Saturday, January 21, 2012

Appearance on Dad's on the Air Radio Show


I am honored that the folks at Dad's on the Air asked me to join them for their January 31st radio show.(Jan 30 for us Americans) Dad's on the Air is an Australian based radio program dedicated to discussing issues concerning fathers, men and boys. They have been doing the show for 10 years now, and have a very large international audience. The topic we are going to discuss is the 'Australian National Plan to Reduce Violence', so I am very excited to be able to get more information out there about this very serious topic.


Washington DC EST Time: Monday, 30 January 2012 - 06:30PM - 8:00PM 

Sydney, Australia Time: Tuesday, 31 January 2012 - 10:30AM - Noon

Host - Bill Kable

You can also listen over the internet, and all of the links to tune in to the show can be found here.

I hope you can all tune in, and spread the word!

Friday, January 20, 2012

I miss being a jack-ass


When I used to write about Buddhism, I took great pleasure in writing twisting words of trolling humor. It was OK to do that, not a lot of controversy in being a Buddhist. Men's Rights.....ugh, well, it's kind of like being that guy who comes to a funeral in daisy duke shorts and sandals. For instance, one blogger found an old post of mine, and linked to it, thinking it was hilarious. But then she came back and found out I was an MRA! HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, NOT AN MRA!!

Black Hypatia writes:
"http://www.thereformedbuddhist.com/2010/07/15-types-of-western-buddhists_16.html
If only I could write this well!
Actually, never mind. He’s still a good writer, I’ll give him that. But he’s big on Men’s Rights. Should have read the full homepage."
Well, I'm used to getting shunned I guess, but damn, I'm not a bad dude. I just want to see equal rights and equal protection for men. I don't have cooties! Meh, it could be worse.

On the bright side, my hate mail has increased, now with extra crazies. On downside, I wouldn't post their emails and make fun of them because I'm pretty sure they'd come find me, and proceed to saw my head off. And I like my head, it fits on my shoulders nicely. People take gender politics seriously! FOR REALZ, YO!(STOP! Don't kill me, I'm a Buddhist!)

In other news, I pissed off a lot of feminists in Australia apparently. I also found out what a 'Seppo' is.

So, the good news is I never run out of material for Men's Rights articles; the bad news is it's hard to troll people about homelessness and rape. Anyway, just an update, back to the grind....Burn Notice marathon on USA...FUCK YEA!

Here, you guys get Crowded House tonight:

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Socially Acceptable Bigotry: Men are Humans Too

As an egalitarian, a Buddhist and a Men's Rights Activist, I have often written on subjects concerning equal protection under the law. Sometimes my work has been critical of political conservatives and sometimes its been critical of political liberals. But not until I started writing about men’s rights, have I experienced such outright hostility and bigotry concerning equal protection for men and boys from all sides of the political spectrum. It’s as if it has become socially acceptable to ignore the suffering of men, to marginalize their basic civil rights and to show a downright spiteful attitude towards anything male.

Down in Australia, the government has come out with a new proposal to 'reduce violence against women and children', which not only ignores the significant portion of male victims of domestic violence, but also has called for the creation of laws that are enforceable towards only the male portion of the Australian population. It doesn’t matter to the National Council that over 1/3rd of domestic violence victims are men in Australia, (even more if you count abused boys under the age of 15) nor does it mention that women are the largest portion of child abuse perpetrators. What they are calling for (and I am not sensationalizing this) would literally remove due process and almost all assumption of innocence from men only, in matters of domestic violence and sexual assault. Furthermore, it calls for only women to receive preferred access to domestic violence services, as well as make it very easy to request protection orders against men. No such benefits would exist for men, indeed, their plan completely ignores battered men and battered children.

Tory Shepherd of the Australia opinion publication ‘The Punch’ wrote a piece calling me a Men's Rights Extremist after I wrote several articles questioning not only the basic statistics that the Australian National Council used, but the startling fact that people are so willing to remove the basic human rights of men. She went on to marginalize and ignore the voices of black men, Asian men and Hispanic men (and even women) in the movement, when she made the racist assumption that men’s rights was generally just “angry white men.” Shepherd then made some horribly ignorant and awfully offensive statements, generalizing what she really believes are the views of the men’s rights movement as a whole. I can’t tell you how much Tory’s bigotry bothers me, since I am part of a religious minority and I know damn well that voices from other "minorities" are a huge part of the Men’s Rights Movement. In fact, it was a black man, a person who goes by the handle Krazie316, whose video brought me to the MRM.

I also sent my article to Graham Young, the editor of the news and commentary site Opinion Online, to see if they were interested in letting their readers discuss this situation in Australia. Here is the article I submitted. Young was not very keen on my conclusion which was:
“No victim of domestic violence, whether they are a man or a woman, should be forgotten by society, simply because they are a man or a woman. Not one!”
He stated that he disagreed with my conclusions, and that I needed to be more specific. But in February 2011 Young wrote an article touting the equality and greatness of his Online Opinion site:
"On Line Opinion is an open platform for ideas. We have a larger audience than any other Australian opinion site outside the mainstream media because we offer diversity and quality, and because we treat our readers with respect, promoting equality as a core value."
Later on in his article, he laments that an unpopular opinion can be harmful to his revenue:
"That advertising income, which helped to sustain both us and a number of the blogs, has just fallen to close to zero, and all because I published this piece by Bill Muehlenberg opposing gay marriage."
Well, I am personally in favor of gay marriage, and many other things which are seen as left leaning, so why is he worried about an article on Civil Rights? Is it because any mention of men being discriminated against is seen in society as acceptable, therefore discussion is viewed as controversial? I understand his concern that publishing an article that challenges the corrupt status quo could cost him money, I really do. But at least he doesn't have to get called an extremist, day in and day out, for demanding equal protection under the law.

Young goes on to call my article, which is nothing more than statistics and the opinion that men should receive equal protection under the law and not be systematically discriminated against, a “rant against women.” To this, I was highly offended. (Hell, my wife was highly offended by Graham Young’s statement) This seems like the M.O. of most people who are against equal protection for men; ignore the facts, and accuse MRA’s of some very bad things. Not saying we don’t have a few nut jobs, we do, as every group has their share. However, what was more telling was his statement to me:
”The problem with your article is that this is an area where one has to tread carefully and you’re not treading carefully.”
Why is the truth about domestic violence data an area that anyone needs to tread carefully? Here in the United States, domestic violence is perpetrated equally between men and women, yet somehow, people don’t want to hear this information. Why is it that a National Council report on domestic violence, which was sponsored by the Australian government, able to use disingenuous statistics, ignore child abuse data and call for the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of battered men without so much as peep from almost any media outlets? Why is it that the civil rights of men are less important that the civil rights of women in our society?

Feel free to tell Graham Young and Tory Shepherd what you think about all this. Australian men and boys deserve to know what is about to happen to their civil rights.

Tory Shepherd and Graham Young, this doesn’t have one thing to do with bashing women, this is about viewing men as equals, and as worthy of equal protection under the law. This has to do with the basic premise of civilized society that laws should not be enforceable towards only one segment in society based on a characteristic such as their sex, race or religion. And trust me when I tell you I have firsthand experience of bigotry towards me because of my religion.

This, the MRM, has to do with those men who die each year by the thousands in dangerous jobs, by homicide, by suicide, and those homeless men who sleep on the street because our society has decreed that there is only room at the inn for women. It has to do with agreeing that fathers should have equal rights to their children and deserve fair treatment from the family court system. It has to do with the ugly fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of offices and programs geared toward women only in government, but NOT ONE for men. And this is despite the fact that men are doing very poorly in so many areas. This is not a call to remove the privileges women have; it is a demand for equal and fair treatment in the eyes of the law!

And these biased programs continue to grow, men keep falling further and further behind.
Here are the facts:

Unsheltered Homeless (2009) [1]
Women – 12,000 – 4%
Men – 240,000 –  96%

Life Expectancy (2006) [2]
Women – 80.8 Years
Men – 75.7 Years

Suicides (2008) [3]
Women – 7,585  - 19%
Men – 28,450  - 81%

Deaths by Homicide (2004) [4]
Women – 3,856 – 20%
Men – 14,717 – 80%

Deaths from Cancer (2004) [4]
Women – 269,819
Men – 290,069

Deaths from HIV/AIDS (2004) [4]
Women – 3,357
Men – 8,756

Federal Funds for Sex Specific Cancer Research [5]
Women – Breast Cancer – $631,000,000  - 40,000 Deaths
Men – Prostate Cancer – $300,000,000  - 33,000 Deaths

Deaths on the Job (2010) [6]
Women – 355  - 7%
Men – 4,192  - 93%

Injuries on the Job (2007) [10]
Women – 36%
Men – 64%

College Enrollment (2009) [7]
Women – 58%  - 11,658,000
Men – 42%  - 8,770,000

Affirmative Action Education Programs (Gender Specific) [8]
Women – Yes
Men – No

Unemployment Rates (2010) [9]
Women – 8.6% –  6,199,000
Men – 10.5%  - 8,626,000

Average Hours Worked Per Week (2010) [11]
Women – 36.1
Men – 40.2

High School Graduation Rates (2005) [12]
Women – 72%
Men – 65%

Incarceration Rates (2009) [13]
Women – 114,979  - 7%
Men – 1,502,490  - 93%

Child Custody Rates [14]
Women – 11,268,000 custodial mothers
Men – 2,907,000 custodial fathers

US Military Deaths From 1950 – 2010 [15][16][17]
Women – 139  - 0.01%
Men – 100,063  - 99.9%

Federally Funded Battered Shelters [18]
Women – 2,000+ $300,000,000 per year
Men – None – $0

Federally Funded Health Offices and Research 1970 – Present (not including cancer research) [19]
Women Only – Office, Projects and Programs 70+ – Funds – $100,000,000,000
Men Only – None – $0

Forced Selective Service
Women – No
Men – Yes

Drug and Alcohol Addiction and Abuse Rates (2010) [20]
Women – 5.8%
Men – 12.2%

Yet we are called the extremists, we are called “misogynists” or “neckbeards” for demanding equal protection under the law; we are the bad guys for requesting fair and honest treatment in the eyes of the government and in the eyes of society. It’s acceptable and OK to denigrate men, to chuckle at their genital mutilation and to laugh off the hardships of those men who sleep on the streets or who die every day on the job or through suicide. This has become the norm, standard operating procedure.

Segregation of legal protection in the Southern part of the United States during the early 20th century, through Jim Crow laws, was a horrible display of bigotry and dehumanization, and really showed just how awful some human beings could be towards other human beings. You would have thought we would have learned some lessons from that. All men are not powerful business men, CEO’s, millionaires or politicians. 99% of us struggle to survive every day just like everyone else, and the suffering of men is not somehow less painful than the suffering of women. Suffering doesn’t care about sex or race or religion; and unlike many people, it does not discriminate on such superficial things. When will it become acceptable for society to view men as human beings who suffer too?

That’s why this Men’s Rights Movement is a Civil Rights movement, and nothing less – and I do not plan to tread lightly.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

The Exclusion of Child Abuse Statistics in Australia's National Plan


Simply put, the most puzzling thing about the Australian 'Time for Action: The National Council's Plan for Australia to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, 2009-2021' is that the plan doesn't address the physical, emotional or sexual abuse of children. In fact, the actual incidence of various types of child abuse, and the profiles of the individuals abusing them have been conspicuously omitted from the volumes of information that justify the National Council's plan.

Understandably, many Australian men have expressed outrage that such a high profile government study would use the possessive pronoun "their," regarding women, as though fathers did not exist in their children's lives. But perhaps the government's failure to include men as caretakers of their own children can be better explained with further investigation into The Plan. Let's take a look at some statistics and studies about child abuse and neglect in Australia as well as the conspicuous absence of some key information. This may help to gauge the severity of the problem, and to determine who is responsible.

The Exclusion of Child Abuse Statistics


While the architects of The Plan often mention how a life in an abusive home is detrimental to a child's well-being, they lack any actual analysis of child abuse and the perpetrators.

In 1996, two quite detailed reports discussing the problem of child abuse in Australia were published, including in-depth analysis of the data that examined the sex and relationship of the perpetrators. Both Angus G and Hall G (1996) [2] and Tomison A (1996) [3] research papers showed an alarming amount of varying types of child abuse, including physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect. Indeed, one of the more shocking pieces of information they supplied identified single parent mothers as the largest demographic of perpetrators of child abuse in Australia. Indeed, the Angus and Hall publication posted some very stunning data. The first chart shows family type of the victims for five Australian states:


(Source: Angus and Hall 1996)

Angus and Hall also studied the finalized cases of child abuse for five Australian states:

(Source: Angus and Hall 1996)

The Angus and Hall study also showed a graph of the types of abuse by perpetrator: 

(Source: Angus and Hall 1996)

In 1997,  the academic researchers Broadbent and Bentley published 'Child Abuse and Neglect Australia 1995-1996' for the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which confirmed what Angus and Hall as well as Tomison showed the year before. The report examined the national figures of child abuse for 1995-96, which showed 29,833 cases of substantiated child abuse or neglect in Australia. The split between the victims sexes, girls(51%) and boys(49%) under the age of 15 who were abused, was split almost evenly. [4-pg19]


(Source: Broadbent and Bentley 1997)

Broadbent and Bentley went on to discuss the prevalence of the natural parent as it related to the perpetrators of the cases of child abuse.
"The data that are available indicate that the person believed responsible in 71% of substantiated notifications of abuse and neglect was the natural parent. This is not surprising given that child abuse and neglect is a child protection issue and that the natural parent is the person most likely to have care of a child. Step-parents were reported as the person responsible in 10% of substantiated notifications and a parent’s de facto partner in 7%. Parents were believed to be responsible for 66% of physical abuse substantiations, 77% of emotional abuse substantiations, 87% of neglect substantiations, but only 24% of sexual abuse substantiations." [4-pg34]
The researchers further examined the sex and relationship of the responsible parties in which this data was readily available.
"In 1995–96, of finalised investigations in those States and Territories for which data were available (Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory), 40% involved children living in single female parent families and 31% living in ‘two parent—natural’ families. A further 15% of finalised investigations involved children from ‘two parent—other’ families (such as families where there is one natural parent and a de facto or a step-parent)"[4-pg35]

(Source: Broadbent and Bentley 1997)

The breakdown of this data for the sex and relationship of child abusers was:
  • 40% single parent female
  • 46% two-parent families (both male and female parental perpetrators) 
  • 6% single parent male
  • 8% Other
This means that in 86% of child abuse cases were perpetrated by or with a female offender, while 52% of child abuse cases were perpetrated by or with a male offender. If past years of recorded child abuse in Australia are any indication, between 20,000 and 30,000 cases of substantiated incidents occur each year. According to several sources, this information did not sit well with several of the people inside the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) nor the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). In fact, in 1997 the AIHW pulled the plug on recording any further data pertained to the sex or relationship of a child abuser.[5]

(Source: Broadbent and Bentley 1997)

However, in a recent email exchange with a spokesperson for AIWH's Child Welfare Division, the AIWH defends their reasoning why the Australian government no longer keeps information on the sex and relationship of the perpetrator.
"Data on ‘sex of person believed responsible’ were included in the annual child protection data collection up to 2001-02, but were not published due to ongoing issues with data availability/quality/comparability.


These issues were mentioned in Child abuse and neglect 1995-96, but not in subsequent reports. Child abuse and neglect 1995-96 (p33) notes: Data were collected from each State and Territory on the relationship to the child and the sex of the person believed responsible for substantiated abuse and neglect. However, some States and Territories had a large number of unknown values in their data on these items and most either could not report on the sex of the person believed responsible, or could not do so reliably.


The decision to discontinue the collection of these data would have been approved by the state and territory government representatives on the former National Child Protection and Support Services data group, and was most likely the result of ongoing data quality issues.


Some of the underlying issues with identifying and recording information about ‘the person believed responsible’ are shown by the related data item: ‘person believed responsible, by relationship to the child’. These data were published up to 2001-02, but always with caveats around data comparability and availability."
It must be stated that the information that was released to the public after 1998 did not contain this information, but were only cited in internal papers which are available only upon request. Furthermore, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada have not had any such problems recording the sex and relationship of child abusers, and is part of each countries yearly statistical reporting. The reporting of this data in Australia up until 1996 shows fairly complete information on most of the Australian states and territories, which has left many confused or upset over this development.

In 2003, another researcher for the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Fitzroy 2003 ‘The violence of women: Making sense of child abuse perpetrated by mothers’, shed some further light on the statistics which continued to show mothers as the primary perpetrator of child abuse.
"Women commit between 31-50 percent of physical assaults on children. Mothers commit almost 50 percent of the recorded infanticide and women perpetrate between 2-7 percent of sexual assaults against children. It is worth noting that often researchers identify that, for example, 69 percent of perpetrators of such and such crime are men, but then fail to discuss who perpetrated the remaining 31 percent. Within family violence research often a gender-neutral term such as ‘parent’ or ‘care giver’ is used, however there is no further discussion as to whether it was a father or mother who perpetrated the assaults. This absence may reflect a general understanding that men are the majority of perpetrators of child assaults, however it may also reflect a denial of the assault of children by their mothers."[6-pg2]
While Fitzroy criticizes the AIHW and ABS decision to not keep the data concerning the sex and relationship of child abusers, she gives a brief reasoning why she understands that many feel that women's violence can be explained away.
"This paper positions women’s use of violence within a social context that includes historical, structural and institutional violence characterised by patterns of domination and oppression. This social context includes patriarchal, racist and classist ideologies whereby some people are defined as superior to ‘others’.....I would argue therefore that an analysis of women’s violence should be positioned within an analysis of the human capacity for violence. We can all desire retribution for perceived harms, experience rage and the wish to inflict pain on another."[6-pg3]
The National Director of the Joint Parenting Association, Yuri Joakimidis, not only admonishes the Australian government for its refusal to keep these records, he claims that bias within the AIHW, to further a particular ideology, were compromising the integrity of all of its data collection.
"In this context, the decision taken in 1997 by the AIHW (Broadbent and Bentley 1997) to no longer publish data indicating the sex of perpetrators in substantiated child abuse cases must be reversed. The action was taken just one year after the data was first published in 1996 (968 men and 1138 women). The omission was justified on the wobbly basis that only one state (WA) and two territories (ACT & NT) had furnished statistics and a lack of publishing space. Interested parties were advised that they could obtain the data under a Freedom Of Information request at a cost of $200.


Curiously, these reasons did not preclude the publication of these data in 1996. In fact, Angus and Hall (1996) observed that "the information base provide an extra dimension to data previously presented." Quite obviously, the non publication of these important statistics can negatively impact on child abuse policy and the allocation of resources. If the AIHW decision does indeed represent bias reporting then such slanted views clearly have no place in scientific endevours." [5]
Indeed, looking at Western Australia's numbers for 2005-06 and 2007-08 alone, they continue to show the same pattern of perpetrators of child abuse being overwhelmingly single females.

I believe it is important to note the hypocrisy of calling this major report on domestic violence 'Time for Action: The National Council's Plan for Australia to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children' when critical information concerning child abuse and neglect in Australia is missing, obfuscated or perhaps even concealed. Furthermore, there are compelling reasons to believe that the National Council left out key facts regarding women's violence to satisfy an ideological and financial agenda that hinges on a false paradigm in which only men are violent in the home.

By omitting this key data, it is clear that the National Council is attempting to paint men as the monsters of domestic violence, who are responsible for almost all of Australia's problems inside the home. The fact that women, not men, are responsible for the majority of actual child abuse was intentionally removed from the parameters of their studies.  It is not only a disgrace to professional and academic integrity, it's a slap in the face to those forgotten children of Australia who live the brutal reality of violence and abuse, day in and day out.

Violence, a human problem, is one which both men and women perpetrate; we are all responsible for putting an end to it, not just in the home, but in society at large. For this council to deny the violence, neglect and other abuses that women commit could be seen as helping to condemn Australian children to lives of invisible pain. It is time the men and women of Australia let their voices be heard, and instruct their government that this is not an acceptable situation. Moreover, it is time that the members of the National Council Advisory Board be held accountable to the public they purport to serve. The women, the men and the children of Australia deserve better than this. They deserve the truth.


References:

[1] 'Time for Action: The National Council's Plan for Australia to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, 2009-2021'

[2] Angus G & Hall G (1996). Child Abuse and Neglect Australia 1994-1995. Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Series; no 16)

[3] Tomison A (1996). “Protecting Children: Updating The National Picture” in Child Abuse and Neglect Australia 1994-1995, Child Welfare Series No.16, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, AGPS, Canberra

[4] Broadbent A and Bentley R (1997). Child Abuse and Neglect Australia 1995-1996. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Catalogue No CWS 1. Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (Child Welfare Series No 17)

[5] Discussion of AIHW Data

[6]  Fitzroy 2003 - ‘The violence of women: Making sense of child abuse perpetrated by mothers’ Australian Institute of Family Studies

[7] Australian Bureau of Statistics 

The Forgotten Men of Domestic Violence

In 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) headed by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, approved a 'framework for action' called 'Time for Action: The National Council's Plan for Australia to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, 2009-2021'. The effort was spearheaded by Tanya Plibersek, former Australian Minister for Housing and Minister for the Status of Women and Jenny Macklin, former Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. The main body of work was completed by the National Council's Advisory Group which is chaired by Libby Lloyd, who founded the White Ribbon Foundation in 2003.

'The Plan' is split into several parts, which puts forth recommendations for new legislation, changes to judicial processes, requests for funding and ideas for domestic programs targeted at reducing domestic and sexual violence against women. The advisory council has some powers to implement programs through the Office of Women among other agencies, but much of what the government funded program calls for requires approval by Parliament.

The entire premise of the National Plan was underpinned by the belief in this statement:
"While a small proportion of men are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, the majority of people who experience this kind of violence are women in a home, at the hands of men they know."[2-pg1]
But a quick examination of the statistics and data shows a much different picture to the rather sweeping indictment of Australian men the National Council paints.

The National Council's plan is put forth as a direct response to several academic papers and various activists around Australia, which purport data and statistics that claim to show an epidemic of men's violence against women. However, the National Council readily admits its data on actual incidences of domestic violence and sexual assault is poor, sporadic and in some cases inaccurate. Nevertheless, the council makes most of their recommendations based on the conclusions of several academic papers and studies, and rarely address any comprehensive analysis of their own. Indeed, 'The Plan' never addresses the topic of violence that women commit towards men or towards children, nor does it accurately state the facts as they are in Australia.
"Data relating to violence against women and their children in Australia is poor. Data on services sought by, and provided to, victims is not readily available, and the way in which information is reported is generally inconsistent and does not allow for a comprehensive understanding of violence against women. Variations in data estimates across Australia are affected by differences in what is captured, counted and reported across States and Territories.
There are also personal and institutional barriers in decision making within and across systems that reduce the extent to which sexual assault and domestic and family violence is disclosed and reported. This affects the capacity of data to accurately reflect the real numbers of women and children who experience this violence. The difficulty [is] in measuring the true extent of sexual assault and domestic [violence]."[1-pg47]
What 'The Plan' lacks in substantial comparative statistical data, it makes up for with hyperbolic references to various academic publications which they imply contain extremely compelling data. However, when direct statistical data is mentioned, it is at best an out-of-context use of very some basic data; and at worst an obfuscation of the full picture of domestic violence. Here is an example of one statistic 'The Plan' mentions over and over again in several of its various publications:
"Violence in relationships remains high in our communities, and most would agree that unless the unequal power relations between women and men are more meaningfully addressed, the incidence will not change. Around one in three Australian women experience physical violence, and almost one in five experiences sexual violence over their lifetime."[1-pg59]
What they don't mention is this "1 in 3" (or 29%) stat isn't just domestic violence, or even violence men perpetrate against women - it's all forms of violence women experience. Furthermore, it's only violence that occurs after the age of 15, and does not consider child abuse experienced by young girls and boys. The exact same data set from which the National Council used, shows that over 41% of Australian men experience violence in their lifetime (12% more than women) as men are much more likely to be the victims of violence than women.

Here is the complete data from the same Australian Bureau of Statistics(ABS) source, which shows a larger picture of data on violence for both women and men.

Violence experienced since the age of 15:
  • 29% (2,243,600) of women experienced physical assault
  • 41% (3,031,800) of men experienced physical assault
  • 17% (1,293,100) of women experienced sexual assault
  • 4.8% (362,400) of men experienced sexual assault
In the 12 month data prior to the ABS survey:
  • 4.7% (363,000) of women experienced physical violence
  • 10% (779,800) of men experienced physical violence
  • 1.6% (126,100) of women experienced sexual violence
  • 0.6% (46,700) of men experienced sexual violence
Of these numbers:
  • 79,500 men experienced physical assault by a female perpetrator
  • 195,300 women experienced physical assault by a male perpetrator
  • 77% of men (60,900) who experienced physical assault by a female occurred in a home
  • 64% of women (125,100) who experienced physical assault by a male occurred in a home
What does 'The Plan' have to say about violence against men?
"While a small proportion of men are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, the majority of people who experience this kind of violence are women in a home, at the hands of men they know. Men are more likely to be the victims of violence from strangers and in public, so different strategies are required to address these different types of violence."[3-pg1]
If the ABS data is correct, which does not include abuse to children under the age of 15, certainly men constituting one-third of all domestic abuse victims is not a "small proportion" in any sense of the meaning. In the prior 12 months to the survey for sexual assault, men experienced 27% of the incidents of sexual violence; again, not a "small proportion." The question must be asked why a well funded government study on domestic violence doesn't even begin to address the victimization of men when they do account for significant portion of domestic violence victims? According to the council:
"Enhanced community awareness and education programs are needed to change violence-supportive attitudes. These initiatives must be always based on the notion of gender equality and the need to shift men’s consciousness from one of privilege to one of mutuality. They need to make men question their own economic, social, and political power over women."[1-pg47]
Does the National Council believe that the violence men endure is not as important as the violence women endure?
"Attitudes and beliefs about gender are learned, and society often teaches deeply held sexist views. Evidence shows that communities increase the risk of violence against women when they allow norms that support men’s controlling attitudes and behaviour over women, or attitudes that support the notion of male privilege.[1-pg39]"
Let's look at the basic statistics for men in Australia in terms of health, education and welfare when compared to women, to see the statistical evidence of 'male privilege'.
  • Men Live on average 5 years less than women - (in 2007-2009 men had a 40.9% chance of surviving to age 85 years compared with women’s 57.3% chance) [A]
  • Men accounted for 93% of workplace fatalities in Australia (2009-2010) [B]
  • Men die of suicide at 3 times the rate of women (2008 Men 16 and women 5 per 100,000 population)[C]
  • At least 1 in 3 victims of family or domestic violence is a man [D]
  • Men are more frequently victims of violent assault (3.9 % man compared to 2.4 % women)[E]
  • Men are more frequently threatened with violent assault ( 5.0 % men compared to 3.5% women)[F]
  • Men's enrollment in post secondary education for 2010 is 43.8%, women's enrollment is at 56.2% [G]
  • Men are more than twice as likely to be victims of homicide (1.8 victims per 100,000 population) than women (0.8 victims per 100,000 population)[H]
  • The imprisonment rate for men in June 2009 was 13 times the rate for women (329 prisoners per 100,000 male adults versus 25 prisoners per 100,000 female adults)[I]
Men seem to be on the disadvantaged side of many basic areas of concern for any Australian citizen. It's no secret that in the Western world, men have been falling behind for sometime now, which many would argue is due in large part to the emphasis in government on placing the needs of women above men. Moreover, the entire premise of this National Council's Plan is predicated on the belief that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of domestic violence. Their own data refutes that claim, and furthermore, several significant studies have been done that show domestic violence is perpetrated equally between men and women.[5][6][7]

After close examination of the National Council's drastic recommendations of judicial and legislative changes, which call for 'gendered civil and criminal laws' meant to enact a type of gender profiling against men, holding them to a lower standard of proof for incidents of domestic violence, one can only wonder how such a one sided study made it past the desks of some of Australia's most prominent politicians without any protest. Furthermore, while the National Plan doesn't commit to equal protection under the law, they attempt to justify the 'gendered treatment for civil and criminal laws' stipulating that "reforming legal frameworks with the aim of improving the safety of all victims of family violence—the effect will be to the benefit of all victims, whether male or female."[4-pg51]

I think many Australians may be curious to ask if Prime Minister Julia Gillard knows the real facts about domestic violence, and if she is aware of the National Council's call to create gendered laws that will in effect be enforced against only the male portion of its population? Sadly, it appears, that the National Council's study regards the men and boys who are victims of domestic violence in Australia as irrelevant and unimportant.

No victim of domestic violence, whether they be a man or a woman, should be forgotten by society, simply because they are a man or a woman. Not one!


References:

[1] Time for Action: The National Council's Plan for Australia to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, 2009-2021

[2] The National Council's Plan  - 2010 Update 

[3] The National Council's Plan - First Three Year Action Plan

[4] Australian Law Reform Commission(ALRC) - Family Violence - A Legal Response 

[5) Headey, B., Scott, D., & de Vaus, D. (1999). Domestic violence in Australia: Are Women and Men Equally Violent? Australian Social Monitor 2:57-62

[6] Dutton D. G. (2007). Female Intimate Partner Violence and Developmental Trajectories of Abusive Families. International Journal of Men's Health, 6, 54-71

[7] Archer J (2000). Sex Differences in Physically Aggressive Acts between Heterosexual Partners: A Meta-Analytic Review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651-680

Monday, November 28, 2011

O' Buddhist World


First off, I want to apologize that I will not be working on this years Blogisattva awards. (shields self from boo's) I just don't have the time, so I'm not sure what will happen with that this year. We asked for help administrating them, but got very little interest. Seems people like to be a part of the project as in nominated, but not a lot in the department of volunteering time. Too bad, this year would have been a bit easier, since those who were criticizing them last year are all probably occupying something at the moment. Not that the OWS is good or bad per se, it's just a relief to know that the anarchists are off harassing someone else.

I lied about backing off on the Men's Rights thing. Yep, still writing about it as I get time. I've alredy written five articles for the MR activist site 'A Voice For Men' and for some reason many feminists don't really like me now. Wouldn't be surprised if many of them were the same Buddhists who disliked me. Hmmmmm, wonder why. While my own personal politics are rather moderate or centrist, I am finding it very interesting seeing conservatives, liberals, libertarians and everything in between coming to join the same movement and working together. It's very strange, but it works. Lots of new voices joining in the conversation everyday.....it's getting very big.

Ummm, been trying to think about something Buddhisty to write about, but I've been drawing a blank. Oh, I got one...publishers, please stop sending me books to review! No seriously, the just end up in a big pile of 'shit I'll never read'.

I have no idea what drama has been happening in the Buddhist world lately, I assume that the Chinese still hate the Dalai Lama and people still think Zen is something you can figure out with a cup of indie coffee house espresso, a $400 yoga mat, a mix tape of Maroon 5 and John Mayer with a teacher named Zen Master Bob. Yea, nothing has changed.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Killing us Quietly: How the US Government legally favors the health and well-being of women over men

In honor of Movember, I wanted to write a piece about the current disturbing situation regarding the enormous gap of disparity between men's and women's health inside the United States, as is legislated by our government.

In the United States, the life expectancy for men has lagged well behind that of women for quite some time. Today's life expectancy of men is 75.7 years, 5.1 years shorter than women, whose life expectancy sits at about 80.8 years. For black men, the data is even worse, as of 2006, their life expectancy was just around 69.0 years. The reasons why men die 5 or more years sooner than women is a rather complex question, which weaves in many different factors directly related to the cause of death. In order to understand this issue thoroughly, we need to take into account causes that men die from at much higher rates than women.
The two major events of morbidity for men that were usually of an 'unnatural cause' were accidents (in 2005 - 78,941 - of which 5,000 were work related fatalities) and homicides (14,717). Of the 1.2 million men and 1.21 million women who died in 2005, the percentage of difference factoring in these events was a mere 0.018%, which does not come close statistically to account for the current five year gap. Certainly, this leaves men with many serious questions about the outstanding and deadly medical conditions that effect them in larger numbers which ultimately lead to a shorter life span. With this information, one would believe that if the Federal government wanted to allocate funds for health research that it would want to spend at least some of that money on research for medical conditions that effect men which lead to their lower life expectancy.

Funny thing happened though; the United States Government did the exact opposite. Despite an already longer and healthier life span, Congress and the President, between 1970 and the present, have passed over 70 different medical programs, research projects and treatment initiatives, at costs exceeding $100 billion dollars, which are specifically allocated for women and girls. Indeed, not only did Congress aggressively pursue health issues and projects that related strictly to women, with the help and prodding of several feminist lobby groups on Capitol Hill, they completely and systematically rejected and ignored any calls to do the same for men. The disturbing and outrageous truth is the Federal government has consciously created medical offices, grants, and research programs for only one portion of its population, which just happens to be the healthier portion, women.



Federal Funding For Women's Health Initiatives 

One issue which came up often with women's groups and feminists in the mid to late 1980's, was the lack of federal funding for female centric diseases such as breast and uterine cancer. After many years of lobbying and activism, Sen. Barbara Muklski (D) successfully took up the challenge of championing this cause with federal legislators. In 1990, Congress passed the first in a series of women's health care programs entitled the 'Women's Health Equity Act', which established the first such gender specific entity, the Office for Women’s Health Research (OWHR) at NIH. In 1991, Congress passed the second 'Women's Health Equity Act' which established the Office on Women's Health (OWH) in the Department of Health and Human Services(HHS) The bill was re-authorized again in 1993, and further saw the creation of the NIH Revitalization Act as well as funding for a Women's program at the FDA.

Again in 1996, Congress passed another version which created the 'National Center’s of Excellence in Women’s Health', which is currently run in several Universities throughout the US. Each successive year after the '96 bill, up until as recently as 2010, Congress passed greater funding for these and other women's health initiatives, which today adds up to over 70+ gender specific offices, projects, research grants and other female only health campaigns and actions. Well funded feminist organizations along with many women's councils and other associations have lobbied Congress every year for more funding and more programs, and have met with great success each Congressional term.

What started out as a call to fund research of diseases which were affecting only women, quickly snowballed into a 20 year avalanche of gender based legislation. Below are a small summary of many of the more public offices and projects that were the end result of these Congressional efforts.



With a FY 2010 Budget of $34 Million just for administrative operating expenses, the OWH is one of the keystone programs of the 'Women's Health Equity Act', acting as both an administrative hub as well as a think tank for new projects to promote women's health initiatives. The OWH main website, where it posts its programs and grants, can be found at 'womenshealth.gov'.

There is no Office of Men's Health, nor any menshealth.gov.

The stated goals of the OWH are:
"To develop and impact national health policy as it relates to women and girls To develop, adapt, implement, evaluate, and replicate model programs on women’s and girls’ health To educate, influence, and collaborate with health and human services organizations, health care professionals, and the public"
What else does OWH support?

National Women's Health Week (NWHW) - "National Women's Health Week is a week long health observance coordinated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health. May 13, 2012 and is celebrated until May 19, 2012. National Women's Checkup Day is Monday, May 14, 2012."

National Men's Health Week an event that is run by a private organization.

OWH also runs the 'The Heart Truth', a national awareness and prevention campaign about heart disease in women sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Heart Truth program excludes men from its focus, and has no comparable male only program.

Another OWH program is the Heart Attack Symptoms and Calling 9-1-1, a campaign for Women that was launched by OWH in early 2011, that educates women to call 911 when suffering symptoms of a heart attack. But why support one group of people with an awareness campaign for a medical condition, heart disease, that effects more men than women?

The campaign Heart Attack Symptoms and Calling 9-1-1 also excludes men from its focus, and has no comparable program.

There is GirlsHealth.Gov, dedicated to the health and well-being of young girls and teenagers, with the tag line , "Be Happy. Be Healthy. Be You. Beautiful."

There is no Boyshealth.gov nor comparable male only program. 

The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports
This governmental program is aimed at improving and promoting the physical fitness and health of it's citizens. The Council does has a fitness.gov/women which has a rather comprehensive annual study called 'A Report of the Surgeon General Physical Activity and Health Women', while men do not have the luxury of such a report.

The PCPFS has no such programs either under fitness.gov/men nor other comparable male only programs.

The President's Council also runs 'Physical Activity and Sport in the Lives of Girls' project and website at fitness.gov/girlssports.htm. I also entered in the URL for fitness.gov/boyssports, to see what the President's Council had to say about boys, and got 'Error 404, Page Not Found'.

The PCPFS has no such programs either under fitness.gov/boyssports nor any other comparable Male only programs.



  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

In 1994 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) created their own Office of Women's Health which have several programs and initiatives. While the CDC does have a Men's Health webpage, they do not offer any such special programs or offices such as those that were funded for women's health


  • US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA)

The US Department of Veteran Affairs runs several female only health programs, two of the biggest being the 'Women's Health Sciences Division' (WHSD) and the 'Veterans Affairs Research and Development for Women's Health.' The mission statement for the VA's WHSD project states:
"The Women's Health Sciences Division located in Boston, MA, focuses on the special issues of women and PTSD, and especially on effective treatments. The Division has pioneered research on the psychological impact of military service on women veterans. Such initiatives include development of psychological assessment techniques, the impact of sexual assault and military sexual trauma, and on the effect of PTSD on women's health and medical problems."
Along with all the other health program that the VA operates for all Veterans, these two women's only programs have their own operating budget of $217.6 Million per year. Men have no such gender specific programs in the VA.

  • National Institutes of Health (NIH)

In 1990, the National Institutes of Health established its 'Office of Research on Women's Health' (ORWH), yet men never received the same funding for an office of research. Instead, NIH gave men a generic link to a Men's Health page, much like the one that Health and Human Services placed under their OWH website. While no gender specific funding exists for male only programs, the NIH also funds three additional women's only projects above and beyond the ORWH. These projects are 'Specialized Centers of Research on Sex and Gender Factors Affecting Women's Health' (SCORs), 'Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health' (BIRCWH) and 'Advancing Novel Science in Women's Health Research' (ANSWHR).


Other Federal Agencies offering female only or maternal health programs that favor women at a 90% or greater rate

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) - 'For Women' and 'Women's Health'.
Medicare/Medicaid - 'Women's Health USA'
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) - 'Women: Life Stages Program'
Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)  - Programs offered
HRSA's Office of Women's Health -(Annual budget exceeds $100 million)
Office of Maternal and Child Health ($660 million annually)
Women, Infants, Children and Youth – Part D ($78 million annually)
Healthy Start - ($104 million annually)
Family Planning - ($316 million annually)
Safe Motherhood and Infant Health (p131) - ($55.7 million annually)


Attempts at passing a Men's Health Act

As early as 1999, several members of both the House and Senate proposed a bill that would establish an Office of Men's Health as a compliment to HHS's Office of Women's Health. Idaho Senator Mike Crapo (R), who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1999, and underwent a radical prostatectomy in January 2000, became the spearhead of this effort to seek parity for health funding for men of the federal level. The Men's Health Act never made it out of committee, in either the House or Senate, and died a quiet death of a tabled motion. Crapo has since unsuccessfully attempted to bring this bill to a vote in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. In 2009, Congressman Baron Hill (D) of Indiana tried to revive the bill, attempting what he thought would be a more acceptable approach by the members of Congress renaming it the 'Men and Families Health Care Act of 2009'. This bill also died in committee, never receiving a vote.

One of the several men's groups who supported both Crapo and Hill in their attempts to pass this bill noticed that "There appears to exist a lingering fear among elected officials that if they support any program designed to help men, they will be criticized as being "anti-woman" by certain gender advocacy groups." On the other hand, no feminist groups came out in direct public opposition to theses bills, as many of them worried that they might be seen as "anti-men." That didn't mean that many feminist groups weren't able to find other ways to express their disapproval over any such Men's Health Act, as several feminists spoke out in opposition as private individuals. USA Today reporter Rita Rubin was one such individual, who has been a frequent speaker at feminist gatherings concerning health issues, and wrote an Op-Ed piece in 2004 condemning the Men's Health Care Act stating:
"It might not have to be that way. Increasingly, research implicates behavior, not biology, for men's shorter life spans. Men are more likely to die violently or accidentally, and they're less likely to seek medical care when they don't feel well. Changing men's health behaviors is nearly as tricky as changing their biology."
Yet Rubin's argument against an Office of Men's Health, she presents no data or detailed research to support her claims. This is an argument many feminists have made against Men's Health initiatives in the past 10 years, however, by saying that because men die in greater numbers by accidents, (per year approx 78,000 men vs 42,000 women) homicides (per year approx 14,000 men vs 3,500 women) and poor health standards, that it isn't nature killing off men sooner, but rather reckless and dangerous behavior exhibited by men. Therefore, many have argued, that men just simply need to change their lifestyle and behavior if they want to live as long as women. This is a terribly disingenuous argument given several factors:

1) Approximately 1.2 million men and 1.21 million women die each year, meaning that a difference of 46,000 more deaths, or 0.018%, and does not statistically in any way account for the 5 - 7 lower life expectancy of men.

2) Over 4,100 of these deaths by accidents for men each year were on the work related fatalities, where women only make up about 7-8% of deaths on the job. Furthermore, many of these accidents for men involved work around the home, approximately 10,000. Even home repairs can sometimes be dangerous work, and these are activities that are traditionally preformed by men.

3) None of the 14,000 men a year who die by homicide asked to a victim statistic. So I find it very curious and rather ironic that some feminists would resort to victim blaming like this, (ie men put themselves in more dangerous situations to get murdered) in light of how vocal they are against the blaming rape victims because they placed themselves in more dangerous situations.

4) There is no evidence, that any credible institution has done, to suggest that men have a less healthy standard of living than women. Indeed, even if that were the case, would those who say people who don't lead healthy lifestyles don't deserve health care?

In 2001, one women's group did speak out to the public against endorsing the Men's Health Act, this time completely stating wrong information concerning dollars spent on research for women's issues:
"National Women's Health Network is not endorsing the bill, says Amy Allina, the group's program and policy director. At the same time, she says, "We believe there are health issues that are particular to men and we encourage health advocates who are concerned about men's health to work to get more attention for those things."

That given, says Allina, "We still think it's necessary across the medical field to work to get more attention to women's health. We think that women's health has been under-researched. Clinical trials as well as the historical medical practice model have assumed male as normal and female as a small version of men. From the perspective of saying women are getting too much attention and men need more of it. Obviously we had some problems with that. I appreciate that they've changed their approach to recognize that they can advocate for men's health without detracting from women's health."
Ms. Allina's reasoning has been the standard format used by many groups that have since opposed an Office of Men's Health, and has been rehashed by many feminist lobby group.


Cancer Research Funding

The National Cancer Institute(NCI) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) receive the bulk amount of Federal funding for critical cancer research, which they distribute to promising programs that are searching for treatments and cures for cancer.



This issue alone could be its own article, however these basic statistics showing how breast cancer, which effects 99% women, has become the most important health research program of the government and public. The funding disparity shown here, despite the many deaths by other cancers, included some male only cancers, says a lot about the current state of affairs regarding the perceived worth of one sex as more important than the other. Pancreatic cancer, for instance, that effects both men and women, and kills almost as many people a year as breast cancer, receives very little funding from public funds.

Suicide and Men

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about suicide, a serious mental health issue, or more precise the outcome of untreated mental problems, which men suffer from in very disproportionate numbers. In 2008, 28,450 men committed suicide compared to 7,585 women. Each year in the US, about 28,000 men will kill themselves, many of who never sought out or asked for help. And although women do attempt suicide in much greater numbers, men complete the act at almost four times the rate of women in the US. Here is an excellent site that discusses the issue of men and suicide.

These numbers are not much different in other countries, like Canada, the UK and Australia. Several of the programs dedicated to women cited above, do have some sorts of programs designed to help those who are suffering from mental illness. While generic help exists for disadvantaged persons with mental illness, the Federal government, outside of reporting the numbers from the CDC and NIH give each year, haven't directly addressed the problem of male suicide. If you look through the CDC list of programs offered by both the Federal and State governments to combat suicide, you won't see even a single mention of a project aimed at curbing the disturbingly high number of suicides among men. The Australian government has a Mental Health and Well-Being program that does acknowledge and attempt to take action against the plague of male suicide, which other countries would be wise to take a serious look at.


Conclusions

The point of all this is not to condemn health programs for women, or to say that women don't deserve gender based projects. Whether or not it is right or wrong, justified or unjustified to use public funds for these types of social programs I leave for others to debate. However, I feel strongly that any successful and prosperous democratic government must protect, defend and hold accountable all of its citizens, to equal and fair standards, to best of the abilities within any given circumstance, regardless of any human characteristic such as race or gender. Here in the US, this is embodied in the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, which is known as the equal protection clause. The second part of the amendment reads:
"....nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Many times I'll hear people that are against Men's Rights say that equality is "not a zero sum game." And they are right in so far as the aspect of each person's individual abilities and needs. However, equal protection under the law is very much a zero sum game. To enforce or enact laws favoring 1/2 the population, without acknowledging the other half, is by its very nature the antithesis of equal protection. While there are times that arise in every country's history that a group may need some special protection or action, when the justifications for enacting these protections are false, but moreover, when such efforts intentionally marginalizes one group in favor of another, despite irrefutable evidence that the group receiving special benefits are in a better position than the vast majority of the other group, many would tend to call this systematic and institutionalized discrimination.

As I tried to demonstrate in my articles on homelessness and education, and in this article, we need to make it known that there are some rather ugly and destructive consequences which can result when the spirit of equal protection under the law is bypassed, ignored and willfully overridden, despite the good or bad intentions of the governing body. Almost everything about these health programs and projects, notwithstanding the necessary and justified maternity initiatives, by the very principle of the legal exclusion of men, violate both the spirit and the law of equal protection, which clearly promotes the health and well-being of one sex as more important than the other. Discrimination doesn't get much more obvious than this.

Where did our system go so wrong? And more importantly, how can we begin to change this?

Monday, October 24, 2011

How the National Organization of Women's Agenda Left Hundreds of Thousands of Men Homeless

Today, homelessness in the United States is an overwhelmingly male problem. Approximately 9 out 10, or about 205,000 unsheltered homeless people on any given night in America will be men or boys, while women, who represent about 36% of those without a permanent residence, constitute only 10% of the unsheltered. This disproportionate disparity between the sexes is disturbing both because of how little attention this fact receives within society, but also because its tells a grim story that runs parallel, and in many ways is is a direct result of, several other difficult problems men face today.

Scope of Reasons

There are many reason someone finds themselves in a situation where they become homeless. While these reasons are quiet important, such as mental illness, unemployment, physical disability or substance abuse, the scope of this article is to examine why men have fewer emergency assistance options, and what lead to this large disparity between the sexes.

Homeless Basics

In order to explore this issue throughly, we need to take a look at some of the terminology in regards to homelessness. There are two basic categories of homeless; those who are sheltered, by either a private or religious organization or through public assistance of some form, and those who are unsheltered, which are those literally living in areas not fit for human habitation (ie cars, abandoned dwellings etc) or those who we are more accused to encounter, that sleep on park benches, underpasses or heating grates. In addition to sheltered and unsheltered, there are three types of homeless people;

*Chronic - Those who remain without a residence for over 180 days, and usually experience multiple periods of extended homelessness throughout their lives
*Transitional - Homeless by a variety of temporary circumstances, and are in a shelter or receive other assistance less than 180 days
*Publicly assisted long term residents - Technically not homeless, however it represents those families or individuals who spend long periods of time, usually years, in publicly funded or subsidized housing. In the US they number over 1.5 million adults and children. The overwhelming majority of this number are single parent adult women with children

Statistics 101 
These facts can be found through several studies done by different organizations. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  annual report is the base line for these statistics.


643,047 people in the US will be homeless on any given night (does not include long term assisted)
403,308 of these are sheltered
239,759 of these are unsheltered (this number is estimated to be higher due to the difficulty of tracking unsheltered homeless)

83% of the unsheltered homeless are adult men
7% of the unsheltered homeless are boys under the age of 18
10% of the unsheltered homeless are adult women and girls under the age of 18. The CDC and HHS estimates almost half this number are "runaway" teenage girls.


edit: As a reader pointed out to me, and which is something that I already knew, is that this HHS study among others are Point in Time (PIT) statistics. This means they ran these figures, as they almost always do on a January night, when many northern US cities have "out of the cold" programs, which reduces the number of unsheltered homeless by almost 1/2. Furthermore, as you will find in these studies, it is difficult to ascertain gender ratio's for unsheltered that can be correlated back to other studies easily. The much more brutal truth is that on an average night in the US, the number of unsheltered homeless is almost double, perhaps more, than the 240,000 figure. Furthermore, the data indicates, taking into account all nights during the year, that men and boys actually account for 94-97% of the unsheltered homeless; or 9.4 to 9.7 out 10 unsheltered homeless on an average night are men. I went with the conservative figures, which in themselves are devastating, as no one can really challenge their validity in any meaningful way.

A closer data point in reality for an average night in the US would be closer to 400, 000 men or 95.8% of the total of the unsheltered homeless.  This is data I am still working on confirmation on through more than just one study.


404,957 are individuals
238,110 are persons in families*
142,000 or 60% of homeless families are children
71% of sheltered individuals were adult men
25% of sheltered individuals were adult women
80% of sheltered homeless families include adult women and 20% include adult men. (Most of them include adult men who are part of a two parent homeless family)
Almost all of the publicly assisted long term residents that are single parent families are headed by adult women

General Characteristics of Homeless Men
1 in 10 are Veterans
4 in 10 has some sort of disability, including mental illness
75% are over the age of 30, most are older than 40
Race- 42% African-American, 38% white, 20% Hispanic
1 in 17 men living in poverty will access an emergency homeless shelter each year, compared to 1 in 35 women living in poverty (1)

Discussions about homelessness and gender

One of the ironic problems that I have encountered while discussing this issues with many different people, when faced with the facts about unsheltered homeless men, inevitably someone will say or try to argue "but men make up about 65% of the total homeless population." The problem with this view, as we will explore later, is that this 65% includes individuals and families with access to public assistance and housing shelters, including the long term projects. Individual men almost always fail to met the requirements for almost all public assistance, (with the exception of Medicaid and Social Security programs) especially those that are meant to benefit children but have the side benefit of helping the parent. The brutal kinds of homelessness, whether it be an overcrowded shelter or more importantly the unsheltered, those literally living on the street is far and away a men's problem. The big glaring issue, is that society has provided with public funds, many layers of safety nets for women, but almost none for men.

Indeed, Health and Human Services (HHS), the governmental agency tasked with managing most of these programs has openly admitted the some of the reasons there is a huge disparity between homeless men and women. Their 2009 annual report states:
"Single men who are poor may be more vulnerable to homelessness because of large gaps in the Unemployment Insurance program and because the largest safety net programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Social Security, are for families or elderly people. The share of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance has declined in recent decades and the gap may be particularly perilous for men because poor women are likely to be accompanied by children and thus eligible for TANF. Adult poor men also have higher rates of substance abuse than women, but substance abuse has not been a categorical eligibility criterion for SSI since 1996. Thus, some women may fall through one social safety net but be caught by another; men may miss them all."
Children, Custody Battles and the Effect on Men

Our court systems have to this day still have not caught up with the radical social transformations of the later 20th century, and in many ways still operates under the 18th century ideas of women as the primary care givers and men as the primary providers and protectors. As divorce rates began to skyrocket during the 1970's, the courts appeared both overwhelmed and paralyzed on what to do in light of these changes, and still to this day have not made a concerted effort on the national level to transform the polices governing child custody and support to fit these new social roles. What people remember as the Women's liberation movement, or early feminism, took good advantage of this anachronistic judicial system to lobby on one hand for the courts to enforce these old gender roles, and on the other to propel women as independent and liberated from these exact same gender roles. The consequences for fathers have been devastating. Even though the rates for single parent families lead by men is rising, 11.3 million single parent families are still lead by females versus about 2.8 million single parent families headed by males. Although this trend is slowly changing, fathers within broken families have been systematically removed from much of the family equation.

The National Organization for Women along side several other feminist organizations fought hard and won protection for women, via proxy of the children the courts awarded to them as custody. And despite having just about 500,000 members, NOW wield tremendous political clout within the US, which has given them the ability to influence much of this legislation. Dozens of these laws and programs, which NOW and other groups lobbied for and supported, have been enacted to socially underwrite, and hence guarantee the basic necessities of women through these court mandated gender roles. In essence, in the absence of fathers to provide either direct support via being part of the "nuclear family" or in lieu of court ordered payments of child support, feminists have been able to influence lawmakers to enforce these ridged gender roles they outwardly oppose, by having the government, or better yet, society become the surrogate provider and protector for disadvantaged women. 79% of sheltered families, and an even greater number in long term subsidized housing, which are not considered homeless by HHS or NIH, are female lead. Indeed, no sane person would argue that society shouldn't look after children in poverty, as of course kids deserve all the benefits they need to grow up healthy and educated. However, NOW has almost always defended the mother's right to custody over the father, even going to the point of calling Father's Rights Groups as fringe and extremists.

1974 Title IV-D of the Social Security Act aka Child Support Enforcement Program

NOW’s leadership deemed 1973 as “NOW’s Action Year Against Poverty,”(7) and led many campaigns that year to enact programs dedicated to women in regards to poverty, health care and child support. While much of what they lobbied Congress for died that year, they were able to call Title IV-D of the Social Security Act as a victory. What came out of that act was the Child Support Enforcement Program. Under the bill, the then Dept of Health Education and Welfare, known today as Health and Human Services, created the Office of Child Support Enforcement(OCSE), which is dedicated to funding programs to track down parents who are behind on their support payments.

In FY 2007 alone, OCSE spent 2.7 billion dollars to help states maintain their own CSE divisions, and enacted many now maligned practices, (9) such as reporting delinquent parents to credit bureaus, suspending drivers, professional, occupational and recreational licenses and in some cases press criminal charges. Obviously, due to the antiquated custody laws, this bill and subsequent programs were and continue to be aimed almost exclusively at men. The effect it had on men was when a man lost his job, or couldn't find employment quickly, a big hole of arrears of child support would be created, which too often became a hole they could never recover from. Despite taking into consideration circumstances that would cause payment delinquency, politicians and officials inside OCSE showed little mercy towards fathers.

Federally Funded Programs for Women and Families

Welfare had always been a program rife with abuse, bad press and astronomical costs. In 1996-97, President Bill Clinton pushed an initiative to replace the 1935 law Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with someone that requires more responsibility on the recipients, and less waste of money overall. What was born was the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act (TANF), a $7 billion dollar project that placed emphasis on families, and moving them to self dependancy over a period of time. Again, TANF with almost all the other programs targeted families, which because of our still antiquated court system and custody laws, overwhelmingly favored single parent mothers. Today, this benefit is extended to around 4.3 million Americans.

But Congress wasn't finished yet, and continued to enact additional grant based programs for families and youths under the purview of HHS. While again, no one is question the importance of children to receive food, shelter and the basic necessities, an enormous disparity between women and men exists as to who benefits in conjunction with the child/children. Pregnant women or women with young children have even more programs funded to supply medical services, food and education. The more prominent ones are:

Community Services Block Grant
Social Services Block Grant
Transitional Living Program for Older Homeless Youth
Head Start
WIC
Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant (Offers over a dozen smaller programs)
SNAP
HUD Programs

The Decoy of Domestic Violence

For the past 25 years the portrayal of domestic violence within most media, TV, movie and magazines, and moreover, the general public, has been one of exclusive male on female violence. This attitude has become so ingrained in our society as truth, without a close look at real statistics, that extreme measures have been taken to attempt to curb this perceived epidemic of male violence. The problem is, none of these portrayals of domestic abuse are even remotely correct. Studies done by both public and private institutions, including the CDC, DOJ, HHS, the American Journal of Public Health and Family Court Review have shown a very different reality of violence inside the home. For many years now, we have known that women are at least as likely as men to engage in partner aggression.(10) "In at least half of all cases, partner violence is mutual."(11) Another CDC study showed that one way physical aggression is perpetrated by the female in about 70% of the cases. Furthermore, acts of child abuse or neglect are committed by the mother in about 40% of cases, 18% by the father and the rest of the time, 52% by either both parents, non-family members or step-parent/partner and parent.(12)

What is true, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, is that men almost never report incidents of domestic violence where they have been the victim. It is also true, when violence escalates, that women are more likely to be injured 62%, while the men are injured about 38% of the time. In incidents where the police are called, the men are much more likely to be arrested for domestic violence when both parties were equal aggressors, especially in states that have a mandatory arrest policy. Not only are men the victims of domestic violence many times more often than has been portrayed, but men are also much more likely to be accused and arrested for domestic violence than their female partners.

In 1994, Congress passed and President Clinton signed Violence Against Women's Act, which was sponsored by now US Vice President Joe Biden. The bill was a high priority within groups such as NOW, National Coalition Against Sexual Assault, National Women’s Political Caucus, National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and several others. NOW President Patricia Ireland, made a statement in 1996 where she likened VAWA to the civil rights act of 1964, saying domestic violence is a hate crime and ironically mentioned the significance of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Under the law clause.

The net affect was the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice was established in 1995, along with about 20 different programs and hundreds of millions of dollars oh new grant money to administer. Much of this money was allocated to finding housing and basic needs for both just women, and both women and children. A list of VAWA created programs from DoJ's website:

Campus Grant Program
Children and Youth Exposed to Violence Grant Program
Court Training and Improvements Program
Culturally and Linguistically Specific Services for Victims Program
Education, Training and Enhanced Services to End Violence Against and Abuse of Women with Disabilities
Engaging Men
Services, Training, Education and Policies to Reduce Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault and Stalking in Secondary Schools Grant Program (STEP)
Tribal SASP
Sexual Assault Service Program-Cultural
Enhanced Training and Services to End Violence and Abuse of Women Later in Life Program
Grants to Encourage Arrest Policies and Enforcement of Protection Orders
Grants to Indian Tribal Governments Program
Grants to Tribal Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Coalitions
Legal Assistance for Victims Grant Program
Rural Grant Program
Safe Havens: Supervised Visitation and Safe Exchange Grant Program
Services to Advocate for and Respond to Youth Grant Program
Sexual Assault Services Program
State Coalitions Grant Program
STOP (Services, Training, Officers, and Prosecutors) Violence Against Women Formula Grants to States
Transitional Housing Grant Program

VAWA truly became a cornucopia of federal money along with political capital for NOW to sell the nation on their version of domestic violence; male offender/ female victim. It also created a lucrative federal cash flow for the specific use of housing, education, college campus programs and other gender specific programs. In many ways VAWA was a homerun for NOW, giving them a strong social safety net to which single women and single women with children have in the event of a housing emergency, or even a long term poverty issue. While the law was later tweaked to favor a more gender-neutral wording, the emphasis has always been on women, while those rare men who have come forward to report to being battered aren't given the same treatment, nor access to the same programs.

Originally passed in 1984, but then renamed and passed as a modified bill was the Family Violence Prevention and Services Grant Act which grants some 250 million a year of Federal funds to support around 2,000 privately owned domestic shelters. Almost without exception, as these shelters opened up and received funds, they have become exclusive for women and children, and at best, a battered man could receive a hotel voucher for a weeks stay at a local hotel and perhaps specialized and segregated counseling. From NOW's current push to reenact this bill: "Unless Congress reauthorizes FVPSA, over 2,000 shelters in the U.S. and millions of women and children could be left without funding or assistance. With domestic violence affecting so many women and children, NOW activists must demand that Congress pass the FVPSA reauthorization (H.R. 4116)"

The net result of these programs, which do include others not specified here, is a publicly funded safety net layer for women, at the expense and exclusion of men. Men are de facto excluded from the lion's share of these funds and shelters.

Specialized Federal Programs on Women's Health and Poverty

Although it is well known that men have a life expectancy 5-7 years earlier than women, several federal programs have been set up over the past 10 years, dedicated towards health and poverty issues geared for women only. These programs have many grants that directly benefit health care issues that women in poverty have. The National Institutes of Health(NIH) has established The Office of Research on Women's Health but have no such office or resources dedicated to men's health outside of a "topic link" to a generic page about men's health. The Veterans Administration also has a the 'Specialized Programs for Women Veterans' which "awarded grants to eight community-based homeless veteran service providers to support programs designed specifically for women veterans," which also includes items on women's health, though no equivalent program at VA exists for men. HHS has an Office on Women's Health which offers programs, advice, research and links to sites like Women and the Affordable Care Act.

Invisibility of Men and More of the Same

The book, Anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science By Akhil Gupta, James Ferguson, talks about this problem(p.159):


Several stories (this one article suggests a link between sexual assault and female homelessness) regarding an increase in the rise of homeless female vets hit several media outlets this past couple of months. Indeed, Michelle Obama took notice as well, and championed a female veterans only housing project in NC. In January of this year even CNN did a special report on female homelessness that they called 'Homeless women face more obstacles'.

In the piece, Roseanna Means, founder of Women of Means told CNN:
"There are so many things that women have to deal with more so than men do -- reproductive years, and then mammograms, then menopause. A lot of women's health is preventive care, and if women lose out on those screening tests, their lives are in danger.

In the world of homelessness, there are lots of emotional issues, psychiatric issues, women who have been beaten up so many times they can't connect the dots. They don't have an address. They don't have a phone. They're all sitting in a shelter together, but they're not necessarily friends. There's not a common bond of, "We're all in this together." Everybody is struggling. Everybody's isolated. Everybody's miserable"
Even though men are much more likely to be unsheltered than females and go through many of the same kinds of problems as these, but 10 fold, this attitude that when men are homeless and mire in abject poverty no one notices, but when women start to show a rise, it becomes an urgent crisis. It is more than abundantly clear that feminist organizations, and even society in general view men suffering as less than as important than women. Indeed, we have so many programs and public funds that go towards women, that this invisibility and disposability of men is written in law.

Only passing mention in any of these media stories mentioned the enormous disparity between the amount of homeless men and women. Indeed, one story quoted male homelessness as a matter of fact:
"Years ago, homeless veterans were almost exclusively men. But with new wars and a changing Army, young women in their mid-20s to early 30s are encompassing a larger part of the homeless population, especially in Fayetteville."
A website called change.org recently ran an article titled 'Poor Women Underserved by Government Anti-Poverty Programs.' They write:
"As Kathryn Baer writes over at Poverty in America, the one possible positive outcome from this report could be that we finally start reevaluating our safety net programs. It isn't enough to talk about women's rights. The government needs to step up and fix these failing programs that so many women and children desperately need."
In an all too familiar tone, the Denver Post wrote a 2009 Op Ed entitled 'Too many single, homeless women left out in the cold':
"Denver streets are no place to spend the night when the mercury drops below zero, but several single, homeless women faced just such a challenge this week due to a shortage of shelter beds. Even though the number of women affected is small, it's an appalling reality and ought to be a call to arms."
They continue:
"We can't always expect government to be the safety net, especially in dire economic times. And we can't assume there are enough people volunteering at shelters and donating the money and resources required to fill the need."
But 30 years of men sleeping on the streets wasn't a call to arms? The appalling reality is that men's suffering is seen as less important that women's suffering.

Why are men an afterthought when it comes to destroying poverty? So every time I hear someone laugh off Men's Right's voices about all these overwhelming problems men face with "What about teh menz?" it really enforces that the National Organization of Women, for the past 30 years, wasn't ever truly about equal protection under the law.

Conclusions

200,000 men sleep on the street tonight because much of society has forgotten about them. Feminist organizations who used their political influence to garner multiple safety nets for women, at the expense of men, certainly don't care. Since it isn't a glamorous topic, most politicians tend to only worry about helping those people who will make them look good. The thing is, they are more than just a dirty bum living inside those cardboard boxes, or sleeping on park benches, they are sons, fathers, grandfathers and brothers. Simply put, they are human beings, and deserve a voice in the discussion when our society begins to dole out money to combat homelessness. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution demands equal protection under the law. What Congress has done over the past 30 years spits in the face of equality.

With men and boys falling behind in education and unemployment, this problem is bound to get worse. We need a voice for men in poverty, we need a voice that can stand up to Congress, we need an strong and unified organization that is willing to tackle these issues. It is more than abundantly clear if we don't speak out and work towards solving problems such as male homelessness, no body will.


References and further reading

(1) http://www.societaldistress.org/files/HO-HAR2009.pdf
(2) http://www.societyandculture.com/Runaway_Children
(3) http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/socy498/gendertype.html
(4) http://www.nchv.org/women.cfm
(5) http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/vanneman/socy498/genderformer.html
(6) http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/who.html
(7) http://www.hhh.umn.edu/centers/wpp/flf/pdf/welfare_case.pdf
(8) http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/
(9) http://www.acf.hhs.gov/opa/fact_sheets/cse_factsheet.html
(10) http://www.saveservices.org/downloads/Myths-of-ABA-Commission-on-DV-Summary
(11) http://smu.edu/experts/study-documents/family-violence-study-may2006.pdf
(12) http://www.nij.gov/publications/dv-dual-arrest-222679/ch1/findings.htm
(13) http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2011/08/women.html
(14) http://www.change.org/petitions/support-the-reauthorization-of-family-violence-prevention-and-services-act
(15) http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/5996/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=2207
(16) http://www.saveservices.org/reports/
(17) http://www.now.org/press/07-96/07-29b96.html
(18) http://www.centerwomenpolicy.org/programs/poverty/
(19) http://www.womenshealth.gov/
(20) http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/poverty/welfare-to-work.aspx
(21) http://www.allaboutcounseling.com/domestic_violence.htm
(22) http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30442.pdf
(23) http://now.org/issues/economic/welfare/TANFtestimonySept2011.pdf
(24) http://singleparents.about.com/od/legalissues/p/portrait.htm
(25) http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/fysb/content/familyviolence/factsheet.htm
(26) http://www.endhomelessness.org/content/article/detail/3659
(27) http://www.societaldistress.org/Content.aspx?ID=29
(28) Anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science