Karen and Nick Woodall hold unorthodox beliefs on domestic violence which are entirely at odds with official Government policy. Their beliefs are dangerous because of the influence they wielded in the past - which continues to have profoundly negative effects now - and the influence they continue to wield in the present.
Karen and Nick Woodall have committed financial fraud repeatedly. It is in their financial interest to try to give “alienated” parents what they want. In the United States, “parental alienation” is routinely used to discredit mothers’ allegations of domestic violence or child abuse.
The couple trained Child Maintenance Options staff from 2008 to 2011. Child Maintenance Options has been repeatedly criticized for its staff’s lack of domestic violence awareness.
Karen Woodall was a member of the Expert Steering Group appointed by Maria Miller in August 2011 to design a system of support to help separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance and other aspects of co-parenting. She also headed the sub group designing the telephone helpline for separated parents.
Karen Woodall designed the “self diagnostic tool” for the Sorting Out Separation website, which was criticized in a House of Commons debate on … as being unrealistic and too positive.
Karen Woodall produced the training manual for helpline operators to support separated parents make “family based arrangements” for child maintenance and other aspects of co-parenting.
Karen and Nick Woodall trained over four thousand early years workers in Sure Start centres and private day nurseries to support separating and separated parents.
Since 2010 or possibly earlier, Karen Woodall has worked in the family courts, diagnosing “parental alienation”, in which the resident parent - usually the mother - “alienates” the children from the non-resident parent - usually the father - by inculcating fear and loathing through false allegations of domestic violence and child abuse. Karen Woodall claims to regularly bring about “transfers of residence”, in which the family court orders a transfer of residence from the resident parent - who is found to be psychologically abusive rather than protective - to the non-resident parent - who is found to be a victim of false allegations.
It is important to understand that the couple were not chosen by accident. They were entirely open about their beliefs - indeed their unorthodox approach was precisely why they were such favourites. In 2012 Samantha Callan and Elly Farmer, the daughter of Lord Farmer, co-authored a Centre for Social Justice report, Beyond Violence: Breaking cycles of domestic abuse, which was heavily influenced by Karen and Nick Woodall’s theories on domestic violence and which was criticized as “dangerous” by domestic violence charity, For Our Daughters:
“Many women’s organisations are concerned about the direction in which this paper is seeking to drive policy.”
On 25 January 2012 Baroness Howarth of Breckland voiced her misgivings about the gateway conversation that mothers would be obliged to have before they could apply to the statutory system replacing the Child Support Agency:
“I am still trying to work out how the system will proceed. There will be a telephone call with a human being. I do not know whether the human being will have any training or understanding of the issues; where they will come from; or what their background will be.
These situations are extraordinarily complex. In the children and family court service, our staff make this kind of assessment when cases come through to ensure that there are no protection issues. They are our most experienced staff; not the least experienced or the clerical staff. Who will do that in future? After the phone call, who will make a decision? What sort of assessment will be made, in cases of violent marital dispute and child protection, to determine whether someone has to pay? I have not gone into all the issues that were eloquently put forward by other noble Lords around the House about the justice of the matter. Women who may have been abandoned after horrific incidents with men will find themselves being held responsible. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said, this will not affect everybody but only that group. How will we identify them and who will make the assessment?”
If Baroness Howarth had known that the Child Maintenance Options staff manning the helpline were trained by fathers’ rights extremists, utterly hostile to the Child Support Agency and to the whole concept of child maintenance obligations, and convinced that most allegations of domestic violence are bogus, she would have been even more worried.
In November 2016 the single parent charity Gingerbread written submission to the Work and Pensions Committee
Throughout the implementation of the child maintenance reforms, the Government assured Parliament and stakeholders that the new statutory service would be sensitive to the needs of domestic violence victims. Of course, it was all just hot air, for the purpose of getting the legislation passed into statute.
On 28 November 2011, Lord De Mauley promised Peers:
“I reiterate that, as outlined in the Green Paper, Strengthening Families, Promoting Parental Responsibility: the Future of Child Maintenance, we are committed to exempting victims of domestic violence from the application charge. I reiterate that we will honour this commitment. Victims of domestic violence will not have to pay an application charge and they will be fast tracked through the gateway. We accept that applicants who have been victims of domestic violence cannot be expected to make family-based arrangements and so should be exempt from the application charge. However, we do not think it is unreasonable that they should make a contribution, as I have just said, to the cost of the statutory service once they are in it.
To assist them wherever possible to move into maintenance direct and so avoid collection charges and recognising that applicants in these circumstances will not want to have direct dealings with their ex-partner, we are developing a payment support service so that payment can be made outside the collection service without the parent with care having to divulge any personal details to the non-resident parent.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, asked about the definition of domestic violence. The commission has been working with the Home Office, which has the lead on domestic violence across government. In 2004, the Home Office replaced the 14 previous definitions of domestic violence used across government with a single cross-government definition. We will, of course, be using that definition.
We are still considering how the parent with care can prove that they have been a victim of domestic violence, but I can assure noble Lords that what is designed will not be onerous or burdensome.”
Lord De Mauley’s promise that the Child Maintenance Service would use the Home Office’s definition of domestic violence was entirely bogus. Child Maintenance Options staff were trained by a couple who virulently oppose the Home Office’s definition of domestic violence.
On 7 December 2016 Caroline Nokes, Minister for child maintenance, gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee. Conservative MP Luke Hall said the Committee had received evidence from mothers that “family-based arrangements can be used as a form of psychological control, as a form of bullying in some respects” and asked what she was doing to monitor that. Out of her depth, eyes rolling heavenwards for inspiration and grasping at platitudes, she replied:
“That is a really important point because we are conscious that wherever there is conflict and where there are issues of both money flowing—or perhaps not flowing—and contact with children, then there are allegations, probably entirely understandably, that one partner or the other is using a family-based arrangement to exert control. Now, it is perfectly possible in those circumstances for a family to then come within the Child Maintenance Service and to have direct pay set up that does not require contact between either party. The CMS, in effect, acts as a go-between to pass bank details so that the parent with care does not have to directly contact the non-resident parent. What is important and what we would like to see is parents able to manage separation better and get beyond that, but let’s be realistic. Some cannot and that is for a variety of reasons. CMS can step in at that point and act as the conduit, the go-between, to make sure that money flows to support the children.”
The following extracts from Karen Woodall’s blog (unless otherwise specified) give a flavour of the couple’s ideology.
The comment below from Karen Woodall demonstrates that a principal focus of the training carried out by the Centre for Separated Families, for which the Woodalls were paid £444,000, was to teach early years workers to disregard mainstream, official guidance on domestic violence.
“I know that one Kat – recent training delivery from CSF to early years sector – stats on DV are shown and someone says ‘oh I would have to be challenging that’…on discussion it emerged that the consensus in the room is that male violence against women = ‘real’ domestic violence female violence against men = self defence….. we then have to take people on another journey of self awareness to get them to a place where they can shed the brainwashing of the past decades on what domestic violence actually is and who suffers it. Its a HUGE problem and because DV is common in family separation we have to tackle it.”
“Working as I do, on a daily basis, with mums and dads who are separating, I know that each are capable of unleashing the very worst of human behaviour on each other. Violence at the end of a relationship is not uncommon and is perpetrated by both men and women, many of whom lose their minds as well as their self control as they struggle to separate emotionally as well as physically. False allegations of violence are common too, on both sides of the fence and so the task of working with families in these situations is delicate, requiring deep levels of understanding and sophisticated routes to differentiation and diagnosis.
Family separation and domestic violence are issues which go hand in hand and in the work that I do, varying degrees of violence, emotional, mental and physical are often part and parcel of the conflicted landscape that a family inhabits. Sometimes the violence is coercive, that is it is about power and control over someone else, over their choices, their life and their very sense of self. This coercive control is the kind of violence which terrorises someone into being unable to leave a relationship for fear of retribution and it is often the kind of violence that is ongoing after a relationship ends.
Much of the violence that is experienced at the end of a relationship however, is what is called by researchers Kelly and Johnson separation instigated violence. Further, there is a developing body of research that demonstrates that intimate partner violence is not just one type of violence but can be differentiated into four different and distinct patterns of violence. These four patterns are Coercive and controlling, Violent Resistance, Situational Couple Violence and Separation Instigated Violence.
Expressing that view at the domestic violence event however was a bit like telling flat earth people that the world is round. Gasps of disbelief greeted the idea that violence could be something that both people engaged in and the idea that a woman who has been in a violent situation with a man could actually recover and even, dare I say it, go on to co-parent with him after separation was horrifying to many. In this world, where all women are victims, the notion of co-parenting appears to be both distasteful and unbelievable and any women collaborating after violence is only doing so because she is afraid not to. This world that these women inhabit is like none that I have ever encountered other than in a Mary Daly treatise. All men and therefore fathers are risky and all women who are separated are in need of educating and defending. It is a terrifyingly politically correct world which has silenced debate for too long and which has, in my view, ended too many children’s relationships with their fathers.”
“Working as I do, through the passage of family separation with many families over twenty years, I witness the ways in which stereotyped thinking, often supported by the domestic violence ‘industry’ training that goes on around the country, ruins relationships between fathers and their children."
“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.”
“I have been demonstrating the difference that equality and respect based work with separated families makes since1998. Alongside colleagues, I have written about it, delivered it, evaluated it and even shown the Minister for Child Maintenance herself the way it works. We have embedded the difference in the Child Maintenance Options service (not that you would find it there these days) and we have recently trained over four thousand early years workers to do it. We have worked with families themselves, with Local Authorities and even trained an Australian Relationship Centre to use our programmes.”
On 27 July 2013 she commented on The Good Men Project blog:
“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 professional attacks on him, she backed down but my guess is it wont 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 Westminster 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.”
On 28 July 2013, as the relationship with the Department for Work and Pensions was rapidly unravelling, she wrote of her plans about:
“scaling up what we can do in the community ourselves, away from the sticky fingers of the state and outside of the orthodoxy of the stranglehold of feminist analysis of family separation.”
“What is always astonishing to me is that when these services are provided by people who are not indoctrinated with the poison of the patriarchal analysis (aka women’s rights), mothers as well as fathers are engaged in almost equal numbers. Which of course enable arrangements between parents to be made, not arrangements to be imposed by one upon the other. This is far away from the ‘very worrying practice‘ which is what one feminist researcher accused us of in a text message this week ( I kid you not, this woman is someone who supposedly researches fatherhood from a feminist perspective, who took exception to my husband raising the issue of female violence in a forum designed to look at fatherlessness). Because it does not use the patriarchal model of gender based violence, but recognises that men and women, at the point of separation, get into fights as they struggle to become psychologically as well as physically separated. Far from worrying, this kind of analysis recognises that both parents are vulnerable and both parents are capable of hurting each other, sometimes badly.”
“The people I have worked with in government are but pale shadows compared to the vibrancy and skill of those who care and want to help others. It was a ridiculous notion really, to think that staff from the Child Maintenance Commission could implement such services, I fell for it because we originally trained all of the people who were delivering it, what I didn’t factor in was the way in which the state interferes with the psychology of its workers, ensuring that each and everyone one of them readily forgets anything that goes against the indoctrination of the state and that working for the state appears to effectively eradicate not only free will but conscience too! A lesson well learned for me and timely too, I am happier in the community and more effective, being with people who understand and really care was always the place I wanted to be. Now I just have to work out how to upscale what we do in ways that do not allow the state to interfere which means working out how to find the funding and how to deliver around the back of the government so that no-one has to interact with it, they can just do it for themselves.”
“We will be heading to Wales in the Autumn and we will do what we can, I am aware of the Welsh nightmare that is the VAWAG* proposals and how they will impact on men.”
On 2 August 2013 the website Rights of Man, in a blog about How the feminist narrative template discriminates against men and boys, reported:
“Continuing on the domestic abuse front, a Facebook message from Karen Woodall (Centre for Separated Families) stated "here's one for all of you interested in domestic violence.... Nick is training today for the DWP, he is not allowed to talk about violence against men or violence in separating couples in any way other than that which is ratified by the Coalition Government Policy on VAWAG by order of the HOME OFFICE - he also has two observers sitting in on the training to make sure he does not transgress this order (that's because they are nervous about my blog and my refusal to do as they ordered me to). This is what your taxes pay for people...the state is most definitely controlling you and if you separate it will be Women's Aid and Refuge who rule your world.”
“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. It’s 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.”
“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. In truth I am none of those things, I never was and I never will be.”
On 13 February 2014 she wrote of One Billion Rising, a global movement to end violence against women:
“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.”
On 20 March 2014 she wrote a blog post entitled “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.”
“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.”
“I know that violence in the home is not what it has become in terms of the images that feed the industry which has manufactured it and I know that in this country at least, there is a very big problem with the use of allegations of violence to control outcomes in the family courts. One of the big problems with allegations of violence is that DV is a gendered crime, it is considered to be something that men do to women and it is most often thought about within a feminist analysis of patriarchal power which is held by men by virtue of their birth. In the UK, we still lag far behind countries such as the States, where a more sophisticated analysis of violence in the home is emerging… But the family courts in this country do not differentiate as yet between those types of violence, which lets women off the hook in terms of admitting or recognising their own inherent tendency to violence and which demonises all men and leads them to their doom.”
“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 upholding 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… 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…"
“If one listens to the likes of Women’s Aid, an unashamedly political organisation, which analyses all family separation through a political lens of patriarchal power and control, one is lead to believe that this all of this nation’s families are headed by monsterous men who beat, shame and control, passive and terrified women and their children. And that after separation, all fathers are dangerous and should be muzzled, castrated or otherwise disposed of. This absolutism is, in itself, terrifying, leading everyone to look in the same direction, again like rabbits in headlights, too terrified to know what to do next without the sisterhood telling us what is permissable. Parental alienation in this world is quite simply the imaginings of men who continue to seek to control women. In other words, it doesn’t exist.”
On 5 June 2014 in a post entitled “Domestic Violence: Enough Is Enough”, she wrote:
“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.”
“It is time to break away from the binary paradigm in which we consider violence and rebuild a way of working with the family which offers support for change, not simply the extermination and removal of one person in order to resolve the problem.”
8 July 2014:
“Dear Yvette,
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.
You write of the hurling of insults and the way in which teachers are concerned for the well being of girls and you use as your evidence this –
According to the Children’s Commissioner there is clear evidence that violence in young relationships is growing. The British Crime Survey shows girls aged between 16-19, are most at risk of domestic violence – over 10 per cent had been experienced violence or abuse in a relationship.
Examining the evidence that you seek to rely on to convince us of this, however, it is clear that far from violence against girls being the only issue that we should be concerned about, violence in the world at large, in the family, in the home and at school, is almost equally likely to affect boys as well as girls, the real fact we should be worried about. In fact men are more likely than women to experience violence per se and almost as likely to experience domestic violence. Don’t believe me? Here is the evidence from the source you quote, the British Crime Survey.
The CSEW showed that young men were most likely to be the victims of violence. The profile of victims of violent and sexual violence varied according to the type of offence. In 2011/12, as in previous years, more than two-thirds of homicide victims (68%) were male. In contrast, women Focus on: Violent Crime and Sexual Offences, 2011/12 | 07 February 2013 Office for National Statistics | 2 were more likely to be a victim of domestic abuse. Some 7% of women and 5% of men were estimated to have experienced domestic abuse in the last year, equivalent to an estimated 1.2 million female and 800,000 male victims.
Whilst you can of course point to the 2% difference in the rate of experience of domestic violence as being evidence that more women than men suffer, it seems to me to be utterly disengenous to simply dismiss 800,000 incidents of domestic violence against men as being either of no consequence or no proof that violence is something that is suffered by men AND women and enacted by men AND women. And yet in your speech this week you consistently and deliberately maintained the illusion that only women and girls suffer violence and only men and boys are to blame.
It is simply untrue. Violence, in the home and in the world around is not a gender issue. Though it is the fervent goal of feminism to convince us that it is.
Our failure to understand this and our belief in what feminists tell us, leads us to witness the creeping emasculation of our boys which, if you have your way, will enter their consciousness in the early days of their education, in the form of your proposal to turn boys into ‘confident feminists.’
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.’ In your piece you quote the organisations who you feel should be supported by your party and the way in which these are leading the way to freedom for women and girls. You end your list of these with the movement 1 billion rising, the brain child of Eve Ensler, the author of the Vagina Monologues and the infamous scribe of the scene in which a young girl of 13 is raped by an older woman, ended with the words ‘if that was rape, it was a good rape.‘ And you proclaim that these are the inspiration behind your proposals that boys are educated out of their inherent masculinity.’ I could not feel more sickened.
In my view, 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. Making boys into girls starts early in their childhood these days, with primary education being more likely to be taught by women and good behaviour in children being seen as that which is displayed by girls, whilst dysfunctional behaviour is more likely to be viewed in boys. The notion that boys and girls are different but equal in their value, in their learning capacity, in their behaviour and in their general demeanor appears to have simply been erased by the idea that, in the words of Glen Poole from Equality4Men, girls HAVE problems and boys ARE problems. 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.
But the rights and needs of children are NOT indivisible from those of their mothers. The rights of boys are equal to those of girls and it is not for feminists to determine what makes a ‘good boy’ or a ‘good girl’ either for that matter. Feminism is not synonymous with equality, much as the feminists would have us believe that it is so and it does not and cannot solve the problems of the world in which we are raising our children and grandchildren.
A world in which the following is true (Taken from the Equality4Men website)
Men and boys in 99% of countries are more likely to kill themselves than women and girls
Men and boys account for 4 out of 5 violent deaths in the world ever year
Girls in nearly 100 of the world’s leading economies are more likely to get a better education and go to university than boys
Fathers all over the globe are less involved in raising their children than mothers for all sorts of personal, cultural and political reasons
which is just a snapshot of the reality that we face in terms of helping boys to grow to be healthy and happy people. How does your proposal, to turn boys into ‘confident feminists’ offer us any kind of road map for the health and wellbeing of boys as well as girls? Put simply it doesn’t. What it does is lie to the electorate about the reality facing our children and prey upon the anxieties whipped up by half hysterical women who believe that dancing around the world proclaiming their oppression is somehow about equality. Pity our boys, because what is being done to them prevents their ability to believe in their own inherent sense of self, prevents their ability to trust themselves and others in the world around them and inculcates shame at the earliest age about what it means to be not a girl.
The facts speak for themselves. Your closing words speak only for you and those like you –
For years we have talked about the importance of empowering our daughters, giving them the confidence to challenge abuse and bringing them up as feminists. If we are going to achieve a real-step change in tackling violence against women, we need our sons growing up as confident feminists too.
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.
Karen Woodall
16 August 2014: “The Modern Day Ducking Stool: Domestic Abuse Programmes and Man Shaming”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
27 September 2014: 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.
A whole school approach, including comprehensive SRE teaching as part of PSHE, is needed to support young people and prevent abuse through:
Challenging notions of male sexual entitlement;
Preventing abusive attitudes and behaviours being reproduced and taking root;
Unpicking harmful stereotypes that place responsibility on girls to protect themselves from violence and abuse;
Addressing the gendered environment in which young people form attitudes and behaviours and navigate relationships;
And acknowledging the scale of violence against women and girls.
The rest of the document relies upon research which has been disproved in some areas, which is assertion in others and which is set in framework of feminist analysis of women and girls being victims of men and boys. 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.”
This post drew admiration from Mike Buchanan, of the anti-feminist political party, Justice 4 Men and Boys.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The core of this argument is – are women violent? The evidence I have posted, which is the largest study in the world of the evidence is – yes they are. This study shows us that violence in families is not gendered, it is not about patriarchy and it is not about bad men and innocent women. When we grasp that as a whole we will take one giant leap forward in our support of families and we will begin to tackle the problem of transgenerational harm done by violence in the family. And the family will become a stronger and safer place and the red herring of patriarchy, which has taken us down some blind alleyways over the past forty years will be exposed for what it is – a political construct which has no place whatsoever in family services.”
“In the living world people are not divided into good and bad people and men are not born inherently violent and women are not born angels. In the real world, ordinary people get into difficult places and sometimes they fight, sometimes quite violently. This does not automatically mean that the woman is going to be murdered and the man is going to go on and murder every other woman he can get his hands on. In the real world, mothers can be toxic people who inculcate false beliefs in the their children and then run off when the court decides that the child is being harmed and should live mostly with dad.”
“This work is, for me, akin to being a sherpa, guiding families across the roughest terrain and into better, safer places. Any practitioner not willing to carry parents across those spaces should not, in my view, be doing this work. This is about helping people in the most desperate moments of their lives, when they are facing allegations of abuse, loss of their loved ones and loss of hope and belief in life. It is not for anyone who is seeking glory, power or prestige. People often tell me they wish there were more of us at the Family Separation Clinic, I can tell you, so do I. The reason there are not more of us however is not because we particularly want to own this space, it is because doing this work is hard on the soul and the spirit and not many people can stand the pace.”
“Caring what happens to children who are alienated means utilising everything and anything to create liberation routes, it means being courageous enough to keep on keeping on even when the family court professionals are heckling and dismissive and even when governing bodies are labelling one’s practice as deficient (and other so called experts are trying to use that to ill effect). Caring about what happens to children is what keeps us going at the Clinic.”
”In the two decades or more since I began work in this arena, I have been attacked publicly and privately, I have been undermined, abused, shamed and stabbed in the back. I have been complained about, sanctioned, publicly discussed and called many names, not all of them nice. In a field which is often conflictual (and that is even amongst those who are supposedly working for the best interests of children), I have been there, done that and worn the T shirts.”
Nick Woodall wrote a guest blog on Karen Woodall’s website, arguing that the United Nations General Assembly Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993 was wrong, and that women are more violent than men.
Vincent McGovern of Families Need Fathers commented:
“From my experiences both personal as a former house husband and voluntary work with Families Need Fathers and as a committee member of Central and North London Branches and Chair since 2011 of both, I find that Domestic Violence is the prime driver in most cases of parental alienation. By DV I mean the use of DV agencies as a weapon of choice rather than as a shield which they portray themselves as and receive so much funding for.
The hi-jacking of Local Authorities DV approach from the feminist patriarchal mindset is the most damaging element against children that I can think of. Effectively an alienating parent especially if female has unlimited power because she has all the institutions of the State to automatically assist. I make this comment based on 5 Ombudsman Investigations including 3 Parliamentary and Health Service with findings all in my favour. And saddest factor of all is that so many local authorities DV agencies in constitution and practice automatically discriminate in service provision based on gender, refusing men. This means children are denied the protection of half their parents because of this crude child endangering gender discrimination.”
Nick Woodall replied: “Hello Vincent. What you have experienced shows only too clearly how a dogmatic adherence to a socio-political approach to family violence and the handing over of public services to pressure groups leads to poor outcomes for families.”
“Where it is clear that the understanding of alienation by a social worker is severely limited AND they are being manipulated by unwell parents, the lack of social worker self awareness becomes starkly apparent.”
Karen and Nick Woodall have close links with international men’s rights activists. Karen Woodall is featured as a permanent link on the Justice for Men and Boys website, run by Mike Buchanan and hosted by A Voice for Men, owned by the virulently misogynistic Paul Elam.
Mike Buchanan believes that most rape allegations are false, that domestic violence kills more men than women, and posts Lying Feminists of the Month, Toxic Feminists of the Month, Gormless Feminists of the Month, and Whiny Feminists of the Month.
A Voice for Men is designated as a male supremacy hate group by the US civil rights organization, Southern Poverty Law Center.
Choice articles include “How to get your man to punch you in the face” and a piece about the family courts:
“The day I see one of these absolutely incredulous excuses for a judge dragged out of his courtroom into the street, beaten mercilessly, doused with gasoline and set afire by a father who just won’t take another moment of injustice, I will be the first to put on the pages of this website that what happened was a minor tragedy that pales by far in comparison to the systematic brutality and thuggery inflicted daily on American fathers by those courts and their police henchmen.”
According to Paul Elam, AVFM’s founder: “Valentines Day, for far too many men, is actually Lighten Up and Don’t be such an Insufferable Bitch Day, but only if you get the present right.” And he tells the cautionary tale of men who should have stuck with prostitutes over materialistic wives and girlfriends: “they went fishing with stink bait and caught bottom dwellers. And then they ended up silently stewing over it.”
In 2011 Paul Elam and a colleague created register-her.com, a website for men to register the names and addresses of “false” accusers of rape and domestic violence, explaining that:
“I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.”
In 2015 Paul Elam uploaded this video on youtube of himself, Dean Esmay, and a group of men’s rights activists drunkenly and obscenely insulting feminist journalists Jessica Valenti and Amanda Marcotte.