on our relationship grew. Pregnant with our son, she cut off communication when I returned to the UK to work.

Since then, I’ve been trapped in a nightmare. Parenthood has been an illusory half-reality: I am legally a father but have never been allowed to be one. Despite my indefatigable efforts, I have met my son just twice; his mother has blocked all other access in defiance of multiple court orders. I could detail here a long list of her heartbreaking breaches, but nobody would want to read it.

Life as an excluded father is utterly lonely. I feel cast adrift, like an inconvenience nobody cares about.

With court proceedings stalled by my ex’s disappearance, I have spent two years pursuing an application under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. I receive email updates mentioning INTERPOL and U.S. authorities’ efforts to locate my son. The situation is surreal. There are days when it feels less like my life and more like a documentary film that I never agreed to star in. I have needed to write about it to help me survive it, to produce a memoir I might someday share to help others enduring similar ordeals.

My story is highly personal; the international dimension somewhat unusual. However, my general experience is not unique. It reflects a deeper truth: we simply do not value fatherhood highly enough. We are far more comfortable accusing men of abandonment than confronting how and why institutions push them out.

It needn’t be this way. We can acknowledge this systemic exclusion while rejecting the false binary that caring about fathers must come at the expense of mothers. Justice does not require us to diminish one parent in order to elevate the other. Instead, recognising and supporting the vital roles of both mothers and fathers, on equal terms, is how we can best serve the interests of our children. Persistently favouring one parent over the other – as we currently do – undermines not only parental equality, but the well-being of children and the moral coherence of society.

My son was abducted and taken to the U.S. in breach of a court order prohibiting his removal from Trinidad and Tobago. Like the others, the order proved meaningless. Indeed, every directive issued by the court has been breached or ignored by my ex without consequence.

My ex is legally aided, so there is no financial deterrent to obstruction. Three different legal aid-appointed attorneys withdrew their representation of her after realising she was misleading the court. None of this resulted in sanctions; just stronger orders that my ex ignores. She has, effectively, been able to act with impunity.

She has also prevented my son’s siblings – my stepchildren – from seeing their own father since they were infants. Unwittingly, the children’s experience contributes to the often-racist stereotype of Caribbean father absenteeism. But their respective fathers are not absent: we are excluded.

 
My son’s older siblings (and my stepchildren) in Trinidad, 2018. I haven’t seen them in many years, they will look so different now

Despite being represented by one of Trinidad and Tobago’s leading family lawyers (who sadly passed away suddenly last summer), I have felt utterly powerless. Court interventions have been too slow, enforcement mechanisms too weak or non-existent. In the initial years of my matter, the institutional indifference was astonishing. Even evidence of my ex preventing her older children from seeing their father – a relevant pattern of behaviour, one would think – could not be considered, due to family court evidentiary rules. Eventually the authorities did seem to realise what they were dealing with. But by then it was too late, my ex had disappeared with my son.

In fairness, the judge’s hands are tied by inadequate enforcement powers. The court knows that my son is being deliberately repelled from access to his father, without justification. It just isn’t able to actually do much about it. The system appears designed to make fathers give up.

With the disappearance, my attorney advised me to pursue the Hague Convention process. At first, it seemed promising: we received confirmation that my son had been taken to America. He was even, seemingly, located by U.S. authorities, only to vanish again. With the Hague application drawing blanks and family court proceedings stalled, I find myself back where I began. I am sharing my story in the hope that someone, somehow, might help locate my child.

 
Meeting my son for the first time in Trinidad, March 2020

Please share this essay with anyone who might be able to help me locate my child

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The wider narrative of absentee fathers is well-known, but how accurate is it? In the United States, more than one in four children live without a father in the home. This is also the generally accepted proportion for the UK, though my own crude maths suggests that it could be higher, with nearly 40 percent of households with dependent children being single-parent families (3.2 million out of the 8.2 million total). Data from the Office for National Statistics show 85 percent of those are headed by mothers (child custody data reporting has it higher, at 89 percent). Statistics for Trinidad and Tobago are harder to obtain, but anyone will tell you the situation is likely similar to the U.S. and UK.

How many of these fathers are missing by choice versus how many, like me, are deliberately excluded? We don’t know the answer, because – and this is a point worth emphasising – nobody publishes that data. There is no government task force. No politicians introducing parental equality legislation. No newspaper headlines.

It’s easier to frame us as absent, easier to perpetuate the ‘irresponsible father’ trope than confront the reality of father exclusion. Doing so would entail acknowledging that men face systemic discrimination in family courts and are relegated to second-class parental status. It’s easier for society not to care.

 
My son in Trinidad, December 2021, on the second of just two 90-minute visits with me that his mother actually brought him to

For the sake of our children, we should care. Active father engagement results in improved child outcomes. In 2016 the UK Department for Work and Pensions hosted a Father Engagement Seminar, which concluded that children with highly involved fathers have greater self-esteem, perform better at school and have fewer behavioural problems.

Conversely, growing up fatherless is highly detrimental to children and society. Children from fatherless homes are exponentially more likely to run away, die from suicide, suffer with substance abuse, become teenage mothers, have behavioural disorders, be sent to prison ... the list goes on. The fact that we have to go back a decade to find such a level of attention (in the UK) to the issue tells its own story.

When I share this information, people often react defensively. One American acquaintance, raised by a single parent, accused me of “blaming single mothers” before I could explain that I, too, grew up in single-parent households (with both my mother and father at different points), and that I was not making a political argument. But I had offended his sensibilities; he wasn’t prepared to even momentarily consider an alternative perspective.

What puzzles me is why acknowledging evidence of poorer average outcomes for children in father-absent homes is so often treated as a moral judgment rather than an empirical observation. Recognising such patterns need not imply blame, nor does it diminish the efforts or sacrifices of single parents. If child welfare is a genuine priority, we should be able to discuss uncomfortable data openly and with nuance, even when it complicates prevailing narratives.

 
Colouring with crayons, Trinidad, December 2021

Being an excluded father feels like living in exile. Some people are sympathetic, but not overly concerned. There is no language for your grief, no place for your story. Father exclusion does not fit into any fashionable social movement. Indeed, it’s allowed to slip through the cracks because it contradicts prevailing assumptions about gender, victimhood and power. Refusal to acknowledge this issue reflects a cultural and legal bias that renders fathers morally disposable.

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