It was a long time coming, but our society finally realized the evil of stereotyping categories of people. Canadian attitudes toward such groups as natives and orientals and blacks in, say, the 1930's have been very much altered, even if not yet completely. And it is not just a matter of such views being offensive; attitudes directly affect actions. When it was finally realized that the injustices against such groups could not hope to be ended until the stereotyping attitudes were eliminated, Canada was on the way to healing its racism.

Indeed, in some quarters the reaction has gone too far in the opposite direction, so that even unfounded and trivial claims of negative portrayals are often made, even with punishments. Where there has been a history of such stereotyping, one should indeed steer very short of borderlines. But reverse injustice is still injustice. For the record, then: a movie depicting Mafia dons as Italian (and as men) is not stereotyping but just telling the facts. But an entire movie milieu in which a disproportionate number of all the evildoers were Italian would be serious stereotyping.

Along the way to grasping the evil effects of stereotyping were some consciousness-raising incidents, such as the Donald Marshall inquiry. The horror of having all the powers of the state, over an extended period of time, used against a helpless innocent person--and for this to happen for no reason but blind racial preconceptions--has to rank among the greatest crimes in this society.

In regard to one major category of persons, however, that society has not grasped the evil of such prejudicial ideas. Exactly the contrary is true, in fact. Over the past twenty years or so, traditional stereotypes against men have not only been retained; they have been grossly amplified and augmented with new ones. At a time when even the most dubious claim of a negative portrayal becomes headline news if directed against certain "designated groups", vicious and blatant portrayals of men as a group have been raising almost no news media objections. To the contrary, certain media entities have themselves actively promoted vicious anti-male stereotyping for years. And hand-in-hand with the wave of negative portrayals has gone the discrimination which inevitably accompanies widespread negative portrayals.

The reasons this has been allowed to happen are manifold, a subject for a very long treatise. One of them is the same reason as that once used to condone anti-Jewish sentiment: "After all, they're rich and powerful, disproportionately controlling the centers of influence in society. So hurting some of them for a change is just a nice turnabout." (For extended discussion of the evil of this kind of reasoning, see our article "The Amy Biehl Violation.") Other reasons for condoning anti-male stereotypes and discrimination range from the perverted form of chivalry some powerful males have always practiced against other males, to the tendency of societies to react against one extreme (here, the traditional discrimination against women when it was finally realized) by swinging to another extreme. And then there is the tendency for revolutionary movements to be taken over by extremists, from the French revolution to the Russian revolution to the feminist revolution.

The most massively promoted anti-male stereotype today is this one: that within couples, only men are violent and only women vulnerable to violence. Sometimes the portrayal is even extended to present men as the only ones violent to children. Now, it is a statistical fact that, on average, women are more vulnerable to physical assault, and hence suffer more physical harm from such assaults; the stereotyping consists in turning that statistical difference into a black-and-white total, or near-total, difference.

At the same time, the available evidence is very much against the claim that men physically assault their partners more often than women do. Or that men are more willing than women are to harm their partners, rather than just more able. (See various MERGE articles on this evidence.) And the statistics on serious harm would be much more equal if proxy violence were counted. Getting someone more strong or powerful to commit one's aggression is an equalizer for the physically weaker; some aspects of this crucial matter are discussed below.

Among the many negative effects of this partner-violence stereotype is that abused men are discouraged from seeking help, and social service providers are deterred from giving it. Similarly, abusive women are deterred from seeking help for their problem, and others from offering it. To the contrary, in fact, women are encouraged to be abusive. After all, if he is the only bad one, she must be the abused one and anything she does is merely self-defence.

These matters are all serious, in general. But in our experience, some of the worst effects of the stereotyping involve its corrupting of the system of law and justice. The effects of racial prejudice on that system have long been realized: on the likelihood of being charged or arrested, on conviction rates, sentencing, and so on. One of the standard arguments against the death penalty is the way in which racial prejudices influence who will live and who will die. And there is ample evidence of a high level of anti-male discrimination in all these same areas of law enforcement. For one example, men are more likely to be charged and prosecuted, and punished to a greater degree, for violence against children.

The level of discrimination is huge in cases with a victim and an offender--or an alleged victim and offender--of each sex, as in partner violence. Under the same conditions, police are much less willing to charge women, judges and juries much less punitive, and so on. This holds up to and including the case of homicide--these days, numerous women are literally getting away with murder of their spouses. We will be presenting evidence of this kind on our website over time, both statistical and individual case histories. How could such things happen in the very system dedicated to promoting justice? Only because of the pervasive atmosphere of anti-male attitudes.

One of the most serious aspects of this discrimination, in fact, is precisely the use of the legal system as itself a weapon of abuse, through the making of false accusations to authorities. As stressed earlier, an assault can be committed by proxy. Though the two sexes are about equally likely to lie, it is overwhelmingly women who can get away with it. So thoroughgoing is the bias that, even after the judicial process has discovered her to have lied--and in the meantime the man has been put through hell--rarely is the woman prosecuted for it. And almost never is any meaningful punishment applied for the horror she has caused another human being.

The stereotype is a central reason for this. After all, if only men are inclined to do evil to their partners, then any time it is just his word against hers, she must be the one telling the truth. Indeed, the anti-male atmosphere not only encourages acceptance of false accusations by women; it encourages their being used in the first place. As the anti-male stereotypes became more virulent, so did the use of this weapon. Remember Jeanette Harris? She was a juror removed from the O. J. Simpson murder trial. Under initial questioning, she had told the court she had not been an abused spouse; then after the trial began it was discovered she had alleged violence on separating from her husband. Faced with dismissal for lying one time or the other, she then vehemently denied she had actually been subjected to violence by him. She explained, in effect, "Of course I said I was abused. I was getting a divorce!"

This brings us close to a horrific problem our organization deals with constantly: the use of false accusations in child custody and access cases in divorce. A few years back, the weapon of choice for expelling a father from his children's lives was the allegation that he had sexually molested them. So great was the horror of the system at even the possibility of such having happened, a man genuinely had to prove his innocence to escape that fate. Eventually, people caught on to what was happening and stopped believing so automatically--and in recent years the level of child sex-abuse accusations in divorce has plummeted dramatically. At the same time, the propaganda promoting the family-violence stereotype has pervaded the culture ever more thoroughly. And the levels of allegations of physical and psychological child abuse--and of all kinds of wife abuse--have risen even more dramatically.

After all, separation is a highly traumatic event, in general. Even normally decent people can become so full of rage as to do vicious things to estranged partners. (The anti-male literature on partner abuse mentions the heightened danger of abuse by him at this time--as it should--but not that of abuse by her. And it certainly never mentions proxy abuse through allegations by her.) But some people are not even normally decent. Even psychotic and borderline-personality women take advantage of the grossly biased system, which doesn' t bother to check for such debilities.

The basic tactic is to make false claims to get "temporary" custody of the children. This is done ex parte, without the father being notified so as to be there to defend himself against the claims. The rest of the tactic can include either abducting the children from the home (then going to a women's shelter, leaving the province, etc.) or getting a restraining order to have him removed from the home--and removed from the lives of the children. Also from all of his belongings, including evidence he could have used to defend against the charges.

The rest of the tactic is mostly delay, of the kind the court system can be so good at. Thus, by the time the father can finally clear himself, the children have been in the sole custody of the mother so long that most judges will say: "For the sake of the stability of the children, she must have permanent custody." Very often, moreover, the father never gets a decent chance to clear himself. Many victims of this process are working-class men who cannot afford the huge expense of the judicial system (and, having jobs, cannot get Legal Aid)--while their ex-partners can get large amounts of assistance from Legal Aid, women's shelters, Child Welfare and so on. Men with limited social skills are especially apt to be victimized by this system. And men from minority groups can be doubly victimized, when anti-male prejudice is compounded with other kinds.

The details of the anti-male, anti-father bias at every stage of this process are sickening, and will be exposed in future articles by us. The abuse of ex parte restraining orders and other ex parte orders is the greatest government-assisted human rights violation in Canada today. For one thing, absolutely no evidence of abuse is required for a woman or her lawyer to get a judge to issue one. In fact, these days she needn't even bother with accusations, just say "I am afraid of him". But it only begins there. Once such orders are issued, police often enforce them ruthlessly--and again, often without any decent evidence that they have been violated, just her accusation. (By way of contrast, it is extremely difficult to get even fair enforcement of court orders standardly issued to fathers, notably those supposedly requiring access between him and the children.) Desperate to see his kids and be sure they're OK, a father in this situation usually makes some slip and violates a condition of the order--perhaps even led deliberately into it by the vindictive ex-spouse. And then the police grab him and throw him into jail.

The toll all this takes on men is horrendous. And the toll on children. Let it never be forgotten: discrimination against men hurts others, not just the individual men. Our files contain numerous cases of fathers who were unable to protect their children from abusive mothers--unable because, to cover their own abusiveness, these women routinely make accusations against the father; and because the system says the woman's accusation must be believed. So he is removed from their lives and no one is left to protect them. Canadian children have even died this way.

As for men in these situations, we see them wind up sleeping in their cars and on the streets. We see them in various stages of rage and despair at the multiple injustices heaped upon them. Yes, as the anti-male literature says, some men turn to violence because they are pathologically possessive and cannot bear to lose control over the other person. Given the facts that 70% of divorces are desired by the woman and that 90% of the time she gets the children, pathological female possessiveness has much less occasion to express itself in violence.

But also, when ordinary people feel the world is against them and they have nothing left to lose, they sometimes do desperate things. And when a man beaten down by all the anti-male discrimination does so, the sexist feminists and sexist chivalrists say, "See--this proves we have to crack down on men even harder!" But these people may find some comfort in the following fact: the great majority of men in these situations turn their violence against themselves, not against others.

Our little group, with only our personal resources, does what it can to help these men--and a few women caught in the disadvantages designed for men. A distraught grandmother told us how she had to hold her son at night, to keep him from shaking in despair and perhaps harming himself. His partner had made allegations to get custody ex parte and then went into hiding, leaving him desperate about the welfare of his 3-year old child. In spite of massive evidence that her stories were grotesque lies meant to keep from losing custody to him, no one in the justice system cared to see it--until, after four months of such grief, we found him a decent lawyer and a decent judge. We see new cases like this every week.

If the people of Alberta knew one tenth of what is going on, they would demand reforms. But those who have promoted the anti-male stereotypes are not likely to tell these stories of injustice. Over time on our website at <www.powerabused.ab.ca>, we will be doing so.