We Need the Power of Many to Stand Against Feminist Agenda

CommentaryIt was 2014 when I first heard from Andrew, a young Queensland dad, who was being denied contact with his two young girls. From then on, he wrote regularly updating me on his eight-year Family Court marathon, where he lost round after round, despite his wife being declared an unfit mother after a court-ordered psychiatric assessment. She very effectively used false violence accusations to get away with moving with the children interstate and endlessly dragging out the legal proceedings. Then in December, he killed himself. Since I heard the tragic news, I’ve been trawling through his old emails; so sad that this good man had lost all hope. I also recently learned that in November, another of my correspondents took his own life. He first wrote to me a few years ago after being shocked by his treatment at an Australian Capital Territory (ACT) police station when he tried to report an assault by his partner on him and his young daughter. He was told by the police, “You don’t really want to report it. Go home and sort it out.” When he tried to talk to his wife, she left with his daughter and took out a violence order against him. “You cannot believe the despair that fathers of this country are in,” he said. I’ve been haunted by the deaths of these two men, wishing I could have done more. The last message I received from Andrew earlier last year ended this way: “Your emails are a ray of sunshine to me. In a very foreboding, stormy ocean, you’re a beacon of hope and of understanding.” Despite our despair at the overwhelming stormy ocean, we can’t afford to give up. We need to give men reason to believe that one-day things will change. While there’s no hope of swiftly bringing down the mighty feminist edifice currently making life intolerable for so many men, by exposing the injustice, eventually we will win through. Most people do care about the fair treatment of men and boys. For now, that means taking solace even in small victories, savouring every sign of the slightest breakthrough. It is critical we bring together all the small organisations working to help men to chip away at the current anti-male prejudice and injustice. People pay their respects in front of a grave in a cemetery in the western city of Dinge, France, during All Saints’ Day, on Nov. 1, 2016. (Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images) Pushback Against Radical Feminism Has Begun Last year, we saw the first sign of a concerted international fightback against the feminist domestic violence industry. DAVIA (Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) is a new coalition of organisations promoting domestic violence and abuse policies that are science-based, family-affirming, and sex-inclusive. Launched late-2021, this has expanded from a handful of participant groups to 70 organizations from 24 countries coordinating campaigns to challenge the anti-male bile around domestic violence being promoted by international bodies across the world. The United Nations is a classic example. This year DAVIA actually managed to block the passage of two typically anti-male U.N. resolutions, after issuing a press release that exposed their crazy thinking. Like the claim that “women are 14 times more likely to die in a climate catastrophe than men,”—a nonsense statistic included in a U.N. resolution allegedly exploring “the nexus between the climate crisis, environmental degradation and related displacement, and violence against women and girls.” A man holds up a sign as he takes part in the Second Annual Womens March Chicago on Jan. 20, 2018. (Jim Young/AFP via Getty Images) Days after the DAVIA issued their world-wide press release highlighting what the U.N. was up to, the resolution was removed from the agenda. No big deal? Arguably there’s little cause for concern about the U.N.’s posturing. As UK journalist James Delingpole writes, “The U.N. is a terrible organisation: a bloated talking shop for technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats, third-world beggars, globalists, socialists, and other overindulged, grasping cry-bullies, meddlers, and no-hopers.” But Delingpole points out that, despite U.N. founding articles requiring equal rights for men and women, the organisation persists in “picking on men and blaming them for everything that is wrong.” That matters. These big international organisations are helping create the zeitgeist that pushes lawmakers into passing more and more draconian legislation targeting men, that prevents judges from allowing fathers contact with their children after cooked-up violence allegations, that green lights propaganda into our schools presenting boys as villains and girls as victims and that encourages despairing men to give up hope. That’s why DAVIA’s work is important. They recently coordinated activities celebrating Nov. 18 as “The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men,” with activities and media events in Argentina, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Northern Ireland, Peru, Sp

We Need the Power of Many to Stand Against Feminist Agenda

Commentary

It was 2014 when I first heard from Andrew, a young Queensland dad, who was being denied contact with his two young girls.

From then on, he wrote regularly updating me on his eight-year Family Court marathon, where he lost round after round, despite his wife being declared an unfit mother after a court-ordered psychiatric assessment. She very effectively used false violence accusations to get away with moving with the children interstate and endlessly dragging out the legal proceedings.

Then in December, he killed himself. Since I heard the tragic news, I’ve been trawling through his old emails; so sad that this good man had lost all hope.

I also recently learned that in November, another of my correspondents took his own life. He first wrote to me a few years ago after being shocked by his treatment at an Australian Capital Territory (ACT) police station when he tried to report an assault by his partner on him and his young daughter.

He was told by the police, “You don’t really want to report it. Go home and sort it out.”

When he tried to talk to his wife, she left with his daughter and took out a violence order against him.

“You cannot believe the despair that fathers of this country are in,” he said.

I’ve been haunted by the deaths of these two men, wishing I could have done more. The last message I received from Andrew earlier last year ended this way: “Your emails are a ray of sunshine to me. In a very foreboding, stormy ocean, you’re a beacon of hope and of understanding.”

Despite our despair at the overwhelming stormy ocean, we can’t afford to give up. We need to give men reason to believe that one-day things will change. While there’s no hope of swiftly bringing down the mighty feminist edifice currently making life intolerable for so many men, by exposing the injustice, eventually we will win through.

Most people do care about the fair treatment of men and boys.

For now, that means taking solace even in small victories, savouring every sign of the slightest breakthrough. It is critical we bring together all the small organisations working to help men to chip away at the current anti-male prejudice and injustice.

Epoch Times Photo
People pay their respects in front of a grave in a cemetery in the western city of Dinge, France, during All Saints’ Day, on Nov. 1, 2016. (Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images)

Pushback Against Radical Feminism Has Begun

Last year, we saw the first sign of a concerted international fightback against the feminist domestic violence industry.

DAVIA (Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) is a new coalition of organisations promoting domestic violence and abuse policies that are science-based, family-affirming, and sex-inclusive.

Launched late-2021, this has expanded from a handful of participant groups to 70 organizations from 24 countries coordinating campaigns to challenge the anti-male bile around domestic violence being promoted by international bodies across the world.

The United Nations is a classic example. This year DAVIA actually managed to block the passage of two typically anti-male U.N. resolutions, after issuing a press release that exposed their crazy thinking.

Like the claim that “women are 14 times more likely to die in a climate catastrophe than men,”—a nonsense statistic included in a U.N. resolution allegedly exploring “the nexus between the climate crisis, environmental degradation and related displacement, and violence against women and girls.”

Epoch Times Photo
A man holds up a sign as he takes part in the Second Annual Womens March Chicago on Jan. 20, 2018. (Jim Young/AFP via Getty Images)

Days after the DAVIA issued their world-wide press release highlighting what the U.N. was up to, the resolution was removed from the agenda.

No big deal? Arguably there’s little cause for concern about the U.N.’s posturing.

As UK journalist James Delingpole writes, “The U.N. is a terrible organisation: a bloated talking shop for technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats, third-world beggars, globalists, socialists, and other overindulged, grasping cry-bullies, meddlers, and no-hopers.”

But Delingpole points out that, despite U.N. founding articles requiring equal rights for men and women, the organisation persists in “picking on men and blaming them for everything that is wrong.”

That matters. These big international organisations are helping create the zeitgeist that pushes lawmakers into passing more and more draconian legislation targeting men, that prevents judges from allowing fathers contact with their children after cooked-up violence allegations, that green lights propaganda into our schools presenting boys as villains and girls as victims and that encourages despairing men to give up hope.

That’s why DAVIA’s work is important. They recently coordinated activities celebrating Nov. 18 as “The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Men,” with activities and media events in Argentina, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Northern Ireland, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.

Worldwide Effort Against Gender Ideology

A global Twitter campaign was launched to promote the hashtag #StopViolenceOnMen, with over 36,000 tweets sent out over a four-day period. In India, the #StopViolenceOnMen hashtag trended, ranking in ninth place among all hashtags.

Then there were the women in Argentina who invaded the offices of the Minister for Women protesting for “Falsely Accused Day” on Sept. 9, another event coordinated internationally by DAVIA.

I loved the feisty language—here translated from Spanish—in their letter to the minister: “Even so, you, Madam Minister, together with your cohort of ideologues, officials and communicators, will surely insist on denying that false complaints exist, that thousands of men are victims of them, and that the infamous judicial industry that feeds this order, is causing unparalleled harm to the rule of law.”

DAVIA is currently launching an ambitious project in January to block the expansion of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Europe, a treaty ostensibly intended to combat violence against women in Europe.

There was a huge fuss in 2020 when the Hungarian Parliament rejected the ratification of this dreadful treaty declaring that the measure promoted “destructive gender ideologies.”

Too right. The IC treaty reeks of feminist ideology, promoting the usually tired dogma about domestic violence being caused by power imbalances that favour men over women. Now it looks like the Convention is in trouble.

Nine years after the IC came into force in 2014, Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia have not ratified the treaty, Turkey withdrew in 2021, and Poland has announced its plan to withdraw. In Israel, the powerful Likud Party has also agreed to not join the IC.

Here’s DAVIA’s latest summary of everything that is wrong with the Istanbul Convention, which includes highlighting its Marxist roots and how it attacks human rights and freedom of thought and religion.

DAVIA’s work provides a little inspiration to help everybody retain hope. If we pull together, there’s much we can do to ensure this year brings better times for men.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Bettina Arndt is an Australian writer and social commentator on gender issues. She was the country’s first sex therapist and feminist, before focusing on men’s rights. Arndt has authored several books and has written for major newspaper titles, magazines, and has featured regularly on television. She received the Order of Australia in 2020 for her work in promoting gender equity through advocacy for men. Find her online at her blog, BettinaArndt.substack.com.