We are masters of your own destiny. l cannot change you, but l can change myself. l am not a slave of perception nor social expectation. l will not yield to that which l deplore, nor will l rationalise ‘copping out’ because the world ‘makes’ me. l can’t go through life whipping myself.

Abdicate responsibility for your thoughts, emotions, actions and choices in life and you have sold your soul.

Politics and its attendent ideology strikes me as a land inhabited by those who have sold out.

Sorry Hugo, but some of us just aren’t buying. Let alone window shopping.

Interesting how it’s always second wives.

I note with some irony that you condemn your sister for being an ‘ultra feminist’ and stereotype all feminists based on her experience, yet you insist that your own political views are a broad rainbow spectrum of men and women working together.

And interesting, again, that you don’t give a moment to wondering what turned your sister into a fire-breathing dragon. Do you really think she was stupid and brainwashed by unnamed professors? Most kids who try out extreme views do so IN college, then settle down afterward. Did you ask your sister what changed her mind?

Well, LoraR, I give you credit and support for doing the right thing and sticking up for the male gender when you deem it appropriate, and on not deciding to take out misogynist transgressions committed in 1898 on your sons.

The first thing I noticed was that DSS inflated their own figures 7 percentage points for both closing years ‘02 and ‘03 without justification. In 2002 they claimed that their supported rate was 55% when it was only 48% and in 2003 they claimed it was 56% when the actual percentage was 49%. Obviously no one in the MGAO bothered to check the mathematical skills of the person writing the report.

You will notice the number total 51A reports filed;

’02: 67,366
’03: 68,404
‘04(Q3) 18,466
‘04(Q4) 18,492

Now look at the actual supported investigation rates;

’02: 48%
’03: 49%
‘04(Q3): 47%
‘04(Q4): 50%

It’s almost uncanny that so far all the numbers are nearly identical isn’t it?

However, the part of the reports that are missing is the actual rate of substantiated cases of child maltreatment compared to actual 51A investigations:

’02: 31%
’03: 32%
‘04Q3: 30%
‘04Q4: 32%

While Q4 contains incomplete data with 1,361 cases pending; If one were to at use the law of averages and include a +/- 3 % margin of error then Q4 actual support rate would once again be only 31%.

Go figure, a bureaucracy whose goal is the well being of “children” refers to “children” in their own reports not as children or families but as consumers. My charge is that human beings are often subjected to the most intrusive arm of the state frequently without just cause, and in many cases, without due process. (It all depends on how much money they have to expend on lawyers or the amount of lawyers willing to work pro bono). Often times these actions are based on the frivolous accusations of under trained, over worked and some times bigoted, and biased DSS employees that are working under a quota system.

I never claimed that it was all “about kids being taken from women to force them to divorce their husbands in order to get them back in the absence of any abuse or neglect on the husbands part”. I merely alluded to a case of documented abuse and used DSS’s own numbers to show that it is quite possible that abuse of this kind is possible. What I found in the process disturbed me.

In two and a half years there have been 172,208 DSS 51A complaints and investigations out of which only 54,474 were supported by any evidence what so ever; that’s only 31.5%. Are you trying to tell me that out of the 68.5% of unsupported investigations there is no chance that some mishandling could or has occurred?

Doesn’t it seem strange that overworked DFCS workers would invent frivolous cases so they could…what…be more overworked? Something there just doesn’t seem logical. I am much more willing to believe that DFCS errors result from underzealousness (not removing children who ARE being mistreated) as burnout and apathy are two of the most common symptoms of being overworked. So I don’t think the argument (about kids being taken from women to force them to divorce their husbands in order to get them back in the absence of any abuse or neglect on the husbands part) rings true.

Myself — I did mounds of research, visited four family counselors and four lawyers along with corresponding with a friend who is a domestic relations lawyer. After covering all the bases I received a virtually consistent message: you’re better off staying because you don’t stand a chance.

In fact, I was told by the lawyer friend that the best thing I could hope for was that she’d finally go far enough to cause fairly dramatic damage to my person that could be shown in court. Until then, the best thing I could do was to stay to protect my daughter.

So I don’t really see where all you guys are coming from. Move you and your kids and your crazy lazy violent wives on down here, then get a divorce, and you’ll come out okay, and can devote your energies to more enjoyable pursuits than this argument.

My sister and I grew up in the same home with a mother who interfered with our relationship with our father, it wasn’t until later in life that I realized her meddling was a result of her own spite and resentment at her own failures as a mother and had nothing to do with anything my father had ever done or didn’t do to or for her.

My sister went on to college an innocent unselfish young woman, she came out a rhetoric spewing self-aggrandizing shrew that would make any Nazi Youth member envious. While I too went on to college and career and eventually marriage and family I could hardly accept her notion that I deserved special treatment due to some perceived injustice to my great great grand mother.

While I welcomed the freedom to openly compete with boys and men that the early days of the feminist movement provided, my sister advocated that men and boys needed to be marginalized to guarantee her victory. If I lost I accepted my disappointment and allowed myself to establish a sense of character that I find missing in most of today’s wymen.

To her, I have sold out to the patriarchal conspiracy because I don’t believe that I should disenfranchise my son to benefit my daughters. She can hardly believe my inclusion, or the many other women who have joined with the men in the men’s rights movement; the sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters and second wives who have witnessed first hand the devastating effects of feminists abuse of power and reject it.

One other thing that made me finally post here was a statement pertaining to the fact that after most men have children they become more conservative; to which I would have to respond, so do most women. Once they realize the danger posed by stark liberal ideals and the effect on their children a great many of us cast off our idealistic naiveté to support policies that better the world for our children regardless of their sex rather than continue to parrot utopian rants of our college professors.

As Hugo has said, a good first step would be for them to acknowledge the gender-based privilege, and then be willing to relinquish it. As Ampersand says, the privilege of being blind to ones own privilege is real. Forums (fora?) such as this blog are useful for raising awareness to some extent, though the blind rage I have seen is probably not penetrable by truth, kindness, civility, or anything else. Fortunately, not everyone is like that.

Jan Brown is what we call “good people”. She’s been instrumental with the Domestic Abuse Helpline For Men up in Maine. I’m sure Karen is the same.

“It’s my impression that people like Hugo don’t really seem to understand what it’s like out there for guys like us. I don’t for one second want to control any women, nor do I wish to take away any of the resources they have for domestic abuse. It’s not so much that there’s a lack of services for a man like myself, the real problem is how it’s made the problems of guys like me totally invisible.”

It seems like no matter how many times you say “I don’t want to have control over women,” some people here will still make the smear that you do.

“I told him also about the shiner and a lot of other things. He said, “Now Jen you realize that’s not OK.”"

Hey, you’re lucky you even got THAT out of him…

“Then there was Jane. Jane’s the one that said she was a good parent even though she deliberately placed her own child in harm’s way. She also threatend to run me down with the car in a parking lot. I was walking away and she came screeching up behind me. When she cam to a stop, the bumper was about four inches from the backs of my legs. Jane said she’s been having inappropriate behavior with cars.”

“Inappropriate behavior with cars” means playing the radio too loud.

“By the time we’d started seeing Jane, I finally realized that I needed to take responsibility because no one was going to do it for me. Jane was shocked when I suggested that if the gender roles were reversed, she would have given much different advice.”

I would have loved to have heard her response. These people need to understand that their monopoly is coming to an end.