Karen Woodall is a men’s rights extremist
Practice Direction 25B of the Family Procedure Rules on the duties of an expert, the expert’s report and arrangements for an expert to attend court, states that: “3.1 An expert in family proceedings has an overriding duty to the court that takes precedence over any obligation to the person from whom the expert has received instructions or by whom the expert is paid.”
On 9 December 2018 the Transparency Project, a registered charity that explains and discusses family law and family courts in England & Wales, hosted a debate at Gresham College with the title “Are Family Courts Working for Families and Children?”
At 08:39 minutes into the YouTube video of the debate, audience member, Councillor Iona Gordon asks:
“On that point about parental alienation - what happens if an expert witness is found to be someone who actually helps and supports organisations like Every Parent Matters Families Need Fathers, and she is the - or he or she - is then the expert in a case, when it’s quite clear from the word go that they’re supporting the father in the case?”
The debate moderator, journalist Louise Tickle, asks panel member Mr Justice Keehan for his opinion. Mr Justice Keehan replies:
Yes, certainly, if that became apparent, the weight that would be attached to that expert’s witness would be virtually nil.
He testily added: “And the much greater awareness nowadays of the pernicious nature of parental alienation, and how it affects not just the relationship of the child with the parent but every aspect of the child’s functioning and ability to form relationships in the future.”
Karen Woodall has been a leading figure in the international men’s rights movement for the last decade. As far back as 22 January 2014, she wrote: “I have been accused of being an MRA (men’s rights activist), and advocate for the equal parenting movement and in the nastier assumptions common amongst feminists, a danger to the families that I work with.”
Karen Woodall is a hired gun for fathers who can afford to pay for her services. For over a decade, she has used her blog and workshops around the country, sometimes hosted by Families Need Fathers to tout for business.
In her blog of 25 June 2015, Karen Woodall urged a reluctant father: “You can have them removed from her if you work hard enough at it… Our coaching and intervention services are at the Family Separation Clinic, you can have real time, real life conversations with people we have helped, people whose kids are now safe, now well and healthy. Anytime you want to take that step, we will be here. K”
It should also be evident for the past decade, from published judgments, that Karen Woodall frequently has a fractious relationship with mothers and children (see, for example A (Children: Parental alienation) [2019] EWFC B56) and that others have accused her of bias towards fathers.
In [2013] EWHC 2305 (Fam) Mr Justice Cobb wrote:
“I am doubtful that the women would engage or co-operate with any assessment, given the breakdown of their relationship with Karen Woodall in the past. From as long ago as July 2011 it has been a matter of record that the women "are not agreeable to her involvement" in the case.”
“I note that in her recent statement, M2 even suggests that Dr. Cameron and Karen Woodall were never impartial, they had a conflict of interest, with specific allegiances to F1: "clearly F1 has a relationship with Dr. Cameron which went outside the realms of this case”.”
I have received screen shots of emails showing Karen Woodall stating that the judiciary are well aware of my website and of her threatening a mother who had raised questions about her BACP sanction in 2015 and about my website that what happened to the mother in A and B (Parental Alienation: No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4) would happen to her.
On 11 May 2020 I submitted information about Karen and Nick Woodall to the President of the Family Division’s Transparency Review, outlining my grave concerns. I received an email acknowledgment that my submission had been received, but my information was completely ignored.
Mr Justice Keehan cannot reasonably claim ignorance of Karen Woodall’s extremist views. Given that he so vehemently supports her, in the face of all the evidence that she is an extremist, it is reasonable to assume that he shares, sympathises with, or even positively embraces her extremist views.
Karen Woodall is revered by other men’s rights activists globally, such as MENZ - Masculinist Evolution New Zealand, the moribund Rights of Man (“The UK's leading website for raising issues about gender discrimination and sexual discrimination against men”), and the University of Toronto Men’s Issues Society, where she spoke at an event titled Disappearing Dads: How Children Suffer When We Demonize Dads.
My website outlines some of Karen Woodall’s links with men’s rights extremists. Mr Justice Keehan should be aware of this material, given that, according to Karen Woodall, he punished the mother in A and B (Parental Alienation: No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4) and [2022] EWCA Civ 982 with the loss of her children in part because she referred to my website.
Karen Woodall is closely associated with Mike Buchanan of Justice 4 Men and Boys. There have been permanent links to Karen Woodall’s blog on the J4MB website since at least 2016. Mike Buchanan is a British men’s rights extremist whose website includes regular slots on Lying Feminists of the Month, Toxic Feminists of the Month, Gormless Feminists of the Month and Whiny Feminists of the Month.
J4MB is affiliated to the US website, A Voice For Men, classified as a male supremacist hate group by the US civil rights organisation, Southern Poverty Law Center.
Typical AVFM fare includes “Remember - BOYCOTT Valentine’s Day” (2011) - “a socially coerced day of hyper-entitlement for a generation of princess leeches… Not all men are getting blowjobs and other forms of sex for the presents on Valentines Day so much as they are getting a reprieve from constant nagging and criticism, if they happen to get the right present… I used to counsel groups of men… Almost without exception the men who were the most frustrated with financial pressures were also men who had entered those relationships wallet first, making sure Princess felt like a princess every minute of the day. In other words, they went fishing with stink bait and caught bottom dwellers… So, gentlemen, if you want your kisses to begin with Kay, please allow me to suggest a prostitute, or at least a woman that admits that is what she is. They may not actually kiss you, but I am thinking their skills in the fellatio department are considerably more developed. And when they are done they will go away!” “How to get your man to punch you in the face” (2018) is another example of AVFM output.
On 31 January 2015 Karen Woodall was the focus of an hour-long interview by AVFM Editor-at-Large Erin Pizzey and co-host, Dean Esmay for AVFM Radio, as part of their “When Did You Wake Up?” series.
Dean Esmay is one of the men in this 2015 video, shot and narrated by Paul Elam, of AVFM members making drunken, sexual slurs against feminist journalists:
Paul Elam: Okay, this is the first AVFM family reunion. We are celebrating the beer company in Dallas that would not kowtow to feminists, and now we have video proof of every man in the men’s movement who told Jessica Valenti “no” to a blow job. And I’m gonna get close-ups of all you motherfuckers. That’s right, hello, Jessica! Hello Jessica! Here’s a dick you won’t suck, oh, there’s another dick you won’t suck, oh my god, there’s just thousands of dicks that don’t want you to suck it! Okay, okay, thank you very much. No means no, bitch! No means no, bitch! Okay yeah, nobody’s intoxicated here!
Group chants: No means no! No means no! No means no! No means no! No means no! No means no!
Man with long grey beard: No means blow! No means blow!
Paul Elam: Have anybody anything else they’d like to say to the world of feminists, because this is going on youtube.
Bearded man at back of group: Go fuck yourself!
Paul Elam laughs and group applauds.
Paul Elam: Well, we’ve already said that a few times.
Man with long grey beard: Thanks for all the fish!
Dean Esmay: Now much more about good rape!
Paul Elam: Hey listen, Amanda Marcotte, your pussy stinks!
Paul Elam: Alright, uh-oh, hey girls, look into your future. A lot more of this shit’s coming, it ain’t gonna be fun, except for us. Alright, haul out, bye bye.
A 2016 Guardian article, The dark side of Guardian comments, featured Jessica Valenti, who said:
“My life looks really different than it did ten years ago, because of online harassment. When someone comes up to me one on one to talk, I get nervous, like is this the person who, you know, said they wanted to rape me last week? I have a PO box, I don’t have a public address listed. I don’t check into hotels using my real name or my husband’s name. I don’t have a public facing calendar for when I do speaking events, in addition to pretty serious security protocols, you know, metal detectors before students can come, not publicizing an event that they’re hoping to get a lot of people to. The last event that I spoke at, they had a bomb sniffing dog. It just completely changes the way that you live your life.”
On 28 June 2011 Paul Elam launched a website, Register-Her.com, on AVFM’s F*cking Their Sh*t Up podcast, which published photos, names and addresses of women who had made “false allegations”. The audio is no longer available, but I have attached a transcript of the podcast at the end of this document.
On 7 August 2022 the Sunday Mail reported fugitive sex offender Nicholas Rossi had posted pictures of his victim’s home on a sick blog which made her out to be the criminal, twice tried to sue her for defamation, and “joined the website of a male supremacy and anti-feminism group called A Voice for Men”.
Given that Karen Woodall has been a leading figure in the international men’s rights movement for the past decade, it is reasonable to assume that she endorses the attitudes espoused by A Voice for Men.
Here is Karen Woodall on a website called Good Men Project, run by Glen Poole, formerly of Fathers 4 Justice:
Good Men Project
“It took me to cleanse myself of the infection called feminism to be able to do it. Feminism messes with your mind, especially when you have survived damage, it tells you that you and only you matter, that your personal grievances matter more than anyone else’s and that men, across the whole of the spectrum are not to be believed, not to be trusted and are largely dangerous to women. When I shed my feminist chains I realised that there are men and women who do bad things to each other and to other people, to little people as well as big people. I realised that the men and women who do bad things to each other have a history, largely of having bad things done to them.
I also realised that there are men and women who do good things. And some people who are in between. I realised that not every women should be believed without question and I realised that not every man should be condemned on the basis of allegations.
And I realised that there is one hell of a world out there that would not exist without the men who clean out drains, design fantastic machinery, save lives, give their lives, help people, make things happen, fly planes, drive boats, clean out the sea bed, design light bulbs, make things go, make things stop, grow things, carry things, fix things and so much more. And a world in which women, where they are strong enough and free enough can do those things too but it is not some weird, masked ‘Patriarchy’ that stops them from doing it.
I had to shed my feminist chains to stop that paranoia that whispered in my ear that I was being done down every time someone celebrated men. I grew up a feminist, it never did me any good at all. Now I work with men and women, mums and dads. I can see what feminism has done to the men in this country and to other countries, like Australia for example. I can see how the life is sucked out of men and boys and they are chewed up and spat out if they do not fit the acceptable feminist norm of what a good man should be. And it sickens me, to the core of my soul. It sickens me to see what feminism has done to good men and good boys and I don’t care whether its cool and groovy to talk about or not talk about feminism when one is considering the horrors that face men and boys, I just want to build support for men and boys in ways that fit what men and boys need and that’s all men and boys, not just some men and boys who happen to be ‘good enough’ to be on places like this.
And as for the state sponsored pro feminist, so called ‘fatherhood institute.’ The only way that bunch managed to get any money was by divesting themselves of anything to do with the reality of fatherhood and pandering to the likes of the state sponsored, acceptable, feminist neutered social policy and legislation. I’d like to know when anyone from the state sponsored charity sector ever climbed up a burning building to save a kid. They would be too busy tweeting how fantastic they were to even notice a child in danger.
You are absolutely kidding yourself Glen that there would ever have been any kind of acceptance of F4J charitable arm at the policy tables. The first time anyone with any thing like real male genitalia said something sensible about fatherhood would have been the last. I have been there, I have seen it and heard it and been aghast by it. If you want your fathers movement to be neutered, tethered and muzzled, go for it, they absolutely love eunuchs in the palace of westminster. If you want real men to be be really represented you are going to have to go elsewhere for your models of success.”
“The shared parenting project did not fail because men failed to work together. It failed because the feminist inspired, feminist funded, massively wealthy, massively in control of academia feminists were able to bring together a whispering campaign and then a research evidence campaign that put enough wind up the trousers of said Tories to put the frighteners on them. I have been in this business since 1991, I have been around Parliament enough, I have sat around the policy tables and I have witnessed, first hand, for the third time around how the feminist funded, feminist driven, feminist written social policy wins out. And saying that the shared parenting project failed because men didn’t organise enough is like saying that men don’t suffer after family separation, they just think they do.
Any of the opposition parties will parly with you. When they get voted in however its a different matter and that is because it doesn’t really matter who you vote for, the country is run by a civil service, all of whom are steeped in the doctrine that has been well and truly stitched throughout the departments since the seventies.
There is no place for fatherhood that does not conform to the expected norm as set out by Harriet Harman and her gang in the 1990’s. It is as prevalent today as its always been, men without masculinity and only where it is deemed useful to women.
Men didn’t fail Glen, women just organised better, got more money and have more power. And they keep it that way every time we tell men otherwise.
This doesn’t have to be a battle between men and women, there are some women, I am one of them, who understand the truth of the matter. But if those of us who do understand keep telling the outside world that it would all just get better if we organised ourselves properly we ignore the reality. They don’t want real men in family lives Glen….read Harman’s ‘The Family Way’ and find out how much they don’t want men in family lives. I used to think people who quoted this kind of stuff were bonkers. Then I sat and listened to the conversation about men around the policy tables in the DWP and DfE last year and it dawned on me why shared parenting will be resisted. This is not some argument over runways. This is about the basic composition of the family and about the value of men and boys.”
Good Men Project
“Men and boys do need their own space and their own dialogue and the ground to allow the way in which masculinity has been shaped by feminism over forty years to emerge into sharp relief. That way, when masculinity is considered and thought about, by men, for men, an emerging sense of what it is to be a man and what it has been to grow as a man confined in the spaces defined by women, will take shape.
On my own journey, liberated from the shackles of feminist doctrine, I see all around me the damage that we have done to men and boys, who are, just as oppressed, just as speechless and just as constrained by the ruling feminist ‘elite’ as women were back in the fifties. The pendulum swung so far in favour of women that we live in a world where men and boys lives are governed by the expectations of feminist legislation, feminist academia and feminist prejudice. The next step has to be a dialogue between men and women and a way of working together that shapes the world in the shadow of our different needs. But first, before we can have that dialogue, men do need to share, do need to think and do need to grieve actually for what has been done to them. I spend a lot of time working with men who are severely wounded at the deepest level by being made to feel ashamed of being born male. Those wounds will be healed when men are able to take their own lives back into their own hands. These are such exciting times and I am very excited by the possibilities of what may emerge as we move forward in working for a more equal world where men and women are valued for the different things they are. A world that our sons and grandsons will be safer in and a world in which they will be valued for the wonderful people that they are.
Good on you Glen Poole, I will be harsh critic when you stray but a staunch supporter as you take this movement forward and, when the healing is underway, (for all of us), the dialogue will be all the more invigorating and all the more creative as we all stand together, different in so many ways, but equal in all.”
Glen Poole replies: “Thanks Karen I always have time to hear your perspectives (even if we don’t always agree) as you are one of the leading voices in the world on men’s issues – thanks for the time you take to comment on my articles here and elsewhere – best – Glen”
Good Men Project
“I experience cognitive, emotional, psychological and spiritual dissonance each and every time I sit down at a government policy table. The cruelty that is disseminated by those remote from real people is not to be dismissed Glen, the trickle down of that cruelty, in policies and practice, which are perpetuated by the state funded behemoths such as the Fatherhood Insitute, is not to be underestimated. Power corrupts and absolute power removes humanity from interactions between the state and the people it serves. We cannot go looking for compassionate answers in the state machinery. I have vowed never to go there again. It is only in the real relationships between real people that the difference that changes lives can be made.”
Good Men Project
“Men who react badly to feminism are not broken people, they are people reacting to being chained up in a cultural and idealogical strait jacket that prevents personal and collective freedoms. And some women react badly to feminism too, when they realise how negtively their lives have been affected by it.
Feminism, it takes the personal and enlarges it until perspective is lost. It gives permission for self absorption and it feeds narcissistic potential until the whole world simply a mirror to the individual soul. It is an hysterical arrested development, in which an illusion is created that personal feelings are the only thing that matters. It is a collective driver of psycholgocial splitting, which terrorises men into splitting off their masculinity and women into projection of negativity onto men. It is, quite frankly, frightening in its power to control and deceive. And just like the ‘Patriarchy’ it is a woman made, woman perpetuated concept. Time we grew up in my view.”
“I despair that the world that we live in is analysed as being governed by this mysterious ‘patriarchy.’ Is that not just a made up way of describing power, invented in the hot bed of women’s efforts to liberate themselves from a hierarchical social structure which no longer exists and used to this day to demonise all men as being ‘collectively oppressing women.’ All men do not oppress women. All women do not oppress men. What would Freud say about the hysterical perpetuation of the notion that there exists, in real time, outside of our imaginations, a baddie called ‘patriarchy’?”
Nick Woodall comments: ““how men collectively oppress women”… This is the secular ‘original sin’ raising its ugly head once again. Guilty, not through individual actions but, because we are born with a penis. Jeremy, if you can tell me how I’ve oppressed anyone, male or female, I would be grateful to know.”
Good Men Project
“Try saying DV is not gender based to any of the feminist researchers, my husband did recently on a Centre for Social Justice panel and was literally laughed at, she rolled in the aisles with her chums at the notion. Subsequently she has singled him out for attack repeatedly, calling him dangerous, questioning his working practice and latterly attempting to say that the Centre for Separated Families has dangerous practice around the family, all this witnessed by leading policy makers. When he stood up to this and asked her to desist from her unwarranted personal and professionak attacks on him, she backed down but my guess is it won’t be long now before she stands down from the panel.
I have personally and professionally experienced the same thing in the last year, repeated and concerted attacks on me for saying that family violence is not gender based and that the research shows that there is a need for a different approach to this. In workshops I have been attacked by feminists from Scottish Women’s Aid at policy round tables in Westminister, I have been laughed at, shouted at and on one occasion screamed at in anger for saying that violence in the home should not be analysed using patriarchal models because that renders people vulnerable.
Make of this what you will, It simply ended my self identification as a feminist, none of what I witnessed was about helping people, all of what I say felt like a concerted effort to keep the status quo in place by fair means or foul, including being ‘offended’ in a regular basis by anything that dies not fit the required orthdoxical approach.Karen Woodall’s blog
Karen Woodall has been writing a blog regularly since 2011. In the years from 2011 to 2016 her writing was particularly extreme and vitriolic. From around 2017, as she became increasingly sought after by wealthy fathers seeking to cast themselves as victims and their ex-wives as vengeful, manipulative alienators, she has toned down her rhetoric and removed some of her blog posts. Hence many of the hyperlinks in this document are from the Wayback Machine. Below are some of the men who have most frequently commented on her blog and to whom she appears to be particularly closely linked.
Stuart Graham
Stuart Graham is a parental alienation campaigner and author of Parental Alienation, Attachment and Corrupt Law and 101 Dirty Tricks of Secret Courts: Private Family Law, under the pseudonym Stuart Hontree.
He acted as McKenzie Friend in 2015] EWHC 2090 for a father claiming to be a victim of parental alienation who sought to have two Cafcass officers and the solicitor of his child’s mother jailed. The judge considered the applications “an abuse of the court process”. He went on to act as McKenzie Friend for the same father in [2016] EWCA Civ 1088 and [2017] EWCA Civ 1579.
He now works as an unregulated parental alienation expert psychologist in the UK family courts.
Vincent McGovern
Vincent McGovern runs the Central and North London branches of Families Need Fathers, and is the author of The War on Dads and Children and a regular speaker at events such as the Families Need Fathers parental alienation workshop on 14 October 2017 with Justice Stephen Wildblood, who ordered a disastrous change of residence on Karen Woodall’s advice in A (Children: Parental alienation) [2019] EWFC B56 - in the full knowledge that she was unregulated - and then vilified the mother when the children repeatedly ran away. Vincent McGovern is a key figure in the British men’s rights movement. See, for example, his Glass Blind Spot interview with Brian Drury about The War on Dads and Children.
Nick Langford
Nick Langford was the researcher for Fathers 4 Justice and author of the F4J Handbook and An Exercise in Absolute Futility: How feminism, falsehood and myth changed the landscape of family law. In 2012 he took part in a Fathers 4 Justice protest in Oxford Street, during which four of his co-protesters stripped naked in Marks and Spencer. He blogs about men’s rights and the evils of feminism at ExInjuria.
Darryl Westell
Darryl Westell was the campaigns director and a protester for Fathers 4 Justice. In 2005 he admitted causing a public nuisance and was given a twelve month conditional discharge after scaling a gantry on the Severn Bridge dressed as Santa Claus with three other Fathers 4 Justice campaigners. In 2004 he scaled a gantry over the A40 dressed as Superman as part of a coordinated plan by Fathers 4 Justice to cause travel chaos for motorists driving into London.
In 2008 Darryl Westell was the Fathers 4 Justice spokesman on the ground, speaking to news reporters, while his colleagues Jolly Stanesby and Mark Harris protested as superheroes “Captain Conception” and “Cash Gordon” on the roof of deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman’s home. Both men were found guilty of causing distress and alarm, and Stanesby was jailed for two months.
Paul Manning
Paul Manning was a member of Real Fathers 4 Justice. In June 2013 he was charged with criminal damage of Constable’s The Hay Wain at the National Gallery in London.
Founder of Britain’s first refuge for battered women in Chiswick in 1971. Now a leader of the anti-feminist movement and Editor-at-Large at A Voice For Men.
Brian Drury
Brian Drury is the author of the Glass Blind Spot podcasts and the @Eyeisbloke Twitter account. Having made a career out of pursuing unsuccessful complaints and grievances against his work colleagues and industrial tribunal proceedings against his employer, the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, he coordinated a campaign to flood OFCOM with complaints about the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, “Torn Apart”, broadcast on 20 July 2021 and still available to view, which looked at forced removals of children from mothers on the grounds of parental alienation.
In his Glass Blind Spot video titled Is The London Victims Commissioner Fit For Purpose? he calls for the dismissal of Claire Waxman, the London Victims’ Commissioner, because she raised concerns about unregulated parental alienation experts in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary about forced removals of children. The video features Vincent McGovern, barrister Sarah Phillimore, and self-styled “Attachment Psychologist” Liz Archer, who is not regulated by the British Psychological Society or the Health Care Professions Council.
19:52
Liz Archer: “Well, I’m just very interested in Claire Waxman’s Twitter profile, as to who she follows, who, within the PA lobby there is evidence that some of those have been trolled. I’m very interested that she follows Natalie Page and who is presented in the Dispatches programme an an expert on experts, who is actually a troll, and is actually not qualified to judge people. One of the problems and the reasons that they could not get expert witnesses to speak on this matter is due to the trolling. There’s a number of websites being set up. There was a colleague alerted me, and it was through The Court Said, where he was being trolled on Twitter, trying to identify cases where he had been the expert on, to undermine his work.* And then, having spoken to other guardians, even, I’m aware that solicitors and NYAS have been targeted, and I became aware of two other psychologists who’ve had websites set up criticising their work**. So there’s a great personal and professional risk in doing this work. And it isn’t about unaccredited experts, as portrayed by Claire Waxman. It’s actually about experts who, if they give the opinion that one of the parents doesn’t like, they actually risk, you know, the personal and professional trolling websites, numerous complaints.”
*I suspect she is referring to Stuart Graham.
**I assume she is referring to my website, centreforsocialinjustice.org and I suspect the other website she is referring to may be https://hessel-willemsen-reviews.co.uk, about Hessel Willemsen, who is a regulated psychologist specialising in parental alienation assessments for the family courts.
21:19
Brian Drury: “Earlier this year, I reached out to one of the alleged unaccredited experts mentioned by Miss Waxman, in the hope that I could include her testimony in my main analysis of the claims made by Dispatches and the London Victims’ Commissioner. For a number of reasons, it was impossible to secure an interview with psychotherapist Karen Woodall within the time period I was working to. But, significantly, she did indicate that she was pursuing a complaint specifically against the London Victims’ Commissioner. And in September she advised me of the following:
“I am pursuing a complaint against the London Victims’ Commissioner for her support of these women, one of whom we took legal action against last year after she had made false claims about me. I have been the target of a campaign of false and malicious allegations by a very unwell woman in London who has recently been suspended from Twitter for hateful conduct. The London Victims’ Commissioner was following this woman on Twitter. When I drew her attention to this, and told her that I had had to leave London because this woman had posted my address on the internet, she ignored me and refused to stop following. The London Victims’ Commissioner has, in my view, shown extremely poor judgment and is pursuing an ill thought out campaign in which she advocates selectively for people she sees as victims. It is shocking behaviour for someone in a position of public trust.”
Karen also updated me recently to confirm that her concerns have now been progressed to phase three of MOPAC’s complaints process and noted that Sophie Linden, London’s Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, current salary £132,000, had advised her that “The London Victims’ Commissioner cannot represent all victims.” Which, I guess, is progress of a sort. Karen aims to ultimately demonstrate how Claire Waxman should be upholding her job description and, if necessary, is prepared to progress the matter to a judicial review or to the Public Sector Ombudsman. So again, watch this space. So, there we go. In conclusion, there appeared to be a significant number of people with not insignificant concerns about the credibility and professionalism of the star expert witness that Dispatches used to promote a narrative about rogue and unregulated parties infiltrating the family court system for the purpose of engineering or influencing potentialy actually very dangerous outcomes. I’m sure you’ll agree that irony is rarely in short supply when it comes to such matters. Hopefully in the New Year we’ll be in a position to report even more about the goings on behind the scenes in the lead up to an aftermath of the whole Dispatches debacle. And I will obviously commit to a final addendum documenting OFCOM’s ultimate finding, whenever that eventually appears.”
Karen Woodall has also drummed up support on Twitter for her campaign against Claire Waxman.
The “very unwell woman” to whom Karen Woodall refers is me.
My Twitter account was just one of several that Claire Waxman followed in connection with the Domestic Abuse Bill. I have never had any direct communication with Claire Waxman.
In January 2020 Karen Woodall made false and malicious allegations about me to the Metropolitan Police, which led nowhere. In March 2020 she threatened me with defamation proceedings but was unable to carry out her threat because all of the information I have published about her and her husband is supported by meticulous research.
I did not post Karen Woodall’s address on the internet. Her residential and work addresses were publicly available on Companies House. I simply remarked upon the luxurious amenities of the riverside apartment she shared with her husband Nick Woodall, with its gym, swimming pool and concierge service, while Government departments paid their charity £487,130 yet they simultaneously failed to keep up with their debt repayments to HMRC under their charity’s supervised Company Voluntary Arrangement.
In fact, Karen Woodall had deliberately put my safety, and my son’s safety, at risk in an act of stochastic terrorism several months earlier. In early 2021 the parental alienation lobby were frantically lobbying peers in the House of Lords to vote for Baroness Meyer’s proposed amendment to criminalise parental alienation as a form of domestic abuse in the Domestic Abuse Bill. A cluster of highly suspicious anonymous “alienated mothers” Twitter accounts sprang up in the space of one week, in a seeming coordinated fashion. Some were aggressive and fixated on false rape allegations, false domestic abuse allegations, and gold digging women demanding excessive child support, which are more typical obsessions of men’s rights activists. Australian journalist Grant Wyeth wrote about the amendment threatening to derail the domestic abuse bill and tweeted: “My mentions are currently filled with thinly veiled men pretending to be "alienated mothers" in order prove that "parental alienation" is a gender neutral concept. It's quite amazing.” I challenged two of these accounts and on both occasions I received a twelve hour suspension from Twitter on the grounds of “hateful conduct”. I think they cynically misreported me as misgendering in a form of transgender hate. On the second suspension on 29 January 2021, Karen Woodall seized her chance and tweeted: “The individual behind this account is known to the Met Police for her stalking & harassment of many people including me. Twitter also recognises her abuse and harassment. Those who find themselves a victim of her behaviours, can report to the Met Police as well as Twitter.” Nick Langford, formerly of Fathers 4 Justice, tweeted in reply: “We were only discussing her yesterday; high time she learnt what justice is. Excellent news.” Parental alienation expert Alison Bushell, who had blocked me months before without ever having interacted with me, retweeted Karen Woodall’s tweet and alerted Deborah Powney. Mick Ogden, who had already started to threaten me, tweeted (as @PAcumbria) “Why is this individual still attacking, stalking & harassing people on Twitter and the website is still online and updated weekly” and retweeted his own tweet (as @Dave_RoberTZ).
The following morning I began to receive very threatening tweets with my full name and my address, which had been obtained from Companies House after Karen Woodall had evidently given them my name. I know it was Companies House because initially the tweets alluded to my registered office address before they looked more closely and found my home address. This was despite me having written to her defamation solicitor twice the year before warning her that potentially dangerous men (Mick Ogden in particular) were discussing approaching her for my details.
Luckily it was my former address as I had moved home. It was clear that my name had been shared among the parental alienation lobby, as various individuals began naming me on Twitter. However, for several months I thought I had only one actual stalker, an “alienated” father in Chorley called Mick Ogden, who obsessively tweeted maps of my (former) address and repulsive sexual slurs. It was not until much later that I discovered that several of the more imaginatively menacing and scatalogical tweets came from John Powney, husband of Deborah Powney, Britain’s top female men’s rights activist, domestic abuse expert for Justice 4 Men and Boys and Lecturer in Policing and Criminology at the University of Lancashire, where she researches male victims of domestic abuse by female perpetrators. Brian Drury has interviewed her about her research for The Glass Blind Spot. A blog called Toxic Feminism reported that while Brian Drury fended off potential disciplinary action from his employers over his online activities (for which Alison Bushell offered her support as a former union rep) new content would continue to appear on his YouTube channel, “posted by able and articulate followers of his channel such as Deborah Powney.” I reported the stalking to the Metropolitan Police, who refused to take it seriously, even though there were indications that the stalking might have spilled over from the virtual into the real world.
On 6 February 2021 the Observer reported that the London Victims’ Commissioner Claire Waxman was being targeted by some of the same people targeting me: “I have received a huge amount of abuse which has misogyny at its root, people who are trying to create a gender war. If I speak out we see the abuse intensify. It’s to try and silence what I am seeing and the work I am doing. It’s a growing phenomenon, which is starting to be understood by academics, which is seen a lot on social media and the tactics used to prevent legitimate voices from speaking out for fear of being targeted and abused.”
I received my third and final Twitter suspension “for hateful conduct” on 17 August 2021 after walking into a trap laid by aspiring barrister, Clara Jennings, an emerging high profile figure in the parental alienation lobby. Clara Jennings had been pestering me on Twitter since 1 August 2021 to explain my reasons for getting involved in opposing parental alienation ideology and and had promised to tell her story of her involvement in promoting the ideology in return. I gave her a detailed explanation of my involvement, which took up a good part of my day. Then she repeatedly stonewalled and refused my requests for her to explain her support for the ideology in return, as she had promised to do. Instead, she repeatedly doxed my name despite me asking her repeatedly not to do so as she was further endangering my safety from dangerous men who object to me challenging their narrative, and repeatedly mocked my concerns, claiming I have mental health problems.
After I put a great deal of effort into explaining my reasons, Clara Jennings refused to uphold her side of the bargain and explain why she was involved. Eventually I asked her whether she was the new partner of a father claiming to be alienated from her children, as I have found that the most vitriolic campaigners are usually new wives and girlfriends with a pathological hatred of the mother of their new man’s children. I posted a link to two of her TikTok videos, I bet I can guess the name of your ex: Cunt and Bye Bitch, and asked whether she was referring to her partner’s ex in these videos. She reported me to Twitter for posting misogyistic content, even though it was her own content and she has left the content on TikTok for public viewing, even encouraging others to view it. I believe she also encouraged other parental alienation campaigners who I had crossed to report me. After my account was suspended and I could not defend myself, she tweeted maliciously and falsely that I had used hateful language about her son, who has Asperger’s. I made no derogatory comment about either her son or autism in general. I pointed out that several parental alienation “quacks” argue that mothers of children with autism or ADHD often wish to label their children’s behaviour as symptomatic of autism or ADHD rather than accept it as symptomatic of the children’s distress over their mothers alienating them from their fathers. I tweeted a link to a Parental Alienation UK video of a so-called “parental alienation expert” Melanie Gill and a transcript of the relevant section. I made it clear that I disagreed with Melanie Gill. I asked @clara_in_Law why she supported an ideology which would only too readily pathologise and blame her for her son’s autism. This was the absolute opposite of disrespecting her son’s autism. I was inviting her to reflect on the dangerous ideology which she supports but which labels other mothers with autistic children as “alienators”.
I did not appeal my Twitter suspension as I was emotionally exhausted from eighteen months of abuse, harassment and threats from Karen Woodall and the parental alienation lobby, and I simply did not have enough energy left.
Clara Jennings was also involved in the campaign against the Dispatches documentary. Clara was inspired to train as a barrister after winning £22,471 from her employer, the owner of a small hair salon, in an employment tribunal in 2017.
In a subsequent Glass Blind Spot video, Have MOPAC been wasting Police time?, Brian Drury interviews David Motterhead about the efforts of Claire Waxman, the London Victims Commissioner, to silence him, claiming that his conduct towards her was entirely reasonable and proportionate:
28:38
Brian Drury: “It’s not to dismiss the possibility that it was just a sort of tactical way of shutting you up, because it does sound like you’re a very effective campaigner. So it may well be that people are aware of you and that she maybe viewed that an opportunity to kind of take you out, so to speak.”
Liz Archer
In RH (Parental Alienation) [2019] EWHC 2723 (Fam), as reported by Family Law Hub, “Keehan J was highly critical of the evidence given by the social worker and the NYAS caseworker, accepting instead the report of an expert in the field of parental alienation”. This “renowned expert in parental alienation”, who recommended a transfer of residence from the mother boy’s mother to his father, was Janine Braier, the same psychologist who recommended a transfer of residence of A and B in the current case.
In [2020] EWHC B17 (Fam) Re H Costs, Mr Justice Keehan ordered the mother to pay half the costs of Janine Braier plus half the costs of the three “professionals to advise on and support the transition of H from his mother’s care to his father’s care”. These three “professionals” were Karen Woodall (who of course is involved in the present case), “red pilled” independent social worker Alison Bushell, a trustee of Families Need Fathers, and Liz Archer. The mother argued that she was unable to pay and that “she did not appoint the expert nor agree to her instruction and she did not appoint the professionals nor agree to their instruction.” Mr Justice Keehan ruled that “The latter submission is totally misconceived and completely misses the point that it was the court which considered their instruction in this case to be necessary and it was the court that gave permission for this expert and these professionals to be instructed.”
In her blog of 20 October 2017 Karen Woodall wrote:
“What we need at the coal face, are practitioners who understand that the work that we do is in a completely different paradigm to generic therapy. People with the guts and courage to do it instead of just talking about it and people who understand that one must be indefatigable in order to survive in this field. People like Liz Archer from the UK, with whom I have worked recently both in France and side by side in delivery in the UK. Liz’s new practice is based in the Midlands and it will provide more services for parents and children in the Family Separation Clinic model. I will write more about Liz’s work shortly with links to her website and contact details and she will give us a guest blog soon, talking about her learning and our development work for EAPAP. Liz does this work, she has a proven record of practice and can be relied upon for her quiet assurance and skill. The UK’s development of parental alienation practice is safe in her hands and both Nick and I welcome her being at the centre of what we are doing in Europe.”
According to her CV, Liz Archer has also worked for unregulated parental alienation expert and self-styled psychologist Melanie Gill at Family Attachment Consultants.
Selected extracts from Karen Woodall’s blogs from 2011
Karen Woodall rants that “lazy, spiteful” Prime Minister David Cameron “has launched one of the most bigoted attacks on dads that I have ever read”.
“In the shadow of a gender equality duty that lacks balls, I sincerely hope that Superman, Spiderman and Batman are dusting off their outfits even as I write.” She was inciting Fathers 4 Justice to pull some more protest stunts, like when David Chick dressed as Spiderman and occupied a crane in 2003, or when Tim Line climbed onto the roof of Lord Justice Thorpe’s home in 2008.
On discovering that Tim Loughton’s presumption of shared parenting has been dropped from proposed legislation, Karen Woodall rants: “You don’t have to look too far in reading the final report of the Family Justice Review to discover exactly who is likely to have nobbled Norgrove. There is a powerful and hitherto dominant matriarchy in UK Social Policy circles and to be on message with this group one has to learn that the mantra ‘in the best interests of children’ really means ‘in the best interests of mothers (and their children).’
She commiserates with Paul Manning that his bond with his son has been “eradicated by institutional bigotry”.
“I am not a man and I have not had to face what too many dads have had to go through, but I have watched my husband suffer the horrors of it all for too many years, my greatest fear is that his son will go through the same. Good men and good fathers being labelled and criticised and seen as dispensable, it is, to my mind, the shame of my generation.”
Stuart Graham: “From top to bottom and back, CAFCASS is utterly rotten and incapable of change. Fraud, perverting the course of justice, perjury, malfeasance, nonfeasance and prejudice reign.”
Paul Manning calls Anthony Douglas, the Chief Executive of Cafcass, “a cheating, lying evidence fabricating low life”, a “lying cheating bastard” and “a piece of excrement, like all at Cafcass”, while Cafcass staff are “a bunch of fabricating female biased liars”.
Karen Woodall rants about feminist journalist Julie Bindel who had criticised Matt O’Connor, the leader of Fathers 4 Justice, on Sky News: “Julie Bindel was bordering on committing hate crime in that interview.”
Karen Woodall rants about the barrister, Lucy Reed, for a post on her Pink Tape legal blog about Matt O’Connor of Fathers 4 Justice who had called Reed a “cunt”, “bottom feeder”, and “Family Butcher”. She rails at Lucy Reed’s “cheap jibes at disadvantaged people [Matt O’Connor] and pompous responses about the etiquette of debate”, “sneering at other people’s disadvantage just for the fun of it” and having an “over inflated ego, massively out of touch with the reality of family separation”.
Paul Manning of Real Fathers 4 Justice wades in, and Stuart Graham advises “Dermot”, another blog regular, to defy a court order: “Some advice for you. If the court gives full residence to the mother the eleven year old can refuse to leave your home and the Police are unlikely to penalise you. Not much the courts will do either. Eleven seems to be the tipping age.”
“Then I met Nick [Woodall, her husband] and discovered the other side to family separation, a side in which his life was controlled by the whims of his children’s mother who remarried and became better off financially whilst still taking child support from him, even though he was caring for his children for half of the week. I watched the difficulties that young children struggle with as they try to make the transition from one household to another and once again, when we looked for help, we found nothing but silence or worse, a thinly veiled hysteria that hissed warnings about shared care and harm to children.”
Karen Woodall rants about Mumsnet: “Over at the cosy club that is Mumsnet, the extreme end of the women’s rights movement seems not only to be alive and well, but flourishing. For those of you who are unfamiliar with radical feminist beliefs, let me give you quick summary. I was a radical feminist in the days when it first came alive as a thought process and way of life. As a former initiate, I am aware of the way in which this particular movement deploys smoke and mirrors to persuade its followers to believe that all men are violent bullies and potential rapists. Women in relationships with men are viewed as collaborators by this particular sisterhood and the Mumsnet gang appear to label these women ‘handmaidens.’ (For the uninitiated, that is a reference to the book the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, a book described thus – In a dystopicly polluted rightwing religious tyranny, a young woman is put in sexual slavery on account of her now rare fertility ). In Rad/Fem world therefore, all women in relationships with men are in sexual slavery.”
“Whilst I am no longer interested in listening to or reading the writings of women who are as enslaved in their own tyrannical beliefs as those they think they are liberating women from, I was curious to see what was going on over at Mumsnet. Alerted to the existence of this particular thread by F4J reporting them to the Police for gender hatred, alongside the almost surreal idea that Mumsnet were harboring such a viperous nest, curiosity got the better of me. Wandering onto the thread, I felt as if I were entering the days of my youth, back in the seventies and early eighties. Posts declaring that ‘all women are to be believed without question’ and arguments that women cannot be guilty of misandry whilst men retain all of the power over the state, finance and business along with various unpleasant rants along the lines of the queen of radical feminism herself Valerie Solanas abounded. I half expected to see SCUM Manifestos to appear up there at one point.
Mumsnet apparently went into meltdown on Tuesday night this week with uproar ensuing after posts were deleted and Mumsnetters were cautioned on their use of language and tendency to stray into defamation territory. F4J were the butt of much of this vitriol, which resulted in the report to the Police and, whilst things seem to have calmed down a bit now, the extreme wing of the women’s rights movement continues to have their say, here’s one from last night – ‘women who hate men have no power or cultural endorsement to inflict their hate on anyone other than the odd individual. Such women tend to stand out in society and suffer consequences for their views/behaviour. Men who hate women have the whole structure and culture of society excusing, and sometimes actively reinforcing, their actions.’
Try telling that to Louis de Berniere and the thousands of other fathers out there who struggle with their relationships with children because of the lack of power and cultural endorsement wielded by the women in their lives.
In family separation, the old feminist adage ‘the personal is political’ comes perfectly into play. The personal in this field is most definitely political and the power, invested through the legislation created in the boiling pot of seventies feminism, is most certainly in the hands of women. Examining family separation through a gender lens clearly demonstrates that fathers are at a disadvantage when it comes to relationships with children after family separation. Examining the legislation, it is clear that it was designed to be that way. From the dad who cannot claim any rights to bring up his natural child, to the father who is reduced to the role of secondary helper to be deployed when strategically necessary, the intention is to put the power and control over children into women’s hands. In rad/fem world, a dad is a dispensable device and if they could be reduced to an iDad, as introduced by F4J this week, so much the better. I thought that this type of blinkered bigotry had died out as we, original radical feminists, grew up. I hoped that the conspiracy theories and the constant analysis of everything that is ever said by any man, at any time, was just part of a youthful movement that pushed real oppression out of the way. In the days when women could not leave relationships because they were likely to lose care of their children, this kind of feminism might have had a place, I said might. Now it just seems like the poisonous pedagogy of old, embittered women, who have indoctrinated another generation to believe that boys become dangerous when they reach puberty. But on Mumsnet? Astonished? Much!
These are, without doubt, changing times and when the old gives way to the new, there will always be a fight. As I have said on previous postings however, let us not be deceived by the notion that this is about good women and bad men. 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. Mumsnet is supposed to offer advice and support, by mums for mums. But this kind of nastiness is not about helping people become better parents and it doesn’t do anything for children affected by family separation either.”
Stuart Graham says Gingerbread is a “club for single mothers” where “pernicious advices and the phone numbers of the nastiest local dad-hating lawyers get circulated”, the paramountcy principle is a “lazy bastard legal cop out”, and “academic fraudsters who grossly manipulate” research to claim “children do not need fathers”.
Karen Woodall dreams: “I would like to ensure that the world in which the boys in my family do not have to face the horrors that my husband had to face and which I witnessed helplessly over fifteen years.”
“One of the things we at the Centre for Separated Families are doing right now is training early years workers in equalities based services, we are developing a social worker course and also a practitioner course on parental alienation all of which we will be making available over the coming months. We intend to get as much info and training out there as we can, as quick as we can because right now there are so few of us with this kind of mindset, too few of us.”
“I am curently delivering workshops on PA for FNF [Families Need Fathers].”
Karen Woodall: “What gave you the moral right to tell me what I should be thinking and doing? Like others who have attacked me this week, you can interpret my refusal to be ordered around any way you please, I care not a jot in reality but I am darned if I am going to be told what to do and what to think and how to behave. You may think you possess the magic key and moral high ground, I happen to disagree with you so take no for an answer. And before you start lecturing me on whether I am skilled in conflict resolution, think about the fact that I spend every day of my working life working with warring couples, do you really think I want to spend my weekend arguing with you? I don’t. Now I have made my views clear, I have told you I will write more about psp and wholesale reform, be happy with that. And dont bother posting anything else because in the spirit of all the best fathers rights groups I shall be removing your dissenting voice from my blog.”
Paul Manning: “still ill, still suffering, still need help. God Bless you Karen, you highly paid women you, (what nonsense!)”
Karen Woodall: “Am here when/if you need me Paul, keep on keeping on and, if you can, try to do things that nurture your soul and you spirit. I will keep doing what I can where I can to assist you x”
Karen Woodall posted a private video under the blog title “Something I did for FNF Scotland this week”.
Karen Woodall is “utterly nauseated” by the “discriminatory practice around separated fathers” and encourages her faithful followers to imagine collaborating on the development of separated family centres far away from the “sticky fingers of the state” and one of her principal figures of hate, “the architect of women’s rights”, Liz Trinder.
Stuart Graham rants about the “mentally deficient” and “criminally minded” “miscreants who are then handled by blatant misfeasants (lawyers) who do not give a s**t.”
Karen Woodall warms to the possibility of working with Stuart Graham:
“Using people who are used to working with the percentage of those who go to court (remember virtually 100% of our work is with court based cases, most of which are in the tiniest percentage of highest conflict and we get good results in 82% of the work we do with alienated children). And I know you have the skills Stu and you know people who have the skills and people who know people who have the skills. And we have a working framework for court management and we don’t need huge amounts of funding because we are delivering it anyway, its just a matter of linking people up and building local hubs. we will still get the mothers who are implacably hostile and we will still get those hell bent on making misery, but we work with those people anyway, I meet them every day. Just a thought or two to keep us cool in the heat wave.”
Vincent McGovern evokes an erotic vision of Karen Woodall as a “giggling Chinese actress acting all coy and shy while fanning yourself” and “reveres” her “searing intellectual honesty”.
Karen Woodall rants about which “ghastly government department” or “bleeding heart liberal” came up with the Cafcass Voice of the Child conference. “What is happening in our family courts is nothing more than the upholding of women’s rights over children’s rights. Children are collatoral damage in the ongoing struggle to ensure that women have dominion over their own lives. Scratch the surface of any of the lone parent organisations or DV organisations and it stares you right in the face. And that, is what Judges are being advised by when it comes to kids and their relationships with parents after separation. A well constructed, massively funded, domineering women’s rights lobby which has changed the law in favour of women and will continue to hold the law in place by peddling lies, untruths, misinformation and a culture of being ‘offended’ should anyone dare to try and change it. Time for change before another generation of our kids is sacrificed on the altar of this madness.”
“This is a manufactured state of war, which is created and perpetuated by feminist falsehoods, some of which are breathtaking in their arrogance and some of which are quite simply just silly. Nevertheless, it is these nonsensical fabrications, which infect the already indoctrinated, that ooze through into the policies and practice surrounding our separated families. In short, the gender war, is nothing but a made up game of smoke and mirrors, created to gain control over family policy and maintained to keep control over funding.”
“This madness, this utter utter madness, is part of the feminist movement that I left behind. It is part of the hysterical, conspiracy theory loving, warped analysis that is utilised by women who want to keep women as well as men in their place.”
“This ‘tyranny of the weak’ is merely, in my view, an excuse that enables feminist women to dominate the men they tell us are dominating them.”
“This war. This stupid, childish silly war, which is manufactured to keep the feminist movement in charge of what reality is allowed to look like is, a dangerous and all pervasive cult.”
“The war between us is built upon feminist falsehoods and fabrications. Now, is there anyone out there who STILL believes it’s about equality?”
Anthony Esler from the Newmarket branch of Families Need Fathers is awestruck by Karen’s brilliance: “I must say Karen…’I’m lost in wonder love and praise’ by your writing. Not only are you morally very brave to attack your ‘sisters!’ so ferociously…but you are so good at wheedling out what they are really about and so articulate at putting it down on paper. May I enquire: Did you gain a double first in English at University? No…I’m serious! I still wish though that your views could get out there more; to have more influence. I’m sure your blog could be turned into a newspaper column…have you ever thought about that? What about The Evening Standard…read by every commuter on every train!”
Karen Woodall replies: “My sisters? they are no sisters of mine Anthony! MY brothers and sisters are those with whom I work day to day for equality, fairness and justice. Thank you for your kind words on my words, I write because when I write my thinking sharpens and my practice with families improves. Some call it shooting from the hip, I call it seeing clearly now the brainwashing has gone and like all escapees from a cult, part of my recovery is speaking the truth of my experience. K”
Nick Child tries to calm her down, but Karen Woodall is on a roll: “This is my journey Nick, you have yours as does Woodman and all the rest. I don’t have a message and I am not trying to convert you or anyone else and sweeping statements about feminism are exactly what this part of my recovery is about, I lived it, it ruined much of my life, it may not have ruined yours and I may not have ruined others but it ruined much of my life and writing about it, like all survivors, is part of the process of establishing balance.”
“Feminism = women’s rights = determined dominance by women over men – admittedly many women would demur and say no, they are really for equality but those women allow the ‘other’ feminists to do too much in their name which is about dominance by women over men and therefore for me feminism is a tainted and broken brand that does not and cannot ever represent equality.”
“I experienced feminism as having oppressed ME, that’s when I abandoned it and took off the glasses. I knew for years it had treated men badly and I still fell for the arguments that a) men deserved and b) if you gave them an inch men would take a mile and so I kept on colluding with it, shame on me for not having done something sooner. It was when I recognised how feminism had oppressed ME that I finally gave it up. When I realised how it had preyed on my difficult upbringing and the way that men had treated me and made me believe that all men were like that. It took my young years and made me distrusting of men, it made me believe that independence was the only right way to be and that relationships with men were risky. Now I accept that this is my journey and that other women experience things differently but the more I pulled at the threads the more I unravelled the way in which feminism had infected my ability to recover from my life experiences. Think about it, as a young person you are harmed and then a group of people tell you the people who harmed you are from one half of the human race and that ALL of that half of the human race is harmful to you and will harm you at any and every opportunity. Your young mind is fed poisonous rhetoric about how you have the right to defend yourself from these harmful beings, how you have the right to harm them in return. If you are in relationship with these harmful beings you are seen as betraying your half of the human race, you are warned again and again and again, through stories, myths, scare tactics and more that dalliances with these harmful beings will harm you and even when you think you are not being harmed you will be. Around the globe as you grow up you are shown how your half of the human race is good and the other half is bad and harmful, repeatedly you are shown how your side is good and the other side is bad. You are given permission to fight these harmful beings by papers which call for killing of men and raging torrents of vitriol which are spewed regularly. As you grow older, the raging torrents become normalised and spread their tentacles through all walks of life so that one day, as you watch a man crawl after a woman for a drop of beer on an advert, you realise that the harmful half of the human race has been beaten to a pulp and whether they are harmful or not, their power is reduced by collective power of the normalisation of rage used by your half to keep the harmful half in its place. And then you look at your six month old grandson destined when he is 12 years old to be deemed harmful to women by your side of the human race simply for being born male. And the question that lingers in your mind is……will my relationship with this small helpless creature also be shaped by the bitterness of women who came out of those generations whose desire for revenge normalised damage to generations of young people. How much longer, I reasoned, was I prepared to let my rage against those who had harmed me be fed by feminist normalisation of it? I gave up feminism when I realised that it had prevented me from healing. When I did I healed. This is not about feminist oppression of men it is about feminism per se. Its not about equality, it is about rage, rights and revenge.”
“The world that I am now working in outside of the feminist paradigm is the richest seam of possibilities I have ever encountered, getting me closer to families and helping me connect and make differences at a deeper level than ever before. I feel human again and real.”
“This is exactly why we do what we do at the Clinic, because we know that good fathers are remoevd from the lives of their children by a system which is designed to do so – and then they are blamed for it and chased for child maintenance. Any father and some mothers too risks this, during separation there are no exceptions because this is how the UK system works. And yes, this system has the opportunity to create alienation built into it hence my drive to create change and highlight what feminist designed legislation has done.”
“I work daily with dads from all walks of life going through the exact same thing. Nothing protects dads from this because the system was built to do exactly what it does, rid families of fathers. Families NEED Fathers was, I would imagine, started on the understanding of what was happening in the early seventies….well, to date, the only thing that has changed since then is the Children Act 1989 and look at the pickle that got us into. And what underpins all of this? One word. Feminism. One sentence. The single parent and domestic violence lobby. One intention. To ensure women’s rights on separation and to give and maintain control over children’s relationships with the external world to mothers. Its no good pretending otherwise. A gender analysis demonstrates it over and over again. This isn’t about equality and it isn’t about children’s wellbeing, its about women’s rights full stop. Shame no-one other than Erin Pizzey ever had the gumption to say it sooner. We have all been fooled.”
Karen Woodall reveals that it has been well known for years that she is a men’s rights activist and that people have been voicing concerns about her for years:
“I have been accused of being an MRA (men’s rights activist), and advocate for the equal parenting movement and in the nastier assumptions common amongst feminists, a danger to the families that I work with.”
“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.
I won’t be rising on Valentines Day, unless its to make my husband breakfast in bed (listen out for the sharp intake of breath from the billion rising advocates on reading that one!) You see I love my husband. I love him because he is a man. I love him because he is, like me, full of strengths and weaknesses and I love him because he survived the worst that the eighties could throw at him in terms of feminist dismissal of who he is a person, of his position in the world and of the assertion that he is basically, at heart, a rapist. This horrible assertion, which demonised, demolished and devastated too many young men in that decade, was the result of second wave feminism gone, in my view, completely out of control. I could say more. I won’t. I was one of those feminists, I am not now.”
Nick Langford chimes in: “And a very happy Valentine’s day to you and to Nick!”
To a woman called Dolores who evidently appears to challenge her narrative, Karen Woodall snaps: “This space is a safe place, where feminist deconstructions and missuse of statistics to prove that women and girls are victims and men are not, are not welcome and so I will not be posting your comments. I think you should dance off and enjoy the patriarchal world that you live in, its not the one I recognise.”
“You are so right in thinking I do not want to have a dialogue with you about this, I don’t. I am tired of listening to the same old tripe that is trotted out by this hysterical movement. And anyway, why waste your time trying to persaude me when you have the billions rising around you funded by the billions pumped into the movement as a whole. No, I am sorry, as you say, its my blog, best you simply dance on by sister.”
“Dolores, glad you got something. Suggest you stick to the billion rising sites from now on because we don’t really have anything in common and as for admitting that people like you exist in the movement, we know you do, there’s a billion of you, all singing from the same hymn sheet and dancing to the same tune.”
“Dolores, you are not interested in helping men, you are only interested in making sure that men are kept in the place you are content to have them be, which is, like your sisterhood, where women think they should be. I am not interested in that kind of venom and I am not interested either in telling men what they should be thinking and feeling, so yes, frankly, my interest is not just about helping men, its about helping men outside of the feminist paradigm, which means respecting them, not telling them they should be dancing around against violence against women and girls in order to be good men. I am sure you will be much happier discussing your vision of the world in the bosom of your equally outraged companions come tomorrow.”
“Dolores, your comment that the only people talking about violence are feminists says it all. Here’s where violence and respect and how to behave well towards each other are talked about in my community. http://equality4men.com and here http://www.mankind.org.uk. Both run by men, both committed to ending violence against men and both interested in discussing violence against everyone outside of the gendered narrative.”
“This post is dedicated to Tim Haries, father of two children lost in the underworld and Paul Manning, father of a child also lost underground. For your dignity, courage and ability to move beyond bitterness and blame, towards a better future, where your children are returned and restored to you.”
Darrell Westell comments:
“A haunting and stunning article Karen. I have just ‘won’ a court order to see my son, whom professes to “hate me”. If I had not read your blogs, and had the benefit of your advice via e mail, this statement from my own flesh and blood would be the end of me. As it is, thanks to you, and the advice I’ve taken from you, I live on in the knowledge of what’s happening, why it’s happening and what the reasons are for it. My new partner and I are 3 weeks away from the birth of our child, and I’ll take your lovely Spring metaphor and run with it. New child. New hope for my alienated child. New perspective on an injustice that has caused my life to stand still in a whirlwind of trauma for 12 years. Tim Harries will be seeing the light of day again soon too, and one hopes and dreams that he may find a reunification, and a bridge to a new life with his two girls. Lovely dedication; I dedicate my own hope to you Karen. Thank you. Xx Darryl Westell”
Karen Woodall replies:
“I wish you and your partner and the new one to come and your boy underground, who will come up for air and life and love again one day, the best that life can bring. Let the love that comes with new life heal your heart and soul. You are not alone and even in your suffering you give much to others. Let us know when the new one is here, sending love for a safe journey into the world. K”
“I am told that to render the old obsolete one has to build the new instead of attacking the old and so that is also what we are doing with our family separation centres and our family separation hub and network. This is of course a step by step process, we are not working with the millions that government makes available but everything we are doing is outside of the prevailing paradigm and so when families come to use for help, they get the best of what we can give, without the prejudice and the discrimination and without the smoke and mirror effect. We do what we say we do and if we get something wrong, as we have this week, we put it right. Somehow I never felt right in that world of government and big charity, it always felt dirty somehow, not real, not honest. I think there are probably some people who do some good things, but being welcomed at the table requires one to give up much of what one believes to be true and learn parliamentary doublespeak..we say it is great even when we know it is not and we keep on saying it through gritted teeth even in the face of evidence to the contrary and we all close ranks and keep on saying it, especially if anyone says the emperor has no clothes on in a very loud voice.”
Darryl Westell tells Karen “you’re the most important person in my life… FYI- ‘Walter White’ is my twitter pseudo name. Real name: Darryl Westell”.
Nick Langford as ExInjuria tells Karen: “I envy you your clarity and incisive ability to cut through the bullshit.”
Padrestevie tells Karen “At the risk of sounding like a sycophant (again!), I have to say what a wonderful blog this is. Your energy, capacity for work, clarity of thought and expression, synthesis of argument and ideas are virtually super human and enviable. Each instalment, from the lovely little dandle bears to the horrors of the deadly female species, has resonated with events in my alienation experience and seemed to arrive almost by telepathy just when I needed them most. Fortunately, your output is prodigious so the wait is never too long.”
Karen Woodall writes a furious letter of complaint to Greenwich Council and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner about a domestic abuse leaflet she has received, with the strapline “Dads - have the strength to change”.
Mike Buchanan weighs in about the the “anti-male bias” and “corruption of public bodies by feminists” including Teresa May.
Vincent McGovern praises Karen’s battle against feminists: “I have been fighting against this institutional anti dad discrimination since 2007 in Brent and Cafcass. Sadly it is not lazy stereotyping, it is systematic, institutional, well funded, highly organised, and historically comparable to the Jim Crow laws which were so biased against black people in the Southern states of America until 1967. For Jim Crow read Domestic Abuser, for black or coloured read Father or man. Until wider society principally men wake up and insist on equality for all it will continue and grow. Karen and Erin Pizzey are more than aware of the damage this discrimination does to children and society, their bravery stands out from the mediocrity and weasel speak of the myriad psuedo professionals including many Uncle Toms who are to willing to appease the stronger feminist elements who seek gender supremacy at whatever cost.”
Karen Woodall: “I would like to ensure that the world in which the boys in my family do not have to face the horrors that my husband had to face and which I witnessed helplessly over fifteen years.”
“Alongside the bulldozers and the wrecking balls, we are also going to need an eye glass and a fine pair of scissors to unpick the threads of prejudice against fatherhood, that are so fine, we can hardly see them.”
“When it becomes culturally unacceptable to discriminate wilfully against fathers and fatherhood, then we will know that change has come.”
“I am currently delivering workshops on PA for FNF [Families Need Fathers].”
Paul Manning replies: “I am no longer proud of my child stealing country it has become corrupt from top to bottom… The way to change is by force and action so that we can protect our children from our own state. Nothing will change unless we fathers get together and force the change.”
Paul Manning wails about “hired guns” and “charlatan experts” warned about in Jane Ireland’s damning report, Evaluating Expert Witness Psychological Reports, little realising that he is in thrall to the biggest hired gun and charlatan expert of them all.
Karen Woodall hypocritically agrees that “it makes grim reading!”
Karen Woodall: “In Gingerbread land, where all mothers are poor and children, without exception, are starving, the only way to tackle family separation is through pursuit and punishment of errant dads.”
Karen Woodall rants that Child Maintenance Options - whose call centre staff she trained - discriminates against fathers by telling them how much maintenance they should pay instead of leaving them to decide for themselves. “Forget private agreements and family based arrangements where the choice is yours and the state doesn’t need to get involved.” She bullies a father who counters that he found Child Maintenance Options helpful and unbiased: “It is shocking to me, deeply disappointing and frankly quite frightening just how entrenched the discriminatory attitude displayed in your comment are.”
“That horrendous, state intervention into family life, that destroys any ability of the family to continue to work together and the spiteful, faceless bureaucracy that purports to be about children’s well being but in reality is simply state sponsored robbery, is what we believed would be ended by the Child Support Redesign Team.”
Paul Manning gushes, “What would we do without your love and our release valve that is your blog?”
Karen Woodall: “There is an objective, gender biased approach to social policy surrounding the family in the UK. Fathers are, without doubt, being routinely and actively discriminated against when they face family separation. This is not about mad men making themselves out to be hard done by, or bad men manipulating reality to get revenge on women. This is cold hard reality. Social policy in the UK discriminates against fathers after family separation, whilst at the same time, making out that it doesn’t and, worse, using smoke and mirrors to point the blame at fathers for their own suffering. That’s a triple dose of delusion for separated dads to cope with, the horror of facing family separation, the lack of access to services to support them through family separation and the blame for having caused it in the first place.”
“This eradication of masculinity in all its difference, in both its positive and negative forms is, I would argue, no accident. Starting in 1973, with the change in the divorce laws, and moved on throughout the seventies by a raft of social policy reform enacted in the shadow of the newly defined ‘patriarchy’ this is a conscious and determined strategy which was encapsulated by Harriet Harman in a report for IPPR called ‘The Family Way‘ in the nineties.”
“Tell me again that there is no bias against fatherhood, its just that fathers think there is. Feminism. It is impossible to do anything inside or outside of the field of the family and social policy, without reference to it. Until it is recognised, named and acknowledged, as the driver of the outcomes that we have seen in the family for the past forty years, we will not be able to move on.
Every time I write about feminism on this blog there is a really big reaction. From the anti-feminists to the pro-feminists, the idea of a world without feminism is a huge talking point. I wrote recently of my recovery from feminism and my understand that this ‘ism’ had shaped my life negatively, not positively. As I continue to explore the world outside of the dominant feminist discourse, I am finding out just how powerful this ‘ism’ actually is. From the creation of a non-existent ‘patriarchy’, to the inculcation of the belief that everything personal has to be political, this belief system has shaped our social policy, our practice around the family, our support to mothers and even the very ability of fathers to conceptualize their role as men. So powerful is this driver of behavior and thought, that I have, in recent months, been accused of being unprofessional for even daring to write about it.
And yet daring to think about it as well as write about it has brought me closer than I have ever come to being able to help the families that I work with. The power of liberation from the strait jacket of the thinking that shaped our social policy in the 1970’s has done nothing but expedite my ability to understand the reality facing families and to actively work to assist them.
I was recently very privileged to meet Erin Pizzey and spend time talking with her about the work that she did in the early seventies at the outset of the liberation movement. Her views, which I realise I have increasingly come to embrace, are that second wave feminism hijacked the social policy agenda in the nineteen seventies and prevented assistance being given to both men and women during times of difficulties. And that social policy, which was designed by feminist academics and set within a framework of patriarchy, has dominated our consciousness ever since.
Fathering in the post separation family? I look back at Harman’s words and I understand that it is no accident that men struggle. I come forward to the present day and think about fathers as their childrens best friends and I see fatherhood set within the parameters of what is acceptable to women. And a narrative about masculinity which has been shaped by forty years of feminist social policy. And all of it disposable in a world shaped by women, When you’re a boy.”
“As the build up to Fathers Day begins, the Centre for Social Justice released their report on Fatherlessness yesterday. As Nick Woodall, husband of mine and co-worker, is on the Centre for Social Justice panel which is considering all things breakdown and breakup, I feel more than a little bit interested in this report, which tells us that one million children in the UK are growing up without any contact with their father.
I am also interested in the report’s criticism of the lack of investment or attention paid by government to the problem of family breakdown, something that is close to my heart given that I wasted many hours in 2011 helping the government to rethink services in this area. Co-incidentally, the CSJ report arrived in my inbox on the same day that I also received a video from the Help and Support for Separated Families initiative, funded by the DWP to support the reform of family separation services.
Comparing the criticism in the CSJ report with the outputs from the so called reforms of support for separated families, the comprehensive failure of the Coalition government to deliver on this score was starkly underlined for me. The dandy little video, came with a message from the Director of HSSF (once a manager of the Options call centre who now appears to have fashioned a role for herself as the Coalition’s family separation tzar), and features a boy growing to be a man whilst being handed between his two separated parents. The video leads us to the Sorting out Separation web application which, in our self appointed Family Separation Tzar’s words, leaves people feeling ‘upbeat and positive’.
Those of you who read this blog regularly will know that the Centre for Separated Families was heavily involved in the work of the Coalition government in the early days. This included sitting on steering groups that were supposedly set up to reform the landscape around family separation services. Our involvement included designing the logic for the Help and Support for Separated Families web application, which was then handed over to the civil servants to connect up to the available advice. The disaster that became the HSSF tool led to us refusing to host it on the Centre for Separated Families website. Primarily because, in our view, it is too poorly connected up to available and appropriate advice to deliver consistent outcomes that promote collaboration. Which, at the end of every day, is our core concern. We don’t want to get it right for some parents, we want to get it right for every parent, because we know that family separation is appallingly painful and because we know that when we get it right, we deliver long lasting change which improves outcomes for children.
Given that the web application is itself, in my view, a comprehensive failure – being poorly linked up to advice and in some cases sending parents to inflammatory information that will make things worse, not better – I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Department for Education’s efforts to change the Children Act and Edward Timpson’s mantra ‘nothing has changed, we just want dads to think things have changed’. Producing a skippy little video that promotes the message that kids do well when both parents stay involved is all well and good. The failure to produce anything underneath that, that actually works to ensure that both parents stay involved, is what matters.
And it is this failure – to produce anything underneath the illusion – that the Centre for Social Justice report highlights. Listening and watching to the reactions to the report, yesterday, I was reminded, once again, why significant change in support to separated families is so difficult to achieve. Leaving aside the lip service, the promises of change that do not materialise and the illusions that something has changed when in reality everything remains the same, coming out of yesterdays reactions is the real reason why support to separated families remains exactly the same as it has always been. The real reason why the UK faces fatherlessness on a massive scale is because men not valued, their role as fathers is considered unnecessary and this results in discrimination against men, which is not only tolerated, it is justified by everyone from politicians to service providers.
Analysing what underpins this sorry state of affairs is not difficult. There is, in our society, a deep seated loathing and fear of men and masculinity, which has led to a collective blame culture. In essence, underneath the inability to hold views about men which are ambivalent and which recognise that men can be both good and bad, runs a cultural psychological splitting which creates the belief that men are mad, bad and dangerous, whilst women are sane, good and safe. I call it the Bad Men Project (BMP), created in the second wave liberal feminist capture of social policy in the seventies and perpetuated as a universal truth throughout the ensuing years. Men are inherently bad and women are inherently good. It underpins everything that touches our lives and no amount of platitudes, in the form of fancy little videos telling us that kids need both parents, or tweaks to the Children Act will make one jot of difference to that reality.
The BMP, which is a product of our collective psychological splitting, is evident in the reactions to the CSJ report yesterday where one and all lined up to tell us that fatherlessness is a bad thing but it’s the fault of fathers themselves that we have such a problem in our land. Even the authors of the report and the Head of the Centre for Social Justice, Christian Guy, were heard to repeat the bad men mantra. ‘We are not blaming single mothers for this problem, most of them would like the fathers to be involved in their lives’, he said, during one interview. Listening to the way in which men as fathers were repeatedly battered by perceptions which have been created in order to keep our social policies in place, I began to realise how deep seated this collective hatred and fear of men really is. And why it is proving so difficult to achieve the paradigm shift that will allow separated parents to work together in ways that benefit their children.
The BMP is exemplified by the ways in which organisations like Gingerbread (architects and purveyors of many BMP fallacies), continually focus upon child maintenance and the need to beat men into conforming to the stereotype of provider. And by Relate, who are busy delivering online services to help dads to understand how deficient they are and how to change so that collaboration is possible. And also by the Fatherhood Institute, whose silence on the matter of fatherlessness speaks far louder than any words they have ever written about whose side they are on. The BMP is a collective brainwashing of our psyche. It works to scare us, terrorise us and set the conditions that ensure that men are damned if they do and damned if they don’t and any man who challenges that can easily be picked off by an allegation of bullying or worse. In short, men, as half of the human race, have, in policy terms at least, collectively become bogeymen; many either dislocated from their own masculinity for fear of offending women or rendered impotent unless deployed as secondary resources at the behest of women.
In the real lives of men and women, however, where ambivalence is still present and each are capable of doing good and bad things, life is not so starkly split and not so haunted by the bogeyman image. Until state services step in that is. What we know, in our work, is that when families separate, if we can get to them before the institutionalised services do, we can prevent the worst of the way in which the state acts… like an incendiary bomb. When we get there too late and parents have already begun to interact with roving domestic violence workers who seem to routinely attach themselves to separating couples, or state funded services which appear to be about collaboration but which in reality are underpinned by the BMP set of beliefs, the split that has already opened up at the point of separation is widened and the rot has begun to set in. Lives which were once reviewed as being normal, not unusual, are suddenly portrayed as being peppered with violence and control and dads who were once beloved and important in children’s lives are suddenly damaging, dangerous and frankly disposable.
The interaction of the state and shared delusion that is the BMP, is a poisonous one and it is the cause of fatherlessness in generation after generation of children. The BMP is at the heart of the Lone Parent Model, which divides parents into one who cares and gets all the state support and the one who provides and gets nothing but our collective vitriol. The BMP is also at the heart of the Children Act 1989 where the ‘rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished’, is a clause much overlooked and under considered. The BMP was at the heart of Harriet Harman’s unpleasant policy paper called ‘The Family Way’ in which the role of fathers is rendered unnecessary. The BMP is present in just about every CAFCASS office and every Social Services team in the land. The BMP is a hugely successful, collective and deeply discriminatory illusion, which drives our policy, poisons our practice and even involves men themselves in its perpetuation. The notion that bad men can be made good if they conform to the required social norms set by women being pervasive across family services. The Fatherhood Institute was even, unashamedly, set up on this seductive notion – that good men do what women tell them to do, whilst all the rest are mad, bad and dangerous to know. This face of acceptable fatherhood, has contributed to keeping the status quo in place for well over a decade now and effectively strengthens the BMP, rendering dads across the land vulnerable on a daily basis to ongoing individual and collective discrimination.
For me, the Bad Men Project is something that I have worked alongside and around for many years but which I am now no longer willing to collude with or tolerate in any shape or form. My refusal to engage with the state in developing services which create an illusion of change, whilst nothing has changed, is not one that is made on any other basis than my belief that equality means treating women AND men with respect and in ways that meets their different needs at different times. I do not want to offer men happy little illusions that they are important in children’s lives via videos or web applications, whilst at the same time delivering services or signing up to policies which I know are actively pushing them out of their children’s lives. Neither do I want to be involved in keeping discriminatory practice in place whilst perpetuating the idea that no bias exists other than in the minds of fathers. And most of all, I do not want, to work with families in ways that value and exalt one parent whilst the other is demonised and disposed of. Especially when I know how dangerous this kind of deluded practice can be for children.
As we head towards Fathers Day 2013, its time that the BMP was taken on and tackled by all of us who understand what it does to dads and what it does to our society. It is not fathers who are responsible for the ‘dad deserts’ that are described by the Centre for Social Justice report, it is the Bad Men Project; a collective delusion that drives our policy and practice, without which, one million children in this land on Sunday, would able to say to the man that gave them life: ‘Happy father’s day, dad.’”
Darryl Westell comments: “A stunningly accurate and quite devastatingly incisive dissection of the true horror and pure stupidity at the heart of Family law UK PLC. I always recall, or maybe recoil (or both) at the loathsome and hateful manner in which I was ‘presented’ in the family courts: I was rather upset at being told I couldn’t raise my own flesh and blood without the express permission of some rotund old hag who presupposed I might need supervision with my own child. I got terribly annimated, verbose and sheer spitting teeth, hopping mad, as one would. I also refused to take my medicine and thank my administerer for the poison. For this outrageous showing of emotion, this outpouring of grief and fire and passion, I was branded a monster. In other words my masculinity, my strength and my very biological hard wiring were demonised and held up as the sole reason why I should be tretated thusly: as a paedophile, as a deadbeat, as a scumbag.”
Karen Woodall consoles him: “The demonisation of masculinity is an utter tragedy in my experience, it has robbed men of their sense of self, turned boys into confused, vulnerable and lost people and lauded women and girls as the only acceptable people. The truth of the matter is that men are more vulnerable than women to many things, early death, being mugged, suicide, self harm, being attacked by strangers and more, but the fact is we ignore that and focus only upon women as being the people who need help. We have got things wildly out of balance and no amount of feminism is going to put the balance back in our lives. I have a step son and a grandson, I want to leave behind, for them, a better world in which their masculinity is embraced, understood and valued, when it is, the appalling crimes against men as fathers, which are made possible by the current climate, will end.”
“The history of feminism is a twisted and warped path in which the very worst of humanity resides alongside the very best of it.”
“Do we not need the power of masculinity? The focus that enables planes to fly in the sky, the courage that has brought us electricity, travel, the brute strength that dug the rail tracks, built the roads, the willingness to do the dirty work, the cleaning of drains, the dredging of rivers, the bravery that it takes to climb into a burning building, the dedication and absolute focus it takes to perform brain surgery? Are all those things not the most wonderful, marvellous, fantastic gifts given to humanity, by men?”
“I watched a tv programme last night about women forced to give up children for adoption and the power of fathers over the family that caused that to happen. Of course no-one wishes to go back there, that is where the pendulum had swung so far that oppression was real, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in my view and men are, in so many ways, as oppressed in their very masculinity as women were back then.”
“It’s an absolute condundrum to my mind, that liberation of women creates the conditions of oppression and dismissal of men.”
“The reality is that the lone parent model of support furthers the rights of women and renders fathers meaningless; and it was designed that way. The lone parent model of support tells us that fathers abandon their families, that they are reckless, feckless and that they spend their money in the pub rather than on their children. A stereotype tweeted only yesterday by Harriet Harman and which is so offensive that I consider it to be akin to saying that all black men carry guns and sell drugs.”
“The lone parent model is a well constructed, well funded, well maintained, illusion, that has nothing to do with the well being of children and everything to do with ensuring that the rights of women come before all else. Before fathers, before the family and ultimately before children. Delivering services in this paradigm can only ever further this myth and can only ever shore up and support the misinformation which is endlessly recycled by those women who first garnered control over the family and since then have done everything to maintain it.
As Autumn settles in and the leaves begin to fall, we are planting seeds for a different way of working. Seeds which have been taken from the fruit of our whole family approach with families over the past fifteen years and which have proved to us and to the parents and practitioners we work with that outside of the lone parent paradigm, where fathers as well as mothers are equally valued for the different things they offer to our children, different outcomes are possible. Off shore on Islands around the UK, soon in Northern Ireland, the Midlands and in London, whole family approaches will be embedded within the community, bypassing the state and the illusion that it peddles, connecting with families in ways that offer astonishing levels of change. As we roll this ball up hill again, more hands have come to join us and the model of collaboration between men and women serving the needs of mothers and fathers in local communities is becoming real. A world far beyond the lone parent paradigm, where lies, stereotypes and misinformation are no longer needed because we are working with reality, not what the women’s rights movement tell us about families.”
Nick Langford warns: “It terrifies me how many men do not understand this, and actively contradict it, even when it kicks them in the face. Pro-feminist campaigns are increasing (like White Ribbon) and at a recent demonstration in Canada all of those imposing the feminist perspective were men. Even Femen is (or perhaps was) apparently run by a man. If I thought this was the patriarchy taking over feminism I might be happy; but it isn’t.”
Karen Woodall replies: “Hi Nick, the issue is that most dads fall for the myth that exclusion from their children’s lives only happens to bad dads. How wrong can they be. This will happen to every single dad in the land if they are not careful, it happens because it is designed to happen in the legislation and because the women’s movement has blindsided men into believing that they are bad and wicked people. Its wrong, its so utterly wrong it makes me feel quite ill at times… and the idea of Femen being run by a man who has presumably divested himself of his masculinity, is so mad I think I will have to go and lie down for a while to recover!!”
She berated Families Need Fathers leaders, who at the time were playing the long game by presenting as moderate to family policy makers and trying to tone down the misogyny of their rank and file members: “FNF should stop colluding with the government today in my view and stop bending the knee and watering down the issues facing fathers and apologising for them. FNF in the membership are fantastic, FNF top brass are selling fathers down the river on a daily basis. Shocking.”
She elaborates to Nick Child: “The issue is that families, as Julie Bindel said, in her own charming way, are nothing but nests of abuse, violence and oppression of women….which is why lone parent families, same sex families and all other forms of family that do not have a heterosexual male within them should be elevated to that of the cultural norm. Feminists who control family policy do not want heterosexual males to have any power because if they do have power they will, as Harriet Harman told us only this weekend, ‘spend all the money in the pub and come home and smash their wives heads against the wall.’
I know that many men want to believe that I am more feminist than feminists but believe me, when you get into the heart of the feminist movement, the kind of thing that Harman is saying publicly right now is daily bread. The ‘family’ is dead if it contains a heterosexual male, unless said man is approved of by feminists (such as those who are represented by the likes of the Fatherhood Institute, who are largely men who have divested themselves of their masculinity sufficiently enough to be non threatening to feminists).
I am not a feminist and what I am arguing for is nothing whatsoever to do with feminism. It is about life outside of the world that feminism has created, what I consider to be life outside of the madness that comes of unbalanced energies and feminist hystrionics. A world where men and women get along but sometimes have a bust up, where some men and some women are dangerous, controlling and abusive and who need stopping when they are and a world where family life is a place where kids get a lot of love and nurture and the different things that men and women can offer them.
It’s not confusing if you just step out of the feminist illusion for a minute. Imagine, a world where personal and individual rights are not your first concern. Imagine, a world where dads are not portrayed as potential murderers and rapists before anything else and a world where interperdependence was not seen as ‘evidence’ that a woman is being oppressed. That world is outside of that bubble of illusion that wraps itself so seductively around you. Feminism in the field of family separation has got nothing whatsoever to do with equality and everything to do with women’s dominance and the disposal of heterosexual men. Much as I hate to say it Nick, that even includes men like you. K”
The female of the species is more deadly than the male
“Amongst other things this week I have been working with yet another father who is being pushed out of his children’s lives through a combination of this country’s slavish adherence to the lone parent model of support and the iron grip of domestic violence allegations.”
She rants about the Fatherhood Institute being “the nemesis of fathers rights shoring up as it does the feminist control of the field of family policy”.
“Just as feminism has slowly but surely eroded masculinity, compelling men to become more like women to be acceptable, this movement will erode fatherhood in my view and mean that the distinct and important things that men bring to children’s lives will be lost. And you can bet that, if Parliamentary politics moves to the left in 2015, this will be speeded up. Remember, for the left, the family containing a mother a father and children, is a hotbed of danger, abuse and damage which feminist academics and policy makers have systematically undermined, attacked and silenced. Equally shared parenting, in which fathering as such is removed in it entirety and replaced by interchangeable parenting units will be very much welcome in that future. Which takes me to the first of my observations this week and the tool of choice for eradication of dad which is the domestic violence allegation”.
“From the erosion of the difference between mothers and fathers in the equally shared parenting movement, to the continued lack of support for fathering by the Fatherhood Institute with a huge dollop of feminism and the control of post separation fathering through the domestic violence industry chucked in for good measure. I am reminded again and again that family policy in the UK is controlled by a small group of feminist women from the academic, parliamentary and lobby world.
Those women who got hold of the family policy making powerback in the seventies, have become more powerful than the men that preceded them in parliamentary terms. Their say rules your life and mine and your children’s lives too. Their work has underpinned the control of the family unit for over four decades, they have systematically demonised men as fathers and labelled men and boys dysfunctional, they have controlled your expression of your biological self and they have set rules about what it means to be human in the world… The female of the species has engaged the male in the construction of his own demise, I cannot think of anything more deadly than that.”
Nick Langford comments: “What [Duncan] Fisher and [Adrienne] Burgess are doing is immensely dangerous and - in my view - immensely evil.”
Darryl Westell gushes “STUNNING article Karen” and calls Harriet Harman “loathsome and as dangerous a person as any in this country”.
Karen Woodall rants at Darryl Westell: “Harriet Harman, Anna Coote, Patricia Hewitt, Sue Slipman, NCOPF (now Gingerbread), all implicated in the NCCL call for the lowering of the age of consent to 10 and in some cases to 4. Harman, Coote and Hewitt wrote The Family Way, in which they discuss their belief that it cannot be taken as read that families need fathers. Joan Hunt, Mavis Mclean, Liz Trinder, Brigid Featherstone, all feminists heavily involved in shaping family policy, all committed to the notion of men and fathers as problems. All massively funded by tax payers and charitable money to keep recycling the same stuff about families not needing fathers and collaboration between men and women being dangerous to women. Women’s Aid and Refuge, funded in eye wateringly large amounts of tax payers money to keep the illusion that all men are dangerous intact so that the industry can grow. Resistant to the idea of differentiation of domestic violence and updholding only the feminist concept of violence in the home being about patriarchal power and control. The Freedom Programme, devised to educate and liberate women from patriarchal power and control, funded by Local Authorities and delivered to women in their own homes as well as in groups. Social work as a feminist industry, delivering judgement to your families on a daily basis from the perspective of patriarchal power and control. The Fatherhood Institute, updholding feminist control of family policy by failing to challenge the valuing of men as fathers and children’s need for fathers. Charities such as Relate, Barnardos, One plus One, Resolution, campaigning against the changes to the Children Act and winning, Families need Fathers, joining with Gingerbread, Relate and the Fatherhood Institute in 2010 in the Kids in the Middle Campaign handing back power to the single parent lobby and undermining change towards collaborative parenting, and to this day failing to understand the politics of the field they are working in….Duncan Fisher and his mumsanddadsnet.com turning men into women and co-opting the very language that is used to argue for change….. anyone who believes that family policy and the appalling treatment of men and children in this country after separation is not underpinned and controlled by feminism is a fool and frankly, deserves all that is coming to them. Open your eyes people, this is about the very fabric of our society and our rights to live our lives free from indoctrination, control and acts of revenge perpetrated upon us by damaged women who live in a social construction which is only relevant to their lives not yours or mine. There is no such thing as patriarchy, its a social construct, its a way of describing a world which doesn’t exist anymore in this country, its arrested development, its the half hysterical ramblings of young women who once thought that the age of consent should be lowered 10 because in some cases, where men had sex with girls over 10 and under 16, the girls had lead them on (Hewitt). These women, along with the likes of Jimmy Savile, made the world a very dangerous place for kids in the seventies and we are only just seeing the results of their involvement. And they are still controlling family policy now and you are still falling for it every time you dismiss the reality of feminism and its corrosive impact on your life and on the life of your kids.”
“Personally I would like to see Glen Poole from Equality4men combine his efforts with men like Nick Langford and Nick Woodall to set up a campaign for dignity and equality in fatherhood, I think they have the skills, the insight and the courage to stand up and represent fatherhood across all of its expressions, perhaps I will suggest it to them.”
“I am incredibly grateful for Nick Langford’s curation of the reality of what is being done and so glad that people do undertand what is happening, if there are, at least a few of us truth keepers, we can resist this tide, whether its borne of sloppiness, arrogance or downright privilige.”
Karen Woodall: “This post is dedicated to Tim Haries. Thank you Tim for all you have done and are doing in the face of your loss of your beloved children, one day they will come home.”
She was congratulating Tim Haries of Fathers 4 Justice for defacing a portrait of the Queen and serving a six month prison sentence.
(Note that another high profile parental alienation expert, Sue Whitcombe, also lent her support to Tim Haries. https://suewhitcombe.blogspot.com/2013/06/)
Fathers4Justice campaigner Tim Haries found guilty of defacing Queen portrait, Independent, 8 January 2014
Six month prison sentence for Fathers4Justice campaigner who defaced portrait of the Queen, 6 February 2014
Tim Haries advert refused by the Times, Telegraph and Independent newspapers, Fathers 4 Justice, 14 February 2014
Fathers4Justice vows to step up attacks on the nation's artworks, Independent, 6 July 2013:
“The man behind the pressure group Fathers4Justice has warned that there will be more attacks on valuable works of art. Matt O'Connor, the organisation's founder, said he would "destroy 10,000 Hay Wains" for the cause of access to children and predicted that the group's stunts would get more extreme and "people will go to prison this year”. One of the group's protesters, Paul Manning, was charged with criminal damage last week after gluing a photo of his child to John Constable's masterpiece The Hay Wain. His stunt followed Tim Harries spray painting "help" over a portrait of the Queen in Westminster Abbey last month. Mr O'Connor said: "I'd destroy 10,000 Hay Wains if it meant I could protect my children. If we think a painting is worth more than a child's life then something is wrong. People will go to prison this year. We've got two trials and there'll be more direct action imminently.”
“The Children and Families Act came into being last month and for those who were looking it seems like the presumption question has been quietly dropped over the edge of the cliff, a bit like its champion Tim Loughton who was unceremoniously ejected from this position of Children’s Minister half way through the Coalition Governmnent’s term. Whatever the intent at the outset of this government, at the end of its term, the rather pathetic looking changes which have actually been brought about will change little if anything at all. The presumption of shared parenting, the reform of child maintenance, the bringing together of a new, collaborative way of supporting families after separation, akin to Maria Miller, the Minister with original responsibility for child maintenance reform’s fall from grace, there’s something a bit shamefaced about what this government has actually done in terms of change. A tweak here, a tinker there and a whole load of investment in ensuring that the circle of sychophantic charities that sit around the westminster village are ‘on message’ from the outside, even if nothing at all has changed on the inside, is about the height of its achievement. At the heart of it all, the single parent lobby continues on its merry way, convincing one and all that dads are feckless, wreckless, mad, bad and dangerous to their children whilst the father’s lobby looks like a neutron bomb has been dropped on it from a great height. What we are left with, on the surface, is business as usual. And all this from a Coalition Government supposedly supporting family life.
Underneath the surface however are some interesting stirrings, something different from the binary divisions which have ruled this field since the early seventies when the sisters of mercy of feminist doctrine came storming in to rewrite legislation and reshape the battlefield of post separation family life. I have been watching this change with a growing interest, particularly as it rises up from the recent round of battle to change the legislative structure around separated families and particularly because it mirrors change which has happened in other jurisdictions, like Australia, where legislative reform was finally pushed through in recent memory and where shared parenting became established as a cultural expectation within legislative change.
There is no doubt in my mind that the move towards an expectation that mothers and fathers will share care of children after separation will come about in the UK. Shared parenting, unlike shared care or equal care, is a concept which is based not upon the division of time in equal or near equal measures, but upon the cultural acceptance that mothers AND fathers are important in children’s lives. Bringing about a change towards greater levels of shared parenting requires examination of structural barriers to sharing parenting, such as the continued slavish adherence to the single parent model of support to families, something which the Coalition Government proclaimed it was going to change but in fact didn’t dare go near in the end. The fact that the single parent model of support is so well established (brought into being fifty years ago or so) and the fact that its supporters are massively funded, well connected and able to raise phenomenal numbers of supporters seemingly at a moment’s notice, is probably something that terrified the life out of those civil servants charged with bringing about change. Certainly in the reform of the child maintenance system, something many of you will remember I was intimately involved with, the power of the single parent lobby to oppose anything and everything that they felt would be detrimental to their membership (read women), was demonstrated several times over. From texting, emailing and writing to every member of the House of Lords, to forming coalitions with charities which were ostensibly part of the reform but actually working against it, this lobby group was relentless in its determination to protect the single parent model which relies heavily upon the stereotype of bad dads and good mums for its justification (and which leads to the continuation of all state support, both financial and otherwise being framed around one parent (usually the mother) to the exclusion of the other parent (usually the father). And it doesn’t matter how much the DWP and its Child Maintenance Options service tweaks, twists and turns it language, its delivery or the framework within which that sits, the reality is that the Help and Support for Separated Families initiative, which came out of the supposed reforms, is quite simply exactly the same single parent model of support only dressed up to make the outside world believe that its about collaboration. Its not. Its absolutely not. Just as the charities which sit around the government supposedly reformed their services to support collaborative parenting at the same time as joining together to form a coalition which eventually watered down Clause 11 (the proposed change in the Children Act 1989 promised by the Coalition Government on coming into power), HSSF promises change and delivers exactly the same as has always been delivered – support to mothers to care and fathers to provide for their children. Something so far away from Sir David Henshaw’s 2006 proposals for reform that it is difficult to see how they have any connection to it at all. Elsewhere, despite all of the Coalition Government’s promises of change, the only difference now is that charities which previously overtly supported the single parent model now covertly support it, whilst at the same time as they have hoovered up the funding (in the case of child maintenance this is around twenty millions pounds) to present their wares via shiny new websites which promise much but deliver nothing different at all.
Take One Plus One’s new invention which is being promoted by CAFCASS, the online parenting plan. Designed for use before any court action is taken, it is supposedly aimed at parents to help them make their child arrangement orders, something which has replaced the old terms of residence and contact and something which all parents are now required to consider. A quick rinse through this CAFCASS endorsed entity tells us that post separation talking to each other might be difficult, but that we should put the needs of the children first and that if we find that hard we should use mediation. Staggeringly close to the HSSF endorsements to ‘talk about things and if its difficult use mediation and here is a calculator so that you can work out how much would be paid under a statutory maintenance arrangement’, this is a pointless, spineless, circular piece of nonsense which is devoid of imagination, steeped in the same old single parent stereotypes with a dash of this government’s remedy of choice, mediation thrown in for good measure. What a waste. What an absolute waste of time, money and effort. And I say that as someone who sat on both government working groups throughout the first years of this government, giving up swathes of my time and energy only to watch it all swirl away down the proverbial pan.
Enough however of the bemoaning of the Coalition’s failure to do what it said it would do and onto the world as I have come to know it in recent months. This world, infinitely more interesting than the stultifiying air of the corridors of power, has begun to look even more interesting in recent weeks and months as from the wreckage of the pro family, pro change lobby, the stirrings of a new movement have begun to emerge. This movement, which is coalescing as I write and which promises to bring together, together rather than smash apart the energy for change (a common phenomenon in the pro father’s movement) is made of disparate groups, all of which work in different fields around the family, but which all hold in common the belief that a move from the single parent model to a whole family model of support post separation is the way forward. This movement, even more excitingly from my perspective, contains women as well as men and is not framed around ‘rights’ but around the need for a cultural and legislative change towards inclusive support for the whole family. This is the kind of movement which finally brought about change in Australia, could this be the vehicle which allows change to be brought through to fruition in the UK?
Recently I have been conversing with other women who, like me, have recognised that feminism did them no favours. These women, who I consider to be some of the most cognitively ‘sorted’ people, are like me, in their late forties and early fifties. We lived through those times when women took hold of the social policy field around the family and we experienced what it did to us. Far from liberating us, nonsensically, it tied us to the kitchen sink and made our primary identity that of caring for children, something far far removed from what the second wave feminist movement told us was our destiny. Looking back, it is so easy to see how those academics who wrote social policy in the seventies, thought they were doing us a favour. Give women total control over their children after separation and they will leave their marriages in droves, was the thinking. And that is what happened. After that however, the cul de sac of the social policy outcomes which were devised for us by those women, meant that far from sharing care of children, we were lumbered with the sole responsibility and, perversely, told that that was liberation. The liberal feminist dominance of the social policy field around family separation never really got to grips with the mess it made of women’s lives in that way and so, in my view, it was easier to expand the myth that all men are dangerous after separation (and create the kinds of domestic violence policies and practice which more or less ensured that all men were dangerous whatever they did) than to tackle the fact that women had been shoved back into the kitchen by the second wave feminist academics and their determination to put all the power over children into the hands of women after the previous centuries of it being held in its entirety by men.
Those second wave feminist academics however are getting old now and will soon be shuffling off into their twighlight years. Whilst they have managed to influence (brainwash) and educate (distort) the minds of more generations of women coming after them, they haven’t quite got the control over all of us that they would like. And this, for me, is the exciting part because those of us who escaped, with minds of our own intact, have retained not only the belief in equality that the original women’s liberation movement in the seventies held, but we have brought with us the skills, the knowledge and the drive to work collectively for change in our field. And now is the time that we can begin to put this into action, together, with men, to shape and build a new way of being in the world so that families can get the help that they need to pull through the difficult times to a better place.
The powerful part of this stirring is the understanding and belief that if change is to come we must all, collectively, become the change we want to see in the world. From fascinating discussions about different ways of building consensus, to how to develop new community models of support, this is the world that I came from many years ago, updated for the twenty first century and this time working together with men not separately from them. This energy, this focus, this belief in our absolute equality and this deep respect and value for each and the relationship between us, for me comes from the work that I did some years ago on gender equality and my understanding that fathers, in the social policy crucibles of the seventies, were quite simply rendered obsolete in an effort to put control over family life into the hands of women. When that realisation dawned, that we had, collectively bought into the mirage that the single parent model of supporting families was necessary because ALL fathers abandon their children and ALL mothers are abandoned and must therefore be supported by the state, I began a journey which I have chronicled in this blog, which ended in my removing my feminist goggles and finally finding the understanding that what we have done to fathers, in shoving them out of their children’s lives via legislation and then blaming them for not being there, was quite simply wrong. From there my compassion grew and my belief in equality, which for so long had really meant women’s rights above all else, all fell into place. Suddenly I knew why so many men fought for their children after separation, suddenly I could see that the desperate longing of father’s was not because they were somehow obsessed or unnatural men, I realised that so many dads, pushed out of their children’s lives, by legislation, by service delivery, by family court practitioners and by cultural apathy, quite simply carried on fighting because they LOVE their children. And that a father’s love for a child, just like a mother’s love, is primal and it is enduring. From there, with the jigsaw pieces finally back in the right place, the lesson that emerged, for me, was unarguable and could not be ever be dismissed. Children need their mother and their father after family separation and routinely breaking the attachment bonds between children and their beloved dads, was and is, cruelty without measure.
Cruelty which prompts fathers to do the most amazing things and endure the most intolerable pain for unimaginable lengths of time. Cruelty which is imposed by the courts, by the crashing into the post separation landscape of what is supposed to be help but which turns out to be thinly disguised single parent models of support which divide parents into good/bad, paying/receiving, deserving/underdserving, dangerous/safe, stereotypes without any regard whatsoever for the significance of these people as mum and dad in their children’s lives. Cruelty which chews up the very soul of fatherhood and spits it out at the other end in the form of court orders which impose no ‘contact’ direct or otherwise and which condemn a father with deepest love for his child, to while away his hours waiting for the time when that love can be given and received again without the interference of the state, the courts, or other people. For some its a long long wait. For others its a wait which never ends. For children its the routine stripping of their attachment bonds and the blind eye turned by too many professionals and others to the impact of that.
On Monday at 10am, some fathers who have suffered such cruelty, will set off from the Royal Courts of Justice to walk to Canterbury Cathedral. These men are, in my view, heralding a new beginning as well as showing us the enduring strength of a father’s love and the lengths to which men will go to cope with their loss and wait until their loved children can return to them. These modern day Pilgrim Fathers exemplify everything that for me is possible and necessary in this new phase of UK family separation politics, a new phase in which responsibility for creating the change we want to see lies not in lobbying remote government Ministers or negotiating with disinterested civil servants but in our own hands, the hands of men and women who have been affected by family separation and the hands of men and women who work on the front line of family change. As these Pilgrims progress on their peaceful protest to register both their existence and their survival of the worst of what family law has done to them, let us, who understand the changes that families need, walk with them, towards dignity, equality and the relationship between us and build the change that we want to see in the world. Its time to take change into our own hands, for families now and in the future.”
Karen Woodall chides Jerry Karlin, Chair of Families Need Fathers, for being too moderate and for not understanding how hard she tried to change the mindset of goverment from the inside:
“I don’t know why you are not aware that we (Nick and I) whilst at CSF worked with the DWP between 2008 and 2013 on reform to child maintenance services. In 2008 we designed and delivered the training that brougt the CM OPtions service to life, working withe CM Reform team intensively as part of the strategy to bring David Henshaw’s 2006 reforms into being. We continued to work with the child maintenance commission across the years subsequent to that, we trained all of the staff at Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission (as it was then) and even won awards for the training we designed and delivered. We continued to work with the Minister for responsibility for Child Maintenance in 2010 and were a core part of the reforms that brought HSSF into being. I chaired groups working on reform and we designed the HSSF web app and the training for the telephony service. We disagreed with the CM Options team however on the watering down of elements of the web app, specifically because all of the elements of it which make collaborative practice with parents truly effective, were stripped out, largely to please the women’s lobby who demanded that the DV triage system was removed. This is the reason why we left the sector and decided to go our own route and build the change we know is needed.”
“Those of you who know my background will be aware that I consider myself to be a recovering feminist. I lived my life from early teens to recent years within the construct known as patriarchy, a construct which I was surprised to discover, one rainy night when driving across the pennines, was a figment of my own imagination. The dismantling of this construct, (which took all of about two seconds), was triggered by the nastiness of one Julie Bindel who, speaking on Radio 4, told the world that she wanted the right to marry her lesbian partner, so that she could destroy the institution of marriage. She went on to describe men and boys as inherently violent and spoke of them as dangerous human beings who must be firmly constrained and preferably disadvantaged in order to rectify the advantage conferred on them by birth. I recognised the tone of voice, the indignation, the self righteousness as being that which had driven me for so many years and at the same time I found myself comparing what she was saying with the men in my life and the boys, particularly the boys. That night I felt as if I had suddenly developed 20/20 vision after years of being blind in one eye. The panoramic view outside of the narrow construct I had been living in was simply astonishing as I finally understood what equality means. And it doesn’t mean inverting a constructed hierachy of belief that half the human race is born advantaged, just because they are men.”
“it is no accident that 90% of non resident parents are dads, the legislation is designed to drive those outcomes. What appalled me back then (1999) and still appalls me now, is that not only are dads driven out of their children’s lives, they are largely blamed, ridiculed and harangued for it. When you scratch the surface of the dead beat dad reality, most dads do not abandon their children, they are systematically shoved out of their lives. That’s not equality, that’s discrimination in action and it is feminists who have done it and if the Julie Bindel’s of this world have anything to do with it, that is how things will keep on being done.”
Karen Woodall attacks the “eye watering”, “shameful”, “blinkered” “feminist” research by Adrienne Barnett of Brunel University and explains:
“To understand the feminist strategy of dragging the issue of PA back into the gender war, let’s go back in time to see where parental alienation first emerged as a concept – right back into the early seventies where in the western world, women were taking advantage of the changes in divorce laws and leaving their spouses in droves taking their children with them. Parental alienation was first noticed in the days when divorce was becoming more common, during a time when the emergence of second wave feminism create the idea of a gender war. The gender war, which is located in the notion that women are always disadvantaged in a patriarchal society, means that in this paradigm, mothers are always at risk, fathers are always risky unless proved otherwise and children are simply part of the mother/child dyad. The gender war is a false war, created to make women believe that their needs are always going to be put second to men in a world in which everyone is born into a structure which always advantages men. Within the field of social policy governing family separation, in the UK at least, this gender war, set against the backdrop of feminist control of social policy, meant that fathers were pushed out of the family and seen as being the primary provider for a mother and her children who were hence forth to be supported by the state and by a punitive child support system.”
She hysterically claims that “it is feminists who have threatened, stalked and harassed me the most. To the degree now where the Metropolitan Police are involved in protecting me.” (I assume she is referring to me here. To put the record straight, the Metropolitan Police did not interview me, as she was unable to provide any evidence to support her malicious allegations against me, and emailed me on 5 February 2020 to say that the investigation was closed.)
“Feminism IS around every corner, it has permeated our lives at every single level. Spend 24 hours listening to the news and reading the print news, analyse it through a gendered lens and you will see how much of it is focused on promotion of the rights of women and girls. We live in an unequal society for certain and feminism is the cause of much of that hidden inequality.”
“I am off to Iceland to train this week, (facing more attack from the feminist press there…)”
“The application of feminist education to the problem of family violence appears to me, when one looks at the evidence, to have spectacularly failed in terms of preventing and treating those who are impacted by it. Worse than that, it seems to me when we look at the ways in which feminist ideology has been applied to the issue of family violence, that there has been one outcome and one outcome only and that is the removal of men from the lives of children on a widespread and systematic basis. Is this a treatment plan or is it simply the extermination of fatherhood which is the ‘unintended consequence’ of the feminist strategy to ‘treat’ domestic violence.”
She advocates “ditching the punitive and vengeful approach of the Duleth Model and the Freedom Programme and recognising them for what they are, tools by which to educate women in the political ideology which is feminism and tools by which to control the behaviours of men. This approach, which is freely applied to families up and down the land, offers women the excuses they need to take control over men and children and maintain it, regardless of whether they are the victim or the perpetrator.”
“It takes a flexible mind and an emotional intelligence to be able to find the beauty of the relationship that you can have within the cold constraints of a controlling other – and to retain the strength and belief in the self that allows one to enjoy that. I lived a long time in such circumstances, navigating with Nick, the cold tight grip of the psychological other – the times we carved out of that, which were truly magical, are what we got as the children’s second best family, the crumbs of what the other parent felt she could allow us.”
“Relate receive millions from government for their so called Relationship counselling… which consists of mostly telling men how deficient they are and stabbing men in fhe back by being signatories to campaigns to stop any measures towards shared parenting to be enacted.”
Karen Woodall writes an open letter to the Labour MP and Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper:
“It was with a heavy heart that I read your article in the Independent this week. Writing about abuse in schools, you headline your piece ‘why we must educate our sons to save our daughters‘ and continue it with the most flagrant disregard for the truth that I think I have recently encountered…
I don’t think I can properly express how I feel about your proposals, to bring in new laws to safeguard women and girls, which are based upon lies, stereotypes and the self interested proclamations of young women who consider themselves to be ‘oppressed’…
The Labour party and all of its supporters should know the truth of the matter which is that feminism is a political doctrine which teaches not equality, but that the rights of women must come first, last and always. As part of that process, the emasculation of men and boys is seen as a desirable outcome…
This narrative, which is evident in your behaviour Yvette Cooper, is shaped by women who have control over family policy and and who see the needs and rights of children as being indivisible from those of their mothers…
Women like you have created a world in which educating boys to be ashamed of their masculinity is seen as desirable instead of cruel and about equality instead of what it is, an oppressive, discriminatory reality. As parents and grandparents, practitioners and ordinary people, we will hold you to account for your crimes against our children and our grandchildren. I hope I stay alive long enough to see the day.”
Nick Langford comments: “Reblogged this on ExInjuria and commented: Just as former smokers make the most evangelical campaigners against smoking, so it takes a former feminist to warn against the dangers of feminism, as Yvette Cooper plans to turn the education system into a machine of mass ideological indoctrination.”
Karen Woodall replies: “Knowing what it did to me all those years makes me so afraid for our children, I won’t rest until more and more people know what how dangerous a doctrine it really is Nick.”
Someone called Charles comments: “Well said Karen. and you are right, Yvette Cooper’s article is worryingly sickening in the extreme.”
Karen Woodall replies: “It is Charles it is frightening in so many ways.”
Karen Woodall claims that working with government nearly killed her: “Having been on the inside and witnessed the way in which the feminist doctrine rules every inch of Westminster, I can honestly say that if we chose to try and change that, I would likely be dead and things would still be the same.”
Vincent McGovern comments: “A very high quality and pertinent letter. My compliments.”
Anthony Esler from Families Need Fathers comments: “Brilliant piece Karen..well received by our Forum. I hope Yvette gets a copy??? And they are talking about her becoming a future PM_ God help all men!!”
Padrestevie comments: “Depriving children of the ability to think for themselves and inculcating fanatical idealism is NOT, confidence building, empowering and liberating however it’s dressed up. It is in fact manipulative, disabling, controlling, stultifying and abusive.”
Karen Woodall replies: “She is one of the architects of the horrors facing men and children in my view.”
Rick Bradford aka William Collins of the Illustrated Empathy Gap, the UK’s most intellectual men’s rights blog, and The Empathy Gap book, and trustee of Families Need Fathers Both Parents Matter Cymru, comments: “Well said, Karen. Keep up the good work.”
Darryl Westell quotes from the Cafcass report presented to the family court in his own case: ““Mr Westell is clearly a dangerous and potentially violent man, who expresses clearly his anger and in his words ‘sorrow and depression’ (like this is a CONTROVERSIAL statement on one’s feelings?!) in the most robust terms. His ex partner expresses genuine concern over his self righteous and crusading demeanour that he proclaims stem from his ‘heartache’ and fear of losing his child. “Miss Clarke is frightened and upset at Mr Westell’s continual pressure in this situation (they expected me to walk away? Might as well have asked me to stop breathing) and feels harassed and scared during their interchanges, especially during hand overs at the contact centre, and feels that she cannot allow her son to be exposed to this type of manipulative and intimidating behaviour. She says she often cries at the thought of contact and feels, with justification, that her son may be emotionally damaged by seeing his mother in such a state.”
Woodman1959 comments: “An extraordinarily powerful and moving account of matriarchal power in action. But they will continue to get away with this until we identify them as such – and goodness sake stop calling this feminism.”
Karen Woodall chides him: “For goodness sake stop calling it matriarchy…feminism is NOT about equality it is about women’s rights over everyone else… Fourth wave feminism, which is what we are now into, has followed the same route as all the rest only now it has a much greater grip on the societies we live in it can ramp itself up to claim dominance over all spheres of existence, including primary schooling.”
Mike Buchanan comments: “Karen, I recently returned from speaking at the first international conference on men’s issues*, in Detroit, and I’m still catching up on my emails. One was from a supporter pointing me to your tremendous letter to Yvette Cooper, and we’ve posted a link to it. Coincidentally, the same Independent piece led to us giving Ms Cooper this month’s ‘Gormless Feminist of the Month’ award just an hour or two before I read your open letter to her: http://j4mb.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/yvette-cooper-mp-gormless-woman-of-the-month/ Keep up the great work!”
*The conference was organised by A Voice For Men and was reviewed by the Washington Post.
Karen Woodall replies to Mike Buchanan: “I am not sure I would call Yvette Gormless, somewhat representative of her group perhaps but not gormless. Feminism has carefully orchestrated a situation in which it controls family policy in this country and it has done this in separated family policy by ensuring that all roads lead to women being in control. The scale of the feminist stitch up is astounding, it infiltrates all corners of the process of separation and ensures that women, by and large have complete control, from money to children, women, if they are quick to make use of the feminist doctrine, can truly take it all… I do fear the world they are trying to create but I don’t think they are gormless, far from it, I think they are probably the cleverest people on the planet… Gormless – no. Deadly – definitely.”
Mike Buchanan comments: “The only strand of feminism of the slightest consequence for 30+ years in the UK and much of the developed world has been gender (radical / militant) feminism, a female supremacy movement driven by misandry… In our election manifesto we’ll be pointing to 20 areas where British men and/or boys are disadvantaged by the actions and inactions of the state, generally to advantage women and/or girls. No feminist has been able to point me to an area where British women and girls are disadvantaged by the state. It’s time for the term ‘equity feminist’ to be consigned to the dustbin of history, so we can turn the spotlight on the hate-driven harridans and their male poodles (e.g. David Cameron, Vince Cable, a third of FTSE100 chairmen…) who hand power to these women on a plate, regardless of the consequences…”
Karen Woodall replies: “When one works with men and women they are each able to understand their own responsibility for making life easier for their kids – until the feminists jump in and tell the woman that she is doing it wrong – or the way in which two people can accept responsibility for their mutual violence as their relationship ends and then CAFCASS bullldoze their way in and decide that HE should go on a DVPP. Or the way in which one gets to the crux of a difficult issue in therapeutic terms between two people and then she decides that to win the fight she is going to bring in a women’s aid worker. Outside of the feminist paradigm, which pits man against woman, the world looks very different and potential for resolution is always present. Inside the feminist paradigm there is only one possible outcome, victory for the woman who gets absolute control and as a result is seen as a strong and courageous survivor and defeat for the man who must lose if he is to prove himself not dangerous to his children. I am tired of that, tired of the cognitive dissonance that brings and tired of the way in which it fails children over and over and over again.”
Mike Buchanan replies: “I publicly challenge prominent feminists when they’ve demonstrably lied in the media and elsewhere – Julie Bindel, Caroline Criado-Perez, Laurie Penny and Kat Banyard come to mind – and I think humour has its place in the war against these ghastly women. After all, what’s been known about (say) DV for decades hasn’t had the slightest bearing on the relentlessly pitiful level of state support for male victims. It was one of the themes of my speech in Detroit – rational arguments simply don’t work against governments in thrall to radical feminists, hence why I’m trying a political approach, with the aim of challenging MPs in marginal seats.”
Karen Woodall replies: “I am so afraid of what Yvette Cooper is saying, because I know that if feminism is taught to little boys and they are not helped to be able to develop the part of their brain which regulates rage, then all we will do is condemn them to being punished for not being little girls (who more readily conform to our feminised expectations of children).”
Children of the Revolution: Life in a post-feminist world
“This week I have been thinking about how life outside of the feminist paradigm can be so difficult to talk about let alone experience. Wherever one travels in the field of family separation, the tentacles of women’s rights creep determinedly in, like japanese knot weed in need of reporting.
The argument of most women’s rights organisations are based upon the idea that children’s needs and wants are indivisible from those of their mothers. This is feminism in action, putting the rights and needs of women first with their children enmeshed within that aim. Those who know the Children Act 1989 will point to the right of the child and the way in which this is set out in the act, to protect and further the needs of children separate from their parents. The problem with the Children Act being however, is that the way that this is too often interpreted and carried out is within a feminist paradigm which leads people to act ‘as if’ the needs and wishes and feelings of a child are indivisible from those of their mothers.
I have written elsewhere of how dangerous this practice is. This framing of all support around the mother after separation as if she and only she is the parent worthy of that. Equally dangerous is the analysis of relationships between mothers and fathers after separation and the upholding of the belief that a mother is a good parent and a father is a parent who must prove he is good before he is allowed to be a parent at all. These gateways, these embedded barriers, are what lead us to live in a culture where dads are disposable, as highlighted in the new CSJ report – Fully Committed, which is published today. This report, which looks at the blocks to involved fatherhood, is something that my husband Nick Woodall has been working on for some time now and I am delighted to see in that report those things which we know must change if we are to bring about better outcomes for the children affected by family separation in the years to come.
Those things are, by and large, to do with loosening the grip of feminist social policy on our family services and the cessation of a women’s rights agenda which is covertly delivered as part of this. The proposal to change the child maintenance system for example, so that each parent after separation is regarded as both capable of paying AND receiving, of caring AND providing for their children. And the notion that the lone parent model of support to families, is simply a way of ensuring that women gain and maintain control and the financial independence to maximise that post separation.
These things, which exist still in our social policy, were written in the days when women could not leave a relationship and automatically take their children with them. These things were designed to enable women to leave marriages with impunity and to ensure that their needs were met in a world where they were, largely, still often financially dependent upon their husbands. These things were written at a time when women could not sign for a mortgage independently and where their wages for the same job of work were often lower than a man simply because they were not a man.
Those days are far far away in the past. Despite all of the stories about glass ceilings and women being oppressed, the reality is that in this day and age a woman is able to own her own home, work for the same pay as a man and achieve as much as men can achieve in the world outside the home.
Inside the home however it is as if the past forty years never happened. Women who once went out to work, shared being pregnant with their husband and who were equally as likely to lounge about in bed instead of doing the housework, suddenly, on the point of separation, become separated ‘stepford’ wives, conforming to the stereotype of poor little woman, abandoned to her fate, children starving and without shoes. Why? Well I would argue because of the way in which feminist social policy belittles women and ties them firmly to the kitchen sink and because modernising Britain, in terms of valuing and supporting engaged and healthy fatherhood has largely been a matter of men tip toeing around on the edges of family policy hoping they might, if they are not too threatening, be allowed to say that dads are actually quite important. The debate about fatherhood and its importance is one which is frustratingly stilted and ever so polite. Everyone is far too busy passing round the hot potatoes of violence in the home and money and being careful not to offend some organisations who get upset at the mere thought that dads should be automatically supported in their children’s lives post separation.
A modern day workforce in the field of family support however, will be equipped to support both mothers and fathers and will also be able to differentiate between the type of violence from which people must be immediately protected and that which can be treated through therapeutic means. A modern day workforce recognises that women have rights and men have rights and that a balancing of those rights does not come before the rights and needs of their children. A modern day organisation supporting separated families will be able to start where each person in the family is and will be able to deliver the immediate, medium and longer term support that sheperds the changing family through the difficult times. And a modern day service will not need to declare itself anything other than committed to equalities, there to support children to maintain strong relationships with all of the important adults in their lives.
Viewed through a post feminist lens, those big bucks Charities such as Women’s Aid and Refuge, Gingerbread et al, all start to look a little bit 1970’s. Their policies and practices sounding more like a second wave feminist manifesto than a truly modern set of proposals to support the separating family in 2014. Continued concentration on women’s rights is all well and good, but the grip they hold on the consciousness of another generation is starting to slip as it becomes apparent that their rule over the sphere of family separation is disappearing. Change or die goes the old maxim and in line with many other countries, it is time for those organisations to modernise their act. Or shut up shop.
Life in a post feminist world is not a dream, it can deliver a great deal more than the limitations set upon family services by the one sided, self interested services which have thus far brought us to a world of disposable dads. It can engage fathers and mothers and it can bring together a working alliance which supports children through change. Life in a post feminist world, where everyone is different and equal is possible and it is time the voices of those supporting dads started to find the courage to say so because the dissonance between what is said and done about family policy within Westminster circles and the reality facing families is so vast, that speaking the truth, at times feels like howling into a gale force wind.
As the Westminster edifice begins to crumble away however and the sins of the past which were visited on children by those working in government departments as well as government funded organisations begin to be made visible, the feminist stranglehold on family policies and practice will be examined alongside the impact on families and the way in which the children in them have been impacted by this. Whatever we think about feminism, it has been at the heart of the Westminster world for well over five decades now, some of its proponents being, in the past, heavily involved in things which will now be scrutinised in the present. Perhaps the time is coming when the truth of what has been done to our children in the name of this political doctrine, will finally be understood and we will know for sure, that supporting children in separated families requires a revolution all of its own.”
Vincent McGovern comments: “Unfortunately in the narrow stifled world of Cafcass and family courts there will always be the likelihood of desperate albeit tactically naive fathers eager to advance their cases by referring to blogs such as Karen’s when they meet unprofessional and biased personnel within the system. The more widely read these excellent blogs are the more they will by used in similar circumstances. Unintended consequences and all that.”
Karen Woodall replies: “Yes it is definitely tactically naive to refer professionals to this blog, it is for parents rather than professionals. The Clinic website is for professionals http://www.familyseparationclinic.co.uk."
“On the left we have Gingerbread. Those gals who fervently want you to believe that all families come in shapes and sizes, or is it families come in all shapes and sizes? Either way what they want you to know is that one parent or two, the only thing that matters is the money. Forget children’s psychological adjustment, ditch the concerns about mothers who alienate, away with the idea that children benefit from the relationships between their parents and off with the heads of anyone who thinks that fathers are necessary – unless of course they are deserving single parent fathers, which basically means that they have to be widowers or the mother of their children must be bad, bad and dangerous to know (think drug/drink/mental health problems). Any father who is non resident is automatically suspicious, especially if he wants to have a relationship with his child. Such men are only good for the colour of their money, which should be hoovered from their pockets and their bank accounts, preferably by the state, with a threat of severe punishment (if not death) should he fail to tip up. Gingerbread have recently released their pre-election manifesto (sorry research), confirming that the only thing that matters after separation is money (to pay for their enormous staff team and cover their senior management salaries/ whoops, sorry, so that children can be fed and have shoes).”
Fabricating fatherhood: changing men and the myth of women’s disadvantage
Karen Woodall attacks the Fatherhood Institute.
“The hidden narratives of the charities that sit around goverment must be exposed in my view. Until and unless we do this we are not going to move forward. Unless we speak about these invisible intentions, we will not understand why this country has such devastating breakdown in couple relationships and we will not be able to prevent children from suffering the fall out from family breakdown which is driven by the women’s rights campaign disguised as family services.”
“People say to us all the time that we should be on the inside. Believe me, we have been there and done that and seen how the ring of steel around family policy is impenetrable and made more so by the appeasement policies of the Fatherhood Institute.”
“Why do the Fatherhood Institute not stand up to Women’s Aid et al and defend fathers as they are systemically stripped from their children’s lives? Why do the Fatherhood Institute see paying of child maintenance as a core responsibility of a father? They said they were the antithesis of the father’s rights movement and they are. Condemning fathers and fatherhood to a narrow band of accepable masculinity in which every man outside of that is seen as wanting. Deficient dad syndrome, it kills the dignity and the wellbeing of every dad in Britain, paid for by the state and delivered by people who recycle ideas for funding for nothing other than, in my view, the sake of it.”
John Allman comments: “Great session in Exeter yesterday. Thanks.”
John Allman is an evangelical Christian, who has also founded Christians Against Mental Slavery, Restore The Family, the Darrim Daoud Truth Campaign, in which he alleges that his friend was murdered by “directed energy weapons”, and Beulah Baruch Ministries, which was a “non denominational evangelical Christian ministry” and was dissolved on Companies House in 2012.
He was given an indirect contact order permitting him to send a letter and gift three times a year to his child. But he showed up at his child’s primary school, demanding to be allowed to watch the Christmas play, and refused to leave even when the police were called. His friend filmed the whole debacle on youtube.
The Modern Day Ducking Stool: Domestic Abuse Programmes and Man Shaming
“This week domestic abuse and all things related have been at the forefront of my thinking and my practice. Never far away from the experience of family separation, domestic abuse is the number one issue facing dads who are fighting to stay in the lives of their children.
For years we have been told that fathers are unsafe after family separation. The mantra ‘supporting children’s relationships with both of their parents where it is safe to do so‘ is attached to every service which is funded by government and the only parent it refers to is dad. ‘Where it is safe to do so‘ arises from the years when organisations like Women’s Aid and Gingerbread ruled the space after family separation and basically means that dads are dangerous and should be prevented from automatic relationships with their children after separation, whilst mums are the natural carers who should never be regarded as anything other than the proper and primary parent.
If we listened to Women’s Aid and Gingerbread et al, every dad at the point of separation, wakes up with a monster mask on his face and murder in his heart. Thus protection of the children, from this violent and unpredictable being, should be our number one priority. Of course there are dads who damage their children and damage their children’s mother too. And for that reason I have never been a proponent of anything but safeguarding and support where it is necessary. How we determine what support is needed however, is something that I have long been concerned about. Because the determinants of who is violent, what constitutes violence and how violence should be treated in the family, seem to me to be made up largely of wounded women who are seeking revenge on men in general. And the broken nature of the interventions that are standard in this country, when dealing with domestic violence, appear also to me to less about protecting children and more about performing a sort of brainwashing routine on men. Sometimes I think that if these women could lobotomise men, just as women were lobotomised in the past, there would be some kind of satisfaction achieved. Instead what they do is something far far worse in my view, they take the relationship that dads have with their children and hold that hostage, aided and abetted by CAFCASS and supported by the family courts. Is this in the best interests of children? I don’t think so, do you?
Working as I do, in the field of family separation I see this story daily and so I long ago abandoned the notion that these stories are just freak tales. Here is just one of them.
Danny is a dad to three children, he is one of those dads who came home one night to find his wife and his children were gone. Six years later he has not seen his children since the day he kissed them goodbye and went off to work in 2008. The years in between have been like walking through a holocaust of grief, loss and pain for Danny, but he has survived, just.
Danny was ordered onto an Idependent Domestic Abuse Programme (IDAP) in 2009 on the basis of the fact that his wife said that he had regularly threatened to hurt her. Danny says that the couple often fought verbally and that she as well as he could be cruel in the process. And there were physical fights too, she would pull his hair and kick him, he would grab her wrists and hold her down so that she could not continue. After these explosions, both would feel shocked and ashamed of themselves and promise each other they would get help. A visit to Relate however left Danny feeling blamed and his wife feeling she was not dealing with this problem properly. A quiet word with the counsellor after a session made her understand that she was in an abusive relationship. She made a plan and executed it. Danny was excised from her life and the children’s. He was ordered to submit to the IDAP leader and admit his failings. When he asked why only he had to undertake the course, he was told he was in denial, when he talked about the couple in conflict together, he was told he was minimising the damage he had done. Finally he was made to understand the rules – conform and change your mindset or lose your children forever – he was told – failure to show the ability to reflect on the ‘truth’ would mean failing the course. Failing the course would mean no contact. Danny tried but could not bend his mind enough. All he could ask was why, when the couple had behaved badly, was he being punished and his relationship with his children held to ransom? He failed the course. He never saw his children again.
Up and down the land this modern day ducking stool scenario, is being quietly played out in a community centre or other such place near you. Behind closed doors, your sons and your brothers, other women’s ex husbands and lovers are being subjected to this grim and unpleasant ritual. From all walks of life, from accountants to carpenters, men are being shuffled along a conveyor belt designed to strip them of their power and their sense of self so that they can be moulded into acceptable dad, docile dad, dad who is aware of his inherent deficiencies. Rolling off the end of this conveyor belt, these men are graded to show how accepting they are of their failings, not enough acceptance and it’s an automatic fail, just enough and they might just pass, complete acceptance presumably wins them a gold star and the right to join the Fatherhood Institute (I jest but you understand my meaning).
What kind of madness is this? What happened to humanity? What happened to dignity? This is a constructed world in which the family courts have turned domestic abuse into very very big business. Run by women for women, the domestic abuse perpetrator programmes are designed to reassure the courts that the man standing in front of them, charged with all manner of heinous crimes, is fit to be a father. Before 1973, when the divorce laws changed, women who left a marriage were regarded as being an unfit parent. Today the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that women can choose to leave a marriage, take the children, the assets, years of financial support AND decide the fate of the fatherhood of the man with whom they chose to have children. Women truly have it all. Apart from those who get caught up in this winner takes all system and who lose to the man who outwits them in the court system. But they are just collatoral damage, invisible and disregarded in the general scheme of things. The sick and twisted truth of the matter is that those women who do lose in this system are often those at the mercy of the very kind of men who SHOULD be on Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes, but that appears to fall on deaf ears when raised in the company of the women’s rights groups. Instead what we see, is routine man shaming wrapped up in the idea that all dads are dangerous. It is shameful, it is inhuman and it is happening near you right now.
DV perpetrator programmes are nothing more than the cold revenge of wounded women and it is time we stopped using them. It is time that we began to see them for the modern day ducking stools that they are, that damn men if they admit their violence and damn them if they don’t. The women’s rights political agenda that has underpinned thinking around domestic violence for five decades now has to be shown for what it is, incapable of stopping intergenerational violence, unconcerned with women’s violence and focused on one thing and one thing only, shaming and blaming men.
We are now one of a very few countries that fails to use, as standard, a triage approach to violence. Other countries are recognising that co-ercive controlling violence is not the only kind of violence that occurs in family relationships and are acknowledging that these other types of violence cannot be treated through routine shaming and brainwashing.
Violence between people in marriages is not uncommon, it is something which is dysfunctional for sure and something for which there should be widespread help and support; which is tailored not to the needs of women at the expense of men, but to the realities that face men and women in relationship together. The ducking stool approach which is currently in use, is cruel, inhuman and wrong and it is time we all stood up to say so. But just like the emperor’s new clothes, until we do, more men as fathers will face the same routine humiliation and destruction of their masculinity as their brothers gone before. It is our responsibility now to say no more of this, enough is enough. Domestic violence/abuse is NOT a gender issue it is a generational learned behaviour which can be treated. But not this way.”
Rick Bradford comments: “Karen – Enjoy your break, I suspect you well deserve it. And keep up the good work. R”
Brainwashing boys: Feminist doctrine for the early years
“It is with alarm that I read the latest bulletin from the End Violence Against Women and Girls Coalition – a group of ardent feminist organisations which unashamedly uphold the notion that boys are disproportionately advantaged by virtue of their gender. Proclaiming the support of the Education Secretary, it would appear that EVAWGC’s plan is to shoe horn into the curriculum, additional education for children as young as 11 on issues of rape, pornography and domestic violence (amongst other issues considered by the Coalition to be gender specific). This ‘fact’ sheet, it is headlined, is designed to fill in the gaps in sex education and is backed by the Department for Eduction. Does anyone else find it terrifying that our boys, already behind in performance in class, entry to University, health and wellbeing, lifespan, exposure to violence in the home and outside of it, are about to brainwashed into believing that their life experience is inherently advantaged in comparison to girls? Here’s a few choice points from the fact sheet on the reasons why such an approach is needed…
This clearly political context is potentially about to be fed to our children, clearly attempting to diminish boys’ developing sense of self and sexuality whilst enhancing girls’ beliefs that they are entitled to live in a world in which boys will behave as women tell them to. Inculcating our already challenged boys with a sense of shame is not what I call education. I will be writing to the Schools Minister on Monday morning to object to this and asking her to listen to people like Glen Poole from Equality4Men, (the global campaign for men and boys) – about the issues facing boys in schools. And how a real gender equality strategy, in which girls and boys learn together the importance of self care and mutual respect within a framework of balanced not biased facts, would change children’s lives for the better based on truth not a women’s rights agenda. I suggest you do the same.”
Rick Bradford comments: “Yes, there are many of us who find the Yvette Cooper et al programme of feminist indoctrination of small boys terrifying. I’ll write to the Rt Hon Nicky Morgan as suggested. But if my sons were just starting school I’d not want to put them through the state meat-grinder.”
Mike Buchanan comments: “Hi Karen. Interesting piece, but the first link seems to be broken. If I’m right in this, and it’s fixed, I’ll be very happy to post a link.”
Karen Woodall replies: “Hi Mike, link is updated and email address included now. K”
Mike Buchanan and John Allman repost Karen Woodall’s blog post on their own websites.
Darryl Westell lavishes praise on Karen Woodall: “A monumental piece of prose.
Perhaps the most beautiful writing I’ve ever come across, and I teach English for a living. It’s relevance and its still, poiniant beauty is seriously, desperately heart-rending. The utter failure and the decrepit wasteland of the court system and the miserable goons who work for Cafcass are laid bare in the incicive and ruthless poetry of this article. Stunning.”
Karen Woodall replies: “I think I spend so much time with people affected by this that it sort of channels its way through me onto the page Darryl. I am glad it helps though I know it has also made some people cry. It made me cry actually when I went back over it.”
“Does anyone really think that going into the court process is something that people do just for the fun of it – or conversely just to have a go at the other parent? (Well yes actually they do, a lot of the women’s rights groups believe that fathers use the courts to harrass mothers and see a fathers wish to keep on being a parent as being a form of violence – trust me, go and look at Women’s Aid and Refuge websites for plenty of evidence of that).”
“The problem facing our family courts is this. All of the services which get government funding and which purport to support separated families are, at the heart of them, carved out of the feminist principles of women’s rights first and children and men a long way behind. The reason why these services cannot help separated families is because they force this hidden agenda onto the families they are trying to work with and it fails them. It fails them because it empowers one parent over the other and it ignores the needs of children and it leaves families with arrangements that are not in a child’s best interests and which break down very quickly, resulting in a return to court. And throwing endless amounts of cash at more government sponsored projects to force families to fit these services is just banging heads against a brick wall – or throwing tax payers money down the drain year after year after year.
Dear Anthony*, when you finally face the truth, which is that the core of your approach to delivering services is based upon a political agenda that does not fit the needs of the families that your service works with, you will unlock the door to your problems and make the services you preside over fit for purpose. Until that day I fear your excitement is less about keeping families alive than offering them the gallows rather than burning them alive at the stake. I wish I was joking.”
*Anthony Douglas, Chief Executive of Cafcass
“I have told CAFCASS this, and I have told the government this, I am not belly aching without having done it, I have had the courage of my conviction. But the truth is that they know it and they keep doing it anyway. They keep doing it because the massively funded women’s rights lobby holds far more power than you could ever imagine. It has the power to twist reality, pay for research and dominate policy making.”
Nick Langford posting as ExInjuria comments: “There is something ghoulish about CAFCASS trying to keep families alive; you can almost hear Douglas muttering to himself, “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”
Karen Woodall replies, “that made me smile Nick”.
Jerry Karlin of Families Need Fathers argues that the cultures of large organisations take time to change.
Karen Woodall replies: “As for leaders – I can think of no other organisation which serves customers which has the arrogance, distance, lack of care, lack of accountability and lack of transparancy that AD* presides over in CAFCASS. It is nothing short of shocking to be honest. This man relies upon being able to say to any dissatisfied customer – it must be your fault you are dissatisfied because the system isn’t broken so you must be. What kind of madness is this? This is in fact institutionalised abuse and anyone who cannot see what is being done to parents in this manner must be either hopelessly devoted to the system or a little dim in my view. There is no defence of CAFCASS or the leadership that stands up to any kind of scrutiny and anyone supporting parents in this system should be as sharp as a tack in understanding that in my view. To not do that is to fail the people we desperately need to protect from this abuse.”
*Anthony Douglas
Vincent McGovern comments: “The real problem is the virtually if not actually unregulated services at the bottom of this monster, DV/MARAC/SS/Cafcass are the real obstacle to progress.”
Karen Woodall replies: “I could not have put that last line any better myself and I am delighted to hear that Brussels is well aware and that something can be done. Unless all of us who understand what is happening across this country join forces, the mirages created by the women’s rights lobby, which are upheld by all of the major charities working with government on family separation and which are bought into by civil servants and thus fed to Ministers, will NEVER change.”
“Since Theresa May’s announcement that men who shout at their wives could face up to 14 years in prison, the issue of coercive control has been in the media. Launched by a plethora of largely meaningless headlines, the idea that coercive control is a new offence which tightens the net around nasty men, protecting feeble victim women has been on our front pages recently.”
“Family violence, however it is carried out, whether it is a one off event, situational, coercive or otherwise is a criminal act and should be heard in a criminal court without delay. Whilst awaiting judgement, children and the parent who has been alleged to have been violent should remain in close relationship supervised, supported and faciitated.”
“I no longer work in the charitable sector and I no longer work with government, I chose instead, with Nick, to walk away and work directly again with the families that need our help. In our world, where family violence is wrong and must be stopped, healing and teaching and changing behaviours is what helps families to end the transgenerational patterns of coercive control and non feminist/non political analysis is what makes the difference in our work. Ironically it was exactly this understanding of the field that I work in that caused a lawyer this week to accuse me of ‘spouting off’ with ‘clear political bias.’ In a field which is riddled with political bias, in which forty years of women’s political activism has effectively silenced, strangled and shunted fathers (and some mothers who are regarded simply as the unintended consequences of feminist policy) to the margins of their children’s lives, I consider it to be one of my greatest achievements to be able to speak the truth of what I see as well as continue to help families change and grow and heal.”
“I am working with Erin Pizzey on development of transgenerational models of dv analysis, this is the kind of thing we have to do to bring about change.”
Vincent McGovern comments: “I have addressed the Petitions Commission of European Parliament twice in 2014. The 2nd occasion I used work kindly provided by Karen Woodall. That said I personally welcome the grotesque child endangering gender discrimination laws being passed and I hope for more of them. My reasoning being men and fathers are in such denial about where they are in modern society that things will have to become worse before they will wake up and take corrective action which does not mean back to the past but rather forward in an enlightened and equal manner. The few people currently aware and effectively addressing this are mostly female, KW and Erin Pizzey in the lead. When I speak to men outside of this business their eyes glaze over. Similar to the last Dodo when it greeted Dutch sailors approaching it with raised clubs in the 18th century.”
Karen Woodall replies: “We tried. We really really tried and we did get somewhere in the DWP in particular but we were beaten back by the women’s rights groups and our whole family practice got turned into something unrecognisable.”
She then gets embroiled in an argument about strategy with Anne O’Regan, a paternal grandmother and trustee of Families Need Fathers Both Parents Matter Cymru. Karen Woodall deplores FNF Cymru’s Paul Apreda’s “unfathomable strategy of appeasing feminists in the Welsh Government”, and Anne O’Regan declares “as someone who campaigned tirelessly against the Ending Violence Against Women bill, I am shocked at the suggestion a home goal may have been scored.”
“Think Coercive Control and wherever you are in the feminist driven arena of family services you will see and hear only one response, that of men’s control over women. Look at the evidence however and you will begin to understand why the Family Separation Clinic does not approach the issue of family violence in the same way. There is very clear and unequivocal evidence drawn from major studies across the world, that family violence is not a gendered issue. Whilst saying that in earshot of any of the government’s family services such as CAFCASS causes some staff to believe that one is making vitriolic anti mother statements, it is the truth and it is essential that when working with separated families one uses the truth and nothing but the truth. Let me explain.
There is a very serious issue that arises during family separation which is often completely ignored by evaluators, mediators and others who work with the separated family. This is that coercive control patterns which were present before the separation happened, can be played out after separation using the children of the family as conduits for that control. The incidence of false allegations made by a child against a parent is one such pattern and as such it is deeply damaging to both children and parent as it involves the child in a pattern of intimate partner violence. In the field of family separation in the UK at least, the deeply held beliefs about separating families which have been forced upon our society by the women’s rights lobby groups over the years, have created a stereotyped picture that looks like bad fathers hurting good mothers and their children. So deep is this belief that children who are caught in the coercive controlling grip of a parent after separation and forced into making false allegations to uphold the power that this parent has over the other, are often simply invisible to practitioners. Couple that with the focus on children’s wishes and feelings and add in a dash of child abuse hysteria which is currently running up and down our land again and you have the perfect ingredients for the controlling parent to use the child to make the allegations that will prevent the other parent from seeing the child again. Or at least for long enough to ensure that the child can be completely alienated from the other parent’s life by deepening inculcated fears and phobias of that parent.
The problem with the way that we support separated families in this country is that for too long we have been driven to believe that this is only about dads who leave families and mothers and children who are abandoned. We have also been encouraged to believe that the only thing wrong with family separation is that said abandoned mothers are struggling to put food on the table and shoes on their children’s feet. This is untrue. It is a stereotype that serves to support the women’s rights groups who have dominated the social policy space around family separation for too long. It is dangerous and it is corrosive, especially to children who are least well served by its ongoing promotion.
Working close to the coal face of family separation, stereotypes are not useful in helping to understand what is really going on in a family. Use of punitive beliefs to drive practice does not serve children who are vulnerable to becoming caught up in parental battles. Looking beyond stereotypes, it is easy to see that the way that a family separates is very similar to the way that the family operated when it was together. Lines of power and control are utilised in just the same way. People do not change during separation, they simply sharpen and harden their inherent traits and they often fall back onto negative behaviours which are used to the full to power their way through to victory.
Because family separation is not about bad dads abandoning angelic mothers and their starving children. Much as we might like to think it is (because that makes it easy to deal with in policy and practice terms), it is not. And saying it is not is not anti mother and it is not pro father, it is simply raising the reality that family separation is about mothers and fathers, some of whom behave well and some of whom do not. When one reaches that place in practice with families, it is easier to see what is really going on and when you see what is really going on it is possible to assist the family. Properly assist I mean, not shove them into a state run service or the family courts where they are run through the mill of other people’s stereotyped beliefs again until they conform, walk away or die. And I mean die. Too many men die after family separation, not because they are not able to talk about their feelings but because of the relentless barriers placed in the way of their relationships with their children, all put there by the stereotyped beliefs which prevail in the world around them. Yes, women die too, I am not denying that. But we hear about the women, we never hear about the men. Speaking about both is important in this field.
Working with that which we do not hear about is the focus of our research work at the Family Separation Clinic where we are examining Intimate Partner Violence in family separation and the way in which children are used in this through the use of false allegations of sexual abuse. False allegations are differentiated by Bernet et al into two categories, false and fabricated. False allegations are those which originate as rumors and which spiral out of control and fabricated allegations are those which are deliberately and maliciously generated either by a parent or by a parent using the child to report them. Whichever category the allegation is in, the outcome in the UK is the same. When allegations of sexual abuse are made, contact between the child and the parent they are made against stops and family proceedings must then await the outcome of any criminal proceedings which arise. Working as we do at the Clinic with high conflict families, false allegations are part of the landscape and they affect mothers as much as they affect fathers. And as deeper examination of the family dynamic shows, allegations of this nature are most often part of an ongoing pattern of ongoing intimate partner violence which has been present in the relationship prior to separation and which continues afterwards through coercive control of the child.
I should be clear that in our work we also differentiate between child sexual abuse which is real and that which is alleged as part of a campaign of control. Differentiating between real and false child sexual abuse allegations requires careful work and demands that the allegations are set within the family dynamic both in the present moment and historically. Achieving clear vision in this area requires us to work outside the feminist paradigm. This is because the feminist belief system which dominates family services, teaches that all women and children must be believed without question and questioning this belief means that one is biased against mothers. This double bind which is imposed upon practitioners, is dangerous to both women AND children because it a) captures mothers in the net of fixed beliefs that all women are good women and b) causes practitioners to overlook the damage that mothers can do to their children. To understand what I mean here let me unpick this just a little bit.
Intimate Partner Violence is not a gendered issue. It just isn’t. Look at the facts in the link above. Men AND women are violent and men AND women are harmed by intimate partner violence. To believe otherwise is to simply ignore the facts and impose your own (untrue) belief system upon families and force them to conform to this. This is not equalities practice, this is discrimination in action. And when one works from a discriminatory perspective, one captures not only the people who fit your stereotyped beliefs, but those who don’t too. This is called ‘unintended consequences’ in feminist speak.
It works like this. If you believe that only men are capable of intimate partner violence and only women can be victims, when you come to look at the separated family where a child is making allegations of child sexual abuse, who do you assume is the abuser? If you believe that coercive control is something that a man uses against a woman, when a child makes an allegation of child sexual abuse against a father, what is your first reaction? What do you do then when the child makes an allegation of sexual abuse against her mother? And what do you do when the allegation of child sexual abuse against his father is clearly shown to be untrue but the child and his mother continue to hold fast to the statement that it happened? Who do you believe and why do you believe it? Is your belief evidence based or is it based upon your own gendered assumptions about violence in the home? When you face those realities which do not fit your belief system, how do you go on to assist families? Or do you continue to try and make them fit your belief system instead of their reality?
Services delivered within a feminist paradigm, which teaches that men are violent and women are not, create significant problems for parents who face false allegations as part of a pattern of intimate partner violence after family separation. For men who face such allegations the prevailing belief is that they are guilty until they are able to prove their innocence and for women so accused, the belief is that they must be really really bad people because women do not sexually abuse children and therefore if a child is saying that it happened they are courageously speaking the unspeakable. All of which provides the coercively controlling parent with the perfect conditions for continuing their abuse, using not only the child but the practitioners who work with the family, the police and even Judges themselves who are not all free of their own deeply held beliefs about what men and women do.
Working outside of the feminist paradigm, with the facts and not the fantasy, it becomes possible to see the family and its patterns of power and control more clearly. This brings potential for understanding false allegations within a new power and control paradigm, one which uses not a constructed idea of patriarchy as its framework but horizontal and vertical lines of assessment which examine past behaviours, historical context and trans-generational family patterns. Locating the separating family within this context allows one to examine allegations within a framework of understanding what brought the family to this place – why this, why now? Using tools such as SET (sequence, escalation, timing) factors developed by Bush and Ross in 1987, allegations are examined within the current dynamic between parents and particular examination is made of the power and control element of the allegations. As Campbell (2014) states, ‘Were the allegations timed in such a way that one parent garnered greater control, has the family system divided itself into two hostile coalitions? Who did the child disclose the allegations to, was it the mother or someone in her coalition or was it outside of a coalition, a teacher perhaps or some other impartial person?’ All of these elements allow the person who is evaluating the allegations to get closer to the reality of what is really going on. All of these elements are worked with outside of the feminist belief system and all are based upon an understanding that coercive control patters and allegations of child sexual abuse can be closely linked in cases of family separation.
Child sexual abuse allegations are damaging in the extreme in a landscape which is already littered with suffering. Look closely at this landscape however and you will see that this is not a war between two people but a war waged by one person against the other with the heavy weaponry being the children involved. When the lines of power and control are made visible through the application of non gendered practice, it is possible to see which parent is the war monger and which one is not. And the one who is not is the healthy parent who is the person most capable of keeping the child safe. Too many practitioners who come to these scenes of devastation and destruction assume that they know what is really going on and treat the problem as a he said/she said situation. Too many bring their own belief systems to the war zone and spend their time trying to make parents fit their paradigm, causing more pain, more suffering and abandoning children to their fate as the conduits of hatred and harm.
When we step out of the need to believe that challenging feminist belief systems automatically make us anti mother or pro father our ability to serve the families who need us improves ten fold. Go on, read the statistical evidence in the link in the first paragraph and open your mind to reality. Intimate partner violence and coercive control is happening all around you, perpetrated by women as well as men and capturing children and rendering them victim to not only the abusing parent but your practice too. If you want to be part of the solution, stop being part of the problem and wake up to the reality of what really goes on in separated families. The children whose best interests you are charged with serving, depend upon you to do so.”
“I am attacked frequently for saying what I say, I am undermined and ridiculed in some places but I keep on saying it and will keep on saying it until those too afraid to say it as it is see that it is necessary to do so. You cannot change this culture without tackling the barriers and feminist thinking is one of the biggest, when I see and hear others saying that out loud I will know that they are on my wagon, until then my wagon is hitched to the international PA movement and will stay that way.”
“What we have are policy makers who are politically motivated and who are absolutely blindsided by the women’s rights lobby. This lobby group is huge, it is financially powerful and it can manipulate reality at will. I have sat around tables with these people who are ferocious when they are challenged. I was once in a meeting with heads of women’s groups who more or less laughed at me, then threatened me and then spent the meeting trying to shout me down. I have been attacked, threatened and bullied by people involved in the women’s rights movement for speaking about the need to work outside of the feminist paradigm when working with separated families. I have seen possibilities for social policy changed absolutely wrecked by the fear of the women’s rights lobby and in the end I walked away because I could not stomach it anymore. Unless we work together, those of us who know the reality – that IPV and Coercive Control are not gendered issues, more generations of children will be used in this way and it is frankly appalling in my view that anyone charged with upholding the best interests of children is allowed to practice using a policitical ideology such as feminism. But they are and they believe they are holier than you and I and more committed to equalities. They are not. Equalities work can never be achieved using feminism as a basis.”
“Feminism is not about equality, it is about women’s rights before all else and it harms children and their mothers and fathers and has no place in practice with the separated family in my view. The argument that feminism is the way to achieve equality is akin to saying that only Maoism can eradicate poverty. Feminism is an ideology, it is political in nature and it does not promote equality. Equalities practice requires you to drop the political ideology, take off the feminist glasses and see the world as it is, not how it is filtered through a political construct. I am absolutely stunned when I hear therapists and other family practitioners arguing that their feminist practice is helpful to families, I am stunned actually that practitioners practice feminist practice without declaring it because I cannot see how that gives people an equalities based service. Why as a man would you subject yourself to a therapist who uses feminist analysis to understand your world for example? In doing so you are immediately subjecting yourself to their assumptions about you and who you are. Feminism has no place in this kind of work and we have to be brave enough to say it.”
“Although feminism is a political ideology, and as such should not be found within a hundred metres of any such professional, it is routinely THE ideology of choice for professionals working with the family. Feminism, which in the last forty years has come to be synonymous with the word equality, has an overarching driver, to ensure that the needs of women are put first within an assumption that men are always priviliged within a patriarchal society. Practitioners around the family, who freely proclaim their feminist identity, are therefore always going to be biased in terms of whose needs they recognise and meet, it being an anathema to feminist doctrine that men’s needs are considered equally to those of women. Additionally, as much of our current legislation around the separated family was created and is maintained by feminist academics who are heavily interlinked with organisations such as Gingerbread and Women’s Aid, both of whom are outspokenly feminist, the family separation playing field is already far less than level for those who venture onto it. Into this hotbed of political ideology enters the child who makes false or fabricated allegations and the parent with whom they are aligned, most often the mother and very often supported by groups of workers from feminist organisations. Within which there is an unshakeable belief that all women must be believed without question and that children do not lie. But children do lie and they lie regularly and often and they lie especially when the circumstances they find themselves in encourage them to lie and especially when there is little possibility their lies will be found out.”
John Allman comments about “feminnazis”, and Vincent McGovern praises “A very incisive and knowledgable overview of the family courts and more importantly the myriad unregulated and unaccountable agencies within local government which wreck such havoc on innocent parents usually dads and vulnerable children by rigidly adhering to such warped ideology.”
Karen Woodall rants about Families Need Fathers collaborating with Gingerbread in 2011: “That’s it in a nutshell, I wonder how many know the truth of it…that’s called shafting your membership in my view, I have never forgotten it, it is what made me want to leave the charity sector, what made me leave came next, the watering down of all of our work by the DWP to keep the women’s rights groups happy.”
“In 2012, after witnessing the destruction of our work with the UK government by the women’s rights organisations who sought to perpetuate the myth of good mother/bad father across new government funded services we had written, developed and trained people to use,our decision to walk away from that and set up the Family Separation Clinic to meet the needs of separated families in the model we know works for them, has always felt like the right thing to do.”