The power of many

It was 2014 when I first heard from Andrew, a young Queensland dad, who was being denied contact with his two young girls. From then on, he wrote regularly updating me on his eight-year Family Court marathon, where he lost round after round, despite his wife being declared an unfit mother after a court-ordered psychiatric assessment. She very effectively used false violence accusations to get away with moving with the children interstate and endlessly dragging out the legal proceedings.

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

I also recently learned that last month another of my correspondents took his life. He first wrote to me a few years ago after being shocked by his treatment at an ACT police station when he tried to report an assault by his partner on him and his young daughter. He was told by police, “You don’t really want to report it. Go home and sort it out.” When he tried to talk to his wife, she left with his daughter and took out a violence order against him. “You cannot believe the despair that fathers of this country are in,” he said.

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

Despite our despair at the overwhelming stormy ocean, we can’t afford to give up. I am more convinced than ever that we need to give men reason to believe that one day things will change. While it’s true there’s no hope of swiftly bringing down the mighty feminist edifice currently making life intolerable for so many men, I have to believe that by exposing the injustice eventually we will win over the huge majority of men and women who care about fair treatment of men and boys.

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

This year we saw the first sign of a concerted international fightback against the feminist domestic violence industry. DAVIA (Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance is a new coalition of organisations promoting domestic violence and abuse policies that are science-based, family-affirming, and sex-inclusive. Launched late 2021, this has expanded from a handful of participant groups to 70 organizations from 24 countries coordinating campaigns to challenge the anti-male bile around domestic violence being promoted by international bodies across the world.

The United Nations is a classic example. This year DAVIA actually managed to block passage of two typically anti-male UN resolutions, after issuing a press release which exposed their crazy thinking. Like the claim that “women are 14 times more likely to die in a climate catastrophe than men,” – a nonsense statistic included in a UN resolution allegedly exploring “the nexus between the climate crisis, environmental degradation and related displacement, and violence against women and girls.” Days after the DAVIA issued their world-wide press release highlighting what the UN was up to, the resolution was removed from the agenda.

No big deal? Arguably there’s little cause for concern about the UN’s posturing. As UK journalist James Delingpole writes, “The UN is a terrible organisation: a bloated talking shop for technocrats, bureaucrats, kleptocrats, third-world beggars, globalists, socialists and other overindulged, grasping cry-bullies, meddlers, and no-hopers.”

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

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

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

A global Twitter campaign was launched to promote the hashtag, #StopViolenceOnMen with over 36,000 tweets sent out over a four-day period. In India, the #StopViolenceOnMen hashtag trended, ranking in ninth place among all hashtags. Look at this event in All Bengal Men’s Forum, one of the most active Indian groups.

Then there were the women in Argentina who invaded the offices of the Minister for Women protesting for Falsely Accused Day on September 9, another event coordinated internationally by DAVIA. I loved the feisty language – here translated from Spanish - in their letter to the Minister: “Even so, you, Madam Minister, together with your cohort of ideologues, officials and communicators, will surely insist on denying that false complaints exist, that thousands of men are victims of them, and that the infamous judicial industry that feeds this order, is causing unparalleled harm to the rule of law.”

Making this all happen is Ed Bartlett who has been working for many years promoting fair treatment for men.  He’s the one who started the ball rolling to put together an international coalition to tell the truth about female violence.  

Under Ed’s guidance, DAVIA is currrently launching an ambitious project in January to block the expansion of the Istanbul Convention (IC) in Europe, a treaty ostensibly intended to combat violence against women in Europe. You may remember the fuss two years ago when the Hungarian Parliament rejected the ratification of this dreadful treaty declaring that the measure promoted “destructive gender ideologies.”

Too right. The IC treaty reeks of feminist ideology, promoting the usual tired dogma about domestic violence being caused by power imbalances that favour men over women. As Stephen Baskerville explains “The Convention has nothing to do with violent crime.  It is a political innovation that promotes radical political ideology.  Under the guise of protecting crime victims, it institutionalizes sexual ideology and transfers dangerous powers to activists engaged in gender warfare against the family, religious freedom, men, and civil liberties.”

Now it looks like the Convention is in trouble. Nine years after the IC came into force in 2014, Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia have not ratified the treaty, Turkey withdrew in 2021, and Poland has announced its plan to withdraw. The photograph at the top of this blog is from a rally against IC in Croatia.

Ed Bartlett has firm plans to ensure this is only the beginning. His email this morning announced DAVIA is in communication with the groups in Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries that led the fight to block the Istanbul Convention in their countries. He’s also just learned that, in Israel, the powerful Likud Party has agreed to not join the IC.  

Not bad, eh? Here’s DAVIA’s latest summary of everything that is wrong with the Istanbul Convention.  And if your organization would like to join forces with DAVIA, you can get more information here: davia@endtodv.org.

Here you are – a little inspiration to help everybody retain hope. If we pull together, there’s much we can do to ensure the New Year brings better times for men.