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

 

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assuming that the girls were the primary victims and the boys the primary perpetrators which reflects an archaic and outdated stereotype about domestic violence.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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Janice Fiamengo, Hannah Spier, and Tom Golden respond to a YouTube video on The Diary of a CEO channel, which features three feminists debating the question: “Has modern feminism betrayed the very women it promised to empower?”In their response, Hannah, Janice, and Tom have a lively discussion, highlighting inconsistencies, omissions, and a variety of other notable observations.

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Georges Links!

Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/thetinmen/

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LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/gohorne/

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September 08, 2025
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From Research to Action — How Finland Helped Its Men
Post 2 in a series on what the world can learn from Finland’s suicide prevention efforts

In the last post, we saw how Finland took an extraordinary first step: instead of shrugging at suicide rates, they studied every single case in the country for a full year. They learned who was dying, where, and why.

But research alone doesn’t save lives. The true test came next. Could Finland turn this knowledge into action?

In 1992, the government launched the National Suicide Prevention Project, a sweeping, nationwide effort that would run for five years. Its ambition was bold: to translate the research into targeted interventions across every layer of society — from army barracks to hunting cabins, from classrooms to church pulpits.

The official goal was clear: reduce suicides by 20% in ten years. But the real innovation lay in how Finland went about it.


The National Strategy (1992–1996)

The project was structured into four phases:

  1. Research (1986–1991) — the “Suicides in Finland 1987” study and its provincial reports.

  2. Strategy formation (1992) — drawing up a national action plan based on those findings.

  3. Implementation (1992–1996) — launching over 40 subprogrammes across sectors.

  4. Evaluation (1997 onward) — both internal and external reviews of what worked and what didn’t.

Unlike typical health campaigns, this was not limited to posters or hotlines. It was a multisectoral strategy, pulling in schools, the military, the church, health services, media, and community associations. Each was asked the same question: What role can you play in preventing suicide, based on what we now know?

This was Finland’s genius. The national strategy was not a blunt instrument. It was a framework that allowed each institution, each community, to shape prevention in a way that made sense locally.


Tailoring Interventions to At-Risk Groups

The 1987 research had given Finland something precious: a map of where suicide risk was concentrated. The next step was to design interventions for those specific groups.

Hunters and Rural Men

Middle-aged rural men were at the very center of Finland’s crisis. Many were farmers or hunters, living in isolation, often drinking heavily, and reluctant to seek formal help. The suicide data showed that licensed hunting rifles were among the most common methods.

Instead of preaching from afar, Finland did something remarkable: they went into the hunting clubs themselves. The idea was simple but powerful — hunters already cared about their “mehtäkaveri,” their hunting mate. So why not train them to look out for each other’s mental health as well?

This became the foundation for what later grew into the Hyvä Mehtäkaveri (“Good Hunting Mate”) programme: peer-support training that taught hunters how to ask the difficult question — “Are you doing okay?” — and how to connect someone with help if they weren’t.

Conscripts and Rejected Recruits

Finland’s system of compulsory military service turned out to be both a risk and an opportunity. The research showed that young men rejected from service for health or psychological reasons faced a sharp rise in suicide risk. The rejection carried stigma — it marked them as different at precisely the age when they most wanted to belong.

So the Defense Forces became a frontline partner. Officers and military doctors were trained to spot vulnerable recruits, offer counseling, and refer them to civilian health care when needed. Rejection from service was reframed, not as abandonment, but as a moment to connect a young man with support.

Beyond counseling, Finland also recognized the practical challenges these young men faced. Initiatives supported by the A-Clinic Foundation and the Finnish Association for Mental Health provided concrete assistance: vocational guidance, social support, and structured activities to help rebuild identity and belonging. These efforts aimed to ensure that rejection from the army did not mean rejection from society. One notable example was the “Young Man, Seize the Day” project (1997), which worked with rejected recruits in several cities to provide vocational guidance, structured activities, and community belonging.

Rural Networks and Gatekeepers

Beyond the army and the hunting cabin, Finland leaned on local gatekeepers — the people already embedded in small communities. Teachers, clergy, police officers, even farmer’s association leaders were given training to recognize warning signs and start conversations. The principle was clear: suicide prevention wasn’t just the job of psychiatrists. It was the job of the whole community.

Alcohol Misuse

Alcohol had long been tied to Finnish male suicide, and the research confirmed its role. The project partnered with the A-Clinic Foundation, Finland’s leading addiction services, to integrate substance treatment into suicide prevention. Men who might never walk into a psychiatric clinic might still accept help for their drinking — and through that doorway, receive broader support.

Suicide Attempters

One of the most striking findings from the research was how many people who died by suicide had already made a prior attempt — but had never received proper follow-up care. The project responded by pushing hospitals to change their protocols: no longer would a suicide attempt be treated only as an emergency to be “patched up.” It was to be seen as a red flag demanding structured aftercare.


Engaging Institutions Beyond Health Care

One of the most radical features of Finland’s approach was the insistence that suicide prevention was not just a medical problem. It was a problem for the whole of society — and so the whole of society was asked to respond.

Schools

Teachers and guidance counsellors were trained to notice the early signs of distress in students. Peer-support programs were introduced so that young people themselves could be allies for one another. The idea was to catch suffering early, long before it showed up in statistics.

Churches

In rural Finland, the local parish was often more trusted than the clinic. Clergy were trained to recognize warning signs, offer crisis counseling, and support families after a suicide. By drawing pastors and priests into the project, Finland tapped into one of its most powerful social institutions.

Media

The project also confronted one of the most sensitive issues: how suicide was reported in newspapers and on television. Journalists were given new guidelines — no sensationalism, no detailed descriptions of methods, and always include information about where to find help. The aim was to prevent copycat deaths and shift the narrative from despair to support.

Workplaces

Though less developed than other strands, workplaces were not ignored. Employers were encouraged to recognize stress and depression among workers, especially men in male-dominated industries like farming, forestry, and manufacturing. Early versions of employee assistance programs began to take shape.


The Male Coping Strategies Programme (Planned but Unfinished)

Among all the subprogrammes Finland envisioned, one stood out for its directness: the Male Coping Strategies Programme.

The research had made it impossible to ignore: Finnish men — especially rural, middle-aged men — were at the center of the suicide crisis. They were less likely to seek help, more likely to drink heavily, more likely to use firearms, and more likely to die by suicide.

The Male Coping Strategies Program was designed to tackle this head-on. Its aim was simple but radical:

  • To help men talk openly about their struggles.

  • To normalize seeking help.

  • To strengthen resilience in ways that fit male culture.

The plan included a public information campaign that would have framed help-seeking not as weakness but as strength. It also envisioned building spaces for men to talk — whether through workplaces, community organizations, or even informal networks.

But the program ran into the one barrier no research can overcome: funding. It never received the resources it needed to stand on its own. Instead, pieces of it were absorbed into other projects, most visibly in the military programs for conscripts and rejected recruits.

Even so, its very existence was telling. In the 1990s, Finland was willing to say openly what many countries still refuse to: male suicide is a gendered issue, and if you want to prevent it, you must address men directly.

And although the national campaign never fully materialized, its spirit lived on. Later, local projects like Hyvä Mehtäkaveri in Kainuu — which embedded suicide prevention into rural hunting clubs — were, in a sense, the Male Coping Strategies Programme reborn in community form.


Results

By the mid-1990s, Finland’s gamble was starting to pay off.

Suicide rates, which had climbed steadily for decades, peaked in 1990. Then, during the years of the project’s implementation, they began to fall. By 1996, suicides had dropped by about 20% from that peak, bringing the numbers below where they had started a decade earlier.

The change wasn’t just in the statistics. Across Finland, you could see new practices taking root:

  • Hospitals no longer discharged suicide attempters without follow-up.

  • Journalists wrote about suicide more responsibly.

  • Teachers and clergy were equipped to recognize distress.

  • Hunters and soldiers had begun to see suicide prevention as something that concerned them too.

An internal evaluation in the late 1990s found that 43% of service sectors reported adopting suicide prevention measures as a result of the project. More than a dozen working models had been developed, along with 70+ publications, training guides, and handbooks.

An external international review in 1999 concluded that the project’s achievements outweighed its shortcomings. The reviewers praised its breadth, creativity, and impact. They noted some gaps — the elderly had been largely overlooked, and the long-term anchoring of prevention into municipal structures was still weak — but the core finding was clear: Finland had changed the trajectory of suicide in the country.

The numbers proved it. And behind those numbers were lives saved.


Why This Matters

The Finnish project showed something the world badly needed to see: suicide prevention works when you meet people where they are.

Instead of waiting for men to walk into clinics, Finland brought prevention to the places where men already lived their lives:

  • In the forests and hunting cabins with their friends.

  • In the army barracks or on the day they were turned away from service.

  • In the pulpit, the classroom, and the local newspaper.

They refused the fatalism of “men won’t seek help.” They built a system that didn’t rely on men crossing the threshold of a psychiatrist’s office. It relied on communities, networks, and everyday institutions to notice, to care, and to act.

And the results speak for themselves: a 20% reduction in suicide rates during the project period. Hundreds of lives saved. A culture shifted.

The contrast with the United States could not be starker. Here, suicide among men — especially middle-aged rural men — is often treated as an inevitability. Our prevention strategies remain vague, underfunded, and detached from the very communities where the deaths are happening.

Finland’s lesson is clear: if you want to prevent suicide, you cannot stop at awareness campaigns and crisis hotlines. You must go out and build support into the fabric of everyday life — in the places where people already gather, work, and belong.


Coming Next: Finland’s Legacy

By the end of the 1990s, Finland had achieved something unprecedented: a national, research-based suicide prevention program that actually bent the curve downward. It wasn’t perfect — some groups were overlooked, funding wasn’t always secure, and not every community took the work as far as it could go. But the results were undeniable.

The project left behind more than lower suicide rates. It left behind a set of models, training tools, and cultural shifts that would ripple across the Nordic region and, eventually, far beyond. Other countries began to take notice. And at the same time, another Finnish innovation — a quiet revolution in psychiatric care called Open Dialogue — was spreading internationally, offering yet another way to reduce suffering and save lives.

In the next post, we’ll look at Finland’s legacy: how their suicide prevention ideas influenced other nations, what worked and what didn’t, and how a small country in the north became a global leader in rethinking how we respond to despair.

Men Are Good

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September 04, 2025
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Who Pulls the Strings of Feminism?
Who Really Funded Feminism -- and Why


Who Really Funded Feminism — And Why

I’ve long wondered how the feminist wall was built. On the surface it looked like a grassroots uprising, but something about it felt orchestrated. What explained that difference? I first found clues in Frank Zepezauer’s The Feminist Crusades, a book that details the massive amounts of money funneled into the movement. That revelation opened my eyes. Later, when I dug deeper into who funded feminism and why, the picture sharpened even more. This post follows that money trail.


When people think of second-wave feminism, they picture grassroots energy: women in living rooms sharing stories, marching in the streets, pushing for change. And that ​may have been true — at first. But by the mid-1970s, something shifted. Feminism stopped being mainly a movement of street-level activists and began morphing into a network of credentialed scholars, policy advocates, and well-funded NGOs.

That transformation didn’t just happen on its own. It was fueled by very large amounts of money — from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie, later MacArthur, Open Society (George Soros), and even the federal government.



The Money Trail

Ford Foundation

In the 1970s alone, the Ford Foundation poured tens of millions into feminist causes. Mariam Chamberlain, a program officer at Ford, was the architect of much of this push. Between 1971 and 1981, she directed $5 million to seed women’s studies programs, feminist publishing, and policy research. At a time when universities were hesitant to invest in such programs, Ford’s grants provided the startup funds that allowed women’s studies departments to take root and flourish. Ford also funded feminist publishing houses and think tanks, creating both a scholarly and popular pipeline for feminist ideas.

By 1979, Ford’s total commitments to women’s initiatives had reached $20 million — a staggering figure for the era (over $85 million today). Most important, Ford chose which voices received institutional backing, embedding them in universities where they gained lasting authority.

The result: women’s studies did not simply emerge as a spontaneous movement. It was engineered into permanence by foundation money. Ford’s investments created credentialed authority that cemented feminist narratives in academia and policy circles for generations. No parallel funding ever launched men’s or boys’ studies.

Fast-forward to today: in 2021, Ford pledged another $420 million globally to advance gender equality in the wake of COVID — proof that its role in shaping gender discourse has remained consistent for half a century. And Ford was hardly alone. Other foundations followed the same path, pouring resources into feminist initiatives while ensuring elite philanthropy shaped the direction of the movement.



Rockefeller Foundation

Rockefeller’s contributions were smaller but highly symbolic. In 1970, NOW received a $15,000 grant (about $120,000 in today’s dollars) — modest in size but significant as a signal of elite endorsement. More broadly, Rockefeller had long funded population control and family planning programs, linking feminist calls for reproductive freedom to demographic priorities embraced by elites.



Carnegie Corporation

Carnegie’s support was less visible but reinforced the same pattern. It funded education and research initiatives that positioned women more strongly in professional life and academia, helping create the pipeline that legitimized feminist priorities.



U.S. Government

Washington soon joined the effort. The 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston was funded with $5 million in federal money. Title IX (1972) and the Women’s Educational Equity Act (1974) came with federal dollars to advance feminist reforms in education and public life.

The government also invested heavily in domestic violence services. The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA), first enacted in 1984, provided grants for shelters, hotlines, and prevention programs. Since 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been a cornerstone, initially authorizing $1.6 billion for investigation, prosecution, and services. In FY 2024 alone, the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women awarded over $690 million in grants. A conservative estimate suggests that since 1994, the U.S. has spent more than $15 billion on violence-against-women programs.

This is striking given that men are far more likely to be victims of violence, yet the government has spent very little on addressing their needs.



Ms. Foundation for Women

Co-founded by Gloria Steinem in 1972, the Ms. Foundation quickly became one of the most influential clearinghouses for feminist philanthropy. Its role was not simply to raise money but to re-grant foundation dollars in ways that seeded and sustained feminist activism at the grassroots level.

By the 1990s, the foundation was channeling millions to women’s centers, domestic violence shelters, reproductive rights campaigns, and academic initiatives. Grants often ranged from $5,000 to $50,000 — small enough to be considered “community grants” but large enough to keep organizations alive and aligned with the broader feminist project.

The flow continues today. Ford, for example, awarded the Ms. Foundation a $4 million BUILD grant (2018–22) to strengthen its capacity. Over time, Ms. became the bridge between elite funders and grassroots activists, shaping the movement by deciding which groups thrived and which withered.



United Nations

The UN has played a central role in globalizing feminist priorities, not just through declarations but through money. The 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City and the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) set the stage by creating institutional frameworks for feminist advocacy. These initiatives legitimized women’s rights as a matter of international governance, with governments encouraged — and often pressured — to align their domestic policies with UN resolutions.

Funding soon followed. In 1976, the UN established UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) as a dedicated channel for financing women’s programs. By the 1990s, UNIFEM was distributing tens of millions annually to NGOs, training programs, and policy projects across the developing world. In 2010, UNIFEM was folded into UN Women, which has since become the central UN agency for gender equality.

UN Women operates the Fund for Gender Equality, a global grantmaking mechanism that has disbursed more than $120 million to over 140 programs in 80 countries since 2009. Its annual budget has grown steadily, reaching around $500 million in recent years, sourced from UN member states, private donors, and corporate partnerships. Much of this money goes directly to feminist NGOs, advocacy campaigns, and government programs designed to advance gender-mainstreaming policies.

The UN has also embedded feminism into global development frameworks. Gender equality became one of the Millennium Development Goals (2000) and was carried forward into the Sustainable Development Goals (2015), ensuring that aid flows and donor governments aligned their budgets with feminist priorities.

By contrast, the UN has never created an equivalent agency, trust fund, or global development goal for men and boys. Issues such as male suicide, fatherlessness, and educational decline remain almost entirely absent from UN programming. The imbalance is clear: while feminism was woven into the fabric of global governance and heavily resourced, men’s issues were left invisible.



MacArthur & Open Society

By the 1990s and 2000s, feminism had gone global, with major foundations exporting their influence abroad.

The MacArthur Foundation invested heavily in reproductive health and rights across the developing world. In India, its grants helped expand networks of reproductive-health NGOs; in Nigeria, it underwrote campaigns to integrate feminist perspectives into national health policy. By 2000, MacArthur had committed hundreds of millions globally, positioning itself as a leading private funder of reproductive rights.

The Open Society Foundations, created by George Soros, became another major engine of international feminist philanthropy. In Africa, OSF financed the African Women’s Development Fund, which has since distributed tens of millions to local feminist groups. In Latin America, OSF underwrote “gender justice” and LGBTQ+ campaigns. In Asia, it supported intersectional programs that tied feminism to poverty, ethnicity, and political repression.

Together, MacArthur and OSF globalized the feminist project. What began in the 1960s and 70s as domestic funding for women’s studies and advocacy had, by the 1990s and 2000s, expanded into a worldwide infrastructure of NGOs and policy centers. No comparable global investment was ever made for men or boys.



Melinda Gates (Pivotal Ventures)

In 2019, Melinda Gates announced through Pivotal Ventures a breathtaking pledge: $1 billion over ten years for women’s empowerment — the largest single philanthropic commitment of its kind. The money was designed to accelerate gender equality in the United States by funding women in leadership, promoting workplace equity, and strengthening feminist advocacy.

Through Pivotal Ventures, Gates directed funds into a wide array of partners, from advocacy groups and research institutes to corporate initiatives and grassroots organizations. The aim was to shift entire systems: how companies hire and promote, how political candidates are supported, and how cultural narratives about gender are shaped.

The scale of this investment effectively guaranteed feminist organizations a decade of unprecedented security and visibility. Yet no comparable billion-dollar commitment has ever been made for men or boys.



Conclusion

Taken together, the record is unmistakable. From Ford’s seeding of women’s studies, to the Ms. Foundation’s grassroots re-granting, to MacArthur and Open Society globalizing activism, and finally to Melinda Gates’s billion-dollar pledge, elite philanthropy has engineered and sustained feminism’s rise for more than half a century. Billions of dollars built the departments, advocacy networks, and NGOs that now define public conversation about gender.

Meanwhile, men’s and boys’ issues received virtually nothing. No major foundation seeded “men’s studies.” No billion-dollar pledge launched a global network for boys. The result is not just an imbalance in funding, but an imbalance in culture and policy: feminism is treated as the unquestioned voice on gender, while men’s struggles — from suicide and fatherlessness to educational decline — remain largely ignored.



Why They Gave So Much

It’s tempting to think these were simply acts of generosity. But foundations don’t write checks this big without a reason. Their motives were strategic:

  • Population Control — Rockefeller and Ford had been pouring money into family planning since the 1950s. Funding feminism’s push for reproductive freedom advanced the goal of lower birth rates, especially among the poor and in the developing world.

  • Labor Force Expansion — Encouraging women into higher education and careers expanded the labor pool, fueling economic growth and tax revenues.

  • Cold War Soft Power — Supporting women’s rights projected America’s moral superiority over the USSR, where women’s workforce participation was touted as a socialist achievement.

  • Shaping the Message — By funding universities, NGOs, and professional associations, foundations steered feminism toward credentialed scholarship and identity politics, and away from grassroots demands like wages for housework or critiques of capitalism. Men, once imagined as partners in reshaping family and work, were recast as obstacles. That framing made the movement more marketable and easier to manage.

  • Global Development — By the 1990s, funding feminism had become part of development policy. Empowering women was reframed as “good governance” and a tool for stabilizing societies.



The Big Picture

So what happened? Feminism flourished — but only in the strands that aligned with elite agendas:

  • reproductive rights as population control

  • career advancement as labor force expansion

  • women’s studies as cultural influence

  • and men positioned as adversaries rather than allies

Meanwhile, more radical or working-class agendas — supporting families, addressing men’s challenges, critiquing capitalism — faded from view.

That’s what hundreds of millions of dollars do: amplify some voices while silencing others.

The takeaway: Feminism wasn’t simply a spontaneous cultural revolution. It was shaped, amplified, and institutionalized by massive foundation funding. The foundations didn’t just give money — they set the rules. Grants went only to those advancing elite priorities, with feminist leaders acting as distributors inside those boundaries. It was philanthropy as social engineering: slick, effective, and enduring.

Follow the money, and you’ll see: feminism was less a revolution from below than a project engineered from above.

Is the same thing happening today with men’s issues? Who gets grants? Large grants? From major foundations? It’s worth asking.

Men Are Good.



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September 01, 2025
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Male Suicide: Finland Acted, America Shrugs
Part One - How Finland Faced Its Suicide Crisis Head-On


Part One - How Finland Faced Its Suicide Crisis Head-On

Part 1 of 3 in a series on what the world can learn from Finland’s suicide prevention efforts


In the United States, the conversation about male suicide is as predictable as it is shallow. “Men just won’t seek help,” we’re told. And that’s the end of it. Nothing more is asked, and nothing more is done.

But in the 1980s, Finland was facing a suicide crisis of its own. Suicide rates were among the highest in Europe, and the deaths were concentrated in a very particular group: men — often rural, middle-aged, isolated, and drinking too much.

Finland could have shrugged, as America does, and accepted that “men just won’t seek help.” Instead, they made a very different choice. They decided to find out, in painstaking detail, who was dying, where, and why.


The Scale of the Crisis

By the mid-1980s, the numbers were grim. Suicide had become one of Finland’s leading causes of death for working-age men. Rates had been climbing steadily since the 1960s, and by the 1980s they were among the worst in the developed world.

For a country that prided itself on being orderly, sober, and efficient, this was more than a statistical embarrassment — it was a national emergency.

In 1985, the Finnish Ministry of Health convened experts, psychiatrists, and policymakers. Their goal was clear: develop a national suicide prevention plan that would reduce suicides by 20% within ten years.

This was, at the time, a radical idea. No other country had attempted a national, research-based suicide prevention program on this scale.

But the Finns knew that to act wisely, they would first have to understand deeply. And that meant one thing: research.


A Radical First Step — Research Every Suicide

Most countries are content to look at suicide from a distance, through statistics. Age brackets, gender breakdowns, perhaps a line on a graph. Finland chose a different path.

In 1987, the government launched what became known as the Suicides in Finland 1987 study — a nationwide effort to examine, in intimate detail, every single suicide that occurred over the course of one year.

Not a sample. Not an estimate. Every case.

For each of the roughly 1,400 suicides, researchers conducted what’s called a psychological autopsy. They interviewed families, spoke to friends and neighbors, and combed through medical and police records. They asked hard questions: What was happening in this person’s life? Had they ever sought care? Were there early warning signs?

The project engaged hundreds of professionals across the country: doctors, social workers, police officers, even clergy. It was one of the most ambitious suicide research efforts ever attempted, and it immediately began to change the way Finns thought about the problem.

The findings were stark. Suicide in Finland was not a random scattering of tragedies. It clustered in specific groups:

  • Middle-aged rural men, often farmers or hunters, living in isolation.

  • Young men rejected from compulsory military service, who carried the stigma of “failure” at the very moment they were trying to establish their adult identity.

  • Men with alcohol dependence, frequently untreated.

  • People who had never had contact with mental health services at all.

For the first time, Finland could say not just how many suicides were happening, but who was dying, where, and under what circumstances.

This wasn’t abstract theory. It was a roadmap. And it set the stage for something even more unusual: a national plan to intervene, directly and specifically, in the lives of those most at risk.


The Provincial Lens

The brilliance of the Finnish project wasn’t just in collecting data — it was in how they used it.

Instead of keeping the results locked away in government reports or academic journals, the findings were handed back to the provinces. Each region received its own suicide profile: a detailed account of who in their community was dying, what patterns were visible, and where the weak points in support systems lay.

In one province, the data might highlight young men failing conscription. In another, middle-aged farmers drinking heavily and living alone. In yet another, the lack of follow-up care for suicide attempts.

These weren’t abstract numbers anymore. They were portraits of neighbors, colleagues, and fellow parishioners. And the responsibility was clear: suicide prevention would have to be tailored locally.

Provincial health officials, police, clergy, teachers, and even farmer’s associations were drawn into the effort. Instead of a purely top-down campaign dictated from Helsinki, Finland was building a network of local responses, each shaped by the community’s own data.

This was a crucial shift. Suicide wasn’t just a “psychiatric problem” to be handled in hospitals. It was a social and cultural problem too — one that touched schools, military bases, rural hunting clubs, and village churches.

By the early 1990s, Finland had something no other country had ever built: a nationwide, locally adapted suicide prevention strategy, grounded in evidence about real people in real places.


Why This Matters

What Finland did in the late 1980s was extraordinary.

Instead of throwing up their hands and sighing that “men just won’t seek help,” they went out and found the men who were dying. They studied the contexts of their lives, the patterns in their struggles, the systems that failed them.

By the early 1990s, Finland could point to its suicide crisis and say with precision:

  • We know who is most at risk.

  • We know where the deaths are happening.

  • We know the social and cultural factors driving them.

This is the foundation of prevention. You cannot help people you refuse to see.

And here lies the striking contrast with the United States. To this day, our suicide surveillance is patchy, fragmented, and often superficial. We rarely break down the data in meaningful ways, and even when we do, we almost never follow it with targeted action. Middle-aged men in rural communities — by far the group most at risk — remain largely invisible in our prevention systems.

Finland chose another path. They chose to look directly at the problem, however uncomfortable. And that choice gave them a roadmap for action.


Coming Next: From Research to Action

Research alone does not save lives. But in Finland, research was only the beginning.

The findings from the 1987 study became the blueprint for one of the boldest public health experiments in the world: a nationwide suicide prevention strategy that would mobilize schools, churches, the military, the media, and even rural hunting clubs.

And it worked. Suicide rates, which had been climbing steadily, began to fall.

In the next post, we’ll look at how Finland took the data in hand and transformed it into practical, creative interventions — and how entire communities became part of the prevention effort. It should post a week from today.

Men Are Good.

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