Karen Woodall despises a lot of people! This list is not exhaustive…
Adrienne Burgess of the Fatherhood Institute
Duncan Fisher of Kids in the Middle
Joan Hunt, academic, one of the “Matriarchs of Academia”: Liz Trinder, Mavis Maclean, Joan Hunt, Brigid Featherstone
Jennifer McIntosh, Australian academic
Baroness Tyler, former Chair of CAFCASS and CEO of Relate
Sir Anthony Douglas, CEO of CAFCASS
Harriet Harman MP, former leader of the Opposition and cabinet minister
Patricia Hewitt, former Labour cabinet minister
Dr Craig Childress, American parental alienation specialist
Melanie Gill, a rival British parental alienation expert
Yvette Cooper, former Labour cabinet minister
Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and creator of One Billion Rising
Julie Bindel, feminist journalist
Penelope Leach, child development psychologist
Organisations Karen Woodall loathes and despises include:
Action for Children
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy
CAFCASS (the Children and Families Court Advisory Service)
CAFCASS Cymru
Child Maintenance Options managers
civil servants
Fatherhood Institute
Gingerbread
Labour Party
Mumsnet
Nuffield Foundation
One Plus One
Relate
“Whilst F4J are portrayed as the bullying baddies as they push to make us aware of the reality of 21st Century, fatherless Britain, one only has to take a look at Mumsnet threads to see the kind of bullying that really makes your hair curl.”
“Which brings me to a recent report released by the Nuffield Foundation, that Charitable body which is charged with improving social well-being in the widest sense. This report that has released just as the issue of shared parenting is back on the public agenda is, in my view, far more dangerous to children than anything a man hanging off tower bridge in a spiderman outfit could do. Above all else, in this short ‘rest’ from blogging, it is this report which has prompted my decision to pick up my pen again, for to not do so, in the face of this kind of poisonous rhetoric, would be to seriously fail my duty to criticise the orthodoxy that has a stranglehold on family policy in this country.”
“The early interventions project that was approved by the judiciary in 2003 would have such a difference. Instead of the Judge having to make a decision based on the balance of probabilities, families would work with professionals trained to understand the psychology and separation and its impact on children (and I mean truly trained, not Relate trained or Liz Trinder trained, I mean trained using empirical evidence which is not tainted with standpoint politics)…
What is the point of putting parents in a group to learn about the impact on children of their separation, when they themselves are bleeding from open wounds. It’s madness in my view and Relate, who appear to bend their delivery of services to meet the needs not of parents but of whatever funding stream happens to be available from government, are doing a national disservice to separating families in my view.”
“The day that is celebrated by lovers everywhere is upon us again. For too many men, however, instead of hearts and flowers, this day will be scarred by the images of Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising movement, an initiative which to my mind, exemplifies the very worst of the poisonous rhetoric of the women’s rights lobby. Rather than celebrating the love between men and women on this special day, this movement attempts to whip up the gender war and steal away the joy. It’s nasty, it’s not telling us the truth and it’s probably arriving somewhere near you on February 14th.
For the uninitiated, One Billion Rising refers to a movement where people rise and dance against against violence against women and girls. A movement started by a woman who wrote the Vagina Monologues, a play in which the rape of a young girl by an older woman was referred to as a ‘good rape’. A movement which states that one in three women across the world will be raped and beaten in her lifetime. A movement which is outrageously promulgated upon half truths and stereotypes. This unpleasant and yet seductively powerful (for young women especially) narrative, revives the ‘all men are rapists’ stereotype and demands that our attention is given to the issues which, we are told, are fundamental to equality.
Far from being fundamental to equality however, the One Billion Rising mission is to reinforce the idea of women as victims and men as perpetrators which in the UK at least, completely ignores the 40% of victims of violence in the home who happen to be men (1). Goodness only knows how that feels, when all around are rising for justice for women and girls and not only does your experience not get heard but you are counted in with the perpetrators simply because you are a man. That’s not justice and its not equality either, it’s discrimination in action, but you won’t find many people talking about it.
Neither will you find many people being very concerned about it. The Violence Against Women and Girls movement is a singularly silent movement on the issue of violence against men and in fact, women’s violent behaviour in its entirety. According to many advocates, men cannot be victims simply because they are advantaged in a patriarchal society. This is the same patriarchal society, in which 40% of victims of violence in the home are men, some of it severe (2). Try speaking up about this in any forum concerned with family violence, however, and you will be shouted down, often aggressively. The VAWG movement doesn’t like what they call ‘gender symmetry’ presumably because if we really treated violence in the home from an equalities perspective, 40% of the funding would go to the 40% of victims of this who are men, instead of the mere 2% in some areas and in others even less.”
“To convince the electorate that coercive control is more than bad men and oppressed women we have to raise the worth of fathers in their children’s lives, a worth which has to be upheld as distinctly different to that which is attributed to mothers. This in itself is an uphill battle and will become even more of a problem now that the Jennifer Mcintosh circus in the form of the Mindful Policy Group has rolled into town. If ever there was a target for those interested in modern family policy, this backward step heralded by Penelope Leach’s poisonous invective about children’s overnight stays with their father is it.. Having recently been made aware that the MPG are about to start training mediators, lawyers et al in the neuroscience of separated parenting, to my mind this is where all of the efforts of those of use committed to whole family post separation support should be focused. Remember, laws can be gender neutral but become gender biased in the enactment of them. MPG could so very easily turn the clock back forty years on services surrounding our separated families”