Chapter 5: False Accusations and the Child-Abuse Lie
 
 

1999 Version

1. Introduction

Western societies have been in a state of collective paranoia about child sex abuse by men. Therapists have been encouraging adult patients to attribute a vast range of symptoms to having experienced sexual abuse by men in their childhood. Women have used accusations of child abuse increasingly as a weapon in child custody disputes. This has been a state of mind induced by the media, who have been lapping up anti-male propaganda from Feminist sources and passing it on almost uncritically to the naive public that we constitute. Actually, until relatively recently, when I started to take an interest in the subject, I myself had the vague impression that "Child Abuse" and "Child Sex Abuse" were one and the same thing!

In fact, the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1992 (Table No. 301) reports that in 1976 sexual maltreatment amounted to only 3.2% of total cases of Child Maltreatment reported in the USA. Even in 1986, despite the huge amount of publicity that this type of crime had received, and despite the comparative neglect of other types of Child Maltreatment by the media, this percentage had still only climbed to 15.7% of the total.

In 1976, all the other listed types of Child Maltreatment (deprivation of necessities at 70.7%, emotional maltreatment at 21.6%, minor physical injury at 18.9%, and other maltreatment at 11.2% ) were more frequent than was sexual maltreatment. Even in 1986, sexual maltreatment was still in third place behind deprivation of necessities at 54.9% and other maltreatment at 21.6%. Despite all the media publicity encouraging people to report allegations of sexual maltreatment, it is interesting to note that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators was still female!

Not only that, but in 1986 -- the last year that the Statistical Abstract of the United States was allowed to report the sex of perpetrators of Child Maltreatment -- 55.9% of perpetrators were female. In the 11 years from 1976 to 1986 (inclusive), the pecentage of perpetrators who were female ranged from a low of 55.9% in 1985 and 1986 to a high of 61.9% in 1979.

It seems clear from this and other evidence that, in the United States:

Most cases of child maltreatment are non-sexual in nature;

Most perpetrators of child maltreatment are female;

Political Correctness in the media and the bureaucracy is covering up these facts;

Child Sexual Abuse by males has been used as an anti-male propaganda weapon by Feminists.

Political Correctness in the media and bureaucracy has been cooperating in this propaganda war.

Thomas (1993) points out that women are more likely to smack children than men are -- for the simple reason that it is the women who carry out most of the child-minding and child-rearing.

"This leaves us with sexual abuse. Clearly, women don't do it in the same way that men do. They don't have penises with which to penetrate their children. What they do instead, as those who have suffered it will tell you, is envelop and overwhelm their little victims. The experience can leave those victims psychologically crippled.

For Kerry, ... the effect of his mother's abuse had been to leave him one of life's automatic victims. His mother had regularly got into bed with him, lain over and around him and fondled his genitalia. Now adult, he was the sort of man who seemed always to be getting ready to cower in the nearest available corner. All through his childhood and teens he had been mercilessly picked on and frequently beaten up by gangs at school and in the street.... Kerry's body language screamed out his defencelessness. In the urban jungle, he was easy meat." (Thomas 1993, pages 135-6)

In December 1991, a television channel[1] reported the results of a survey, according to which one third of women had had some sort of unwanted sexual experience (i.e."molestation") before the age of 16. But can we believe that all these events were unwanted?

I would have liked the survey to include questions about how many wanted events of a sexual nature these women experienced before the age of 16. If the number of unwanted events greatly outnumbered the number of wanted events (according to the women, at least), then I would suspect they were not telling the truth. Do women start wanting sexual events at exactly age 16? Do women have weaker sex-drives than men? (Most Feminists would hate us to believe that!)

It is so easy for a woman to say, after the event, that she was an unwilling party to a sexual episode. Women typically (but not always, of course) take a passive role -- particularly as far as initiating sexual intercourse is concerned. If a man has had an errection, on the other hand, he can't very well go around saying that he didn't enjoy it.[2] It is possible to have an errection and not enjoy it, but it must be a fairly rare occurrence. Anyway, men are are socially conditioned to want and enjoy (heterosexual) sex under almost any circumstances.

Thomas (1993) also raises the question of how damaging "sexual abuse" really is. It is a very fashionable crime -- one of the most publicised types of crimes of the late 20th Century. Nevertheless, Thomas cites a German police study that found that few "victims" of sexual abuse suffered any actual harm from the abuse itself. However, some children did suffer harm from the process of investigating the cases of alleged sex abuse.

In such cases, consent by the child is deemed to be irrelevant. Children are supposed to be too young to know what they are doing in such situations. This is misleading, as children do have a kind of sexuality. This is, of course, different from adult sexuality. Children derive pleasure from touching their private parts. I have also come across, over the years, a few quite young girls initiating explicit sexual talk, which they learn not to do when they grow older, in many cases. And quite young children enjoy looking at the private parts of the opposite sex.

Nevertheless, Society does have the right to set age-limits to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. These age-limits may regulate the institution of marriage, sexual relations, censorship of pornographic and violent information, and so on. Most parents must surely feel a strong abhorrence at the thought that some adult (particularly a stranger) might have consenting or non-consenting sex with their non-adult children.

I know someone who phoned up a Social Welfare Department2 anonymously, because he was worried that his female partner was sexually molesting their infant son. Almost the first thing the female social worker asked was, "Did the boy get errections at such times?" He apparently did, but what has that got to do with it? When they convict men for molesting young girls, I'm sure they don't ask if the girls had physical sexual reactions.

No wonder few people think sexual abuse of boys by females is a problem, despite the fact that mothers have vastly more opportunity to molest their children, in most cases, than fathers do. Again I ask, do women have weaker sex-drives than men?

Feminist propaganda depicts women as victims of males. This message is drummed into us with an efficiency that Goebbels would have been proud of. But I was at New Zealand's Otaki Beach one Sunday, just before they arrested someone for a highly-publicised child-rape at Otaki, and while walking from the beach store to the beach itself, an about-ten-year-old girl delivering papers (or something) looked in my direction, as I drew level, and said something quietly to another girl (of about the same age), who was on roller-skates.

There was a slight upward slope in the footpath, and this girl on skates came up to me and said, "Hi! It's hard getting up this hill!" Obviously, that was an invitation for me to give her a hand and get myself suspected of child-molestation. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but young girls don't usually approach strangers in that way, in my experience. I've heard that many male lawyers are "paranoid" as well -- some have a policy of never giving a bath to their children, in case they are later accused of sex abuse in court if the relationship breaks up.

I am a teacher, and I had one experience of a girl who put herself into a situation where she obviously hoped her male teacher would take the initiative and get himself into trouble. Teacher unions these days warn their members about this sort of thing. Women should get punished by the legal system if they manoeuver men into situations where the men take initiatives that the women can then make a criminal complain about.

Another important aspect of sex abuse allegations is that some of them are made by adults about events that supposedly happened when they were children. The typical scenario is that the adult had no inkling that anything like this had ever happened to them until they went to see a therapist. In some countries, the therapist will get State funding and the patient will get State compensation[3] -- provided that they can together "recover" memories of some child abuse that the patient allegedly suffered. This is known as the False Memory Syndrome, and can result in the accusation and even conviction of innocent parties and the destruction of families.

Another common context that accusations of child sexual abuse crop up in is in divorce and separation proceedings. The typical scenario is for the mother to make accusations that the father sexually molested one or more of the children. This accusation does not need to be proved, but is sufficient to almost guarantee that the mother is awarded sole custody of the children. Such accusations should have to be proved in court before having any effect on custody decisions.

We all know how easy it is for a woman to get an abortion in Western countries. The law usually states that the mother's mental health, or something, needs to be at risk, but we are all aware of how loosely that is interpreted, in practice. You and I were just lucky, I guess, that our mothers didn't feel like aborting us!

But once we are actually born, we can breathe a sigh of relief, and we don't have to worry any more that our mothers can kill us and get away with it. Or do we? It turns out that infanticide, by women only, amounts to abortion by other means -- and the mother can get away with it almost as easily as with abortion, in some Western countries.

As a popular weekly magazine[4] once said, "Even though it involves the taking of life, probably no other crime is treated so sympathetically by our legal system as infanticide." Apart from abortion, of course, but that is a completely legal crime, in most cases. I wonder if the Pro-Choice lobby will now start campaigning for women's right to kill their under-age children if the mother's health is in danger?

The article in question raised the Men's Rights issue of equal punishment for men and women for equal crimes. The relevant legislation[5] requires the balance of the mother's mind to have been disturbed at the time of the crime of infanticide, before she can get off scot-free. In fact, that clause is interpreted so liberally that she doesn't actually need to have had an unbalanced mind at all. The article goes on to say that a father who kills his child may get a prison sentence of 20 years, whereas a mother who does the same will usually just just get sentenced to counselling!

As Thomas (1993) says, infanticide is a terminal form of child abuse. He cites figures from the USA which show that it is carried out mainly by women (55.7% of cases) on male children (53.7% of cases). He correctly points out that this is exactly the opposite of the propaganda picture that the Feminist-dominated media paint. Infanticide receives very little publicity, in comparison with sexual abuse. But most people would agree that infanticide is a much more serious crime than sexual abuse. After experiencing sexual abuse, after all, at least you're still alive!

Lyndon ("No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism," London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992) cites figures from England and Wales in 1989 for the ages of murder-victims (excluding aborted fetuses). The "Under 1" age-group, with 28 victims per million population, is by far the largest group. The next largest group stands at 16 victims per million population -- but that covers the 14 years between the ages of 16 and 29 (inclusive) -- not just twelve months, as the "Under 1" group does.

"Most of those babies are murdered by their mothers. Many of them are beaten to death. The crime is not counted as murder. It exists in the separate category of infanticide. The perpetrators are accorded special treatment in the courts and are most unlikely to be sentenced to any long term of detention." (Lyndon 1992, pp 37-38)

But most of the perpetrators do not get anywhere near the courts. As Thomas (1993) points out, the police do not seem interested in arresting people for infanticide -- because the offenders are mainly women! In Britain in 1989-1990, for example, only 2% of infanticide cases were solved by the police!! It would be useful to find out if the offenders were mainly the mothers of the victims. "Unfortunately," writes Thomas (1993, page 145),"the numbers dry up once men stop being the bad guys."

Some Feminists like to pretend that no woman would put herself through a rape court case unless it were true, but that is obviously just another Feminist lie. I'm sure that it must be terrible for a genuine victim of rape to go through the trial process -- but why would a false complainant suffer any anguish when perjuring herself in order to pursue some personal vendetta ?

Eugene Kanin ("False Rape Allegations", Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol.23, No. 1, 1994) studied rape allegations in a small US metropolitan community covering a 9-year period. In that period, he found that 41% of the rape allegations made were false -- by the complainant's own admission! There may of course have been others that were false, but where the complainant did not admit that they were false. He states:

"These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention."

Similarly, Feminists have been perpetrating the myth that children never lie in court about sexual abuse. This is just more Feminist propaganda. The article "Liar! Liar!" in the New Scientist of 14 February 1998 reports that three-year-old children are perfectly capable of skilfully hoodwinking other individuals, according to research carried out at the University of Portsmouth.

Here is the opening paragraph of a news item[6] about a false accusation.

"A man has been acquitted of wounding a woman after police gave new evidence in the Court of Appeal that the woman's leg injury may have been self-inflicted."

Did the police prosecute this woman for making a false complaint? No. But why not?"

False complaints are an important Men's Rights issue, because men are accused of crimes much more than women are. Whether the alleged offence is assault, rape, sexual abuse, or some other crime, no one would like to be convicted or something they didn't do, of course.

The man who was acquitted in the Appeal Court had originally been sentenced to ten months' imprisonment in the District Court, on the basis of false evidence given by this woman. He spent some time in jail on remand, plus six weeks of his actual sentence before the appeal.

It would seem to me only fair that that woman should also be sentenced to ten months imprisonment for her perjury and false complaint.

The police line in some countries seems to be that they don't like to prosecute people for making false complaints, in case that puts people off making genuine complaints. But you do see in the paper from time to time cases where the police have actually prosecuted people for making false complaints.

So what I would like to know is, how do the police decide whether to prosecute someone for making a false complaint? I suspect that men are much more likely to be prosecuted for making a false complaint than women are.

I wrote to the police asking for details of their prosecutions for false complaints, according to the category of crime involved. They replied that they didn't keep such statistics, they wouldn't compile them for me, and they wouldn't let me go through their files to compile them myself.

Neither the Ombudsman nor the Police Complaints Authority could help. I am left with the impression that there is something going on here that should not be hidden.

In the year ended 31 December 1993[7], almost 40% of sexual violation cases that were cleared, were cleared as "no offence". In other words, when someone claimed that sexual violation had taken place, and the police were able to come to a decision about what had happened, almost 40% involved false allegations. In actual numbers, 361 cases were in the "No Offence" category. And, of course, some of the 60% who were considered by the police to have committed the offence would have been acquitted in court later on.

This means that an awful lot of false allegations are being committed by women, just in the one area of sexual violation alone. I'd love to know how many actually get prosecuted for these false allegations -- I bet it's very few! The point is that there's absolutely nothing to stop women making these false allegations, unless they can get prosecuted for it.

The police are not God, nor are the courts God. They can all make mistakes. The odds are that at least some of the false accusations are going to result in wrongful convictions.

False complaints of rape and child abuse are one way that women oppress men in society today. Neil Foord was jailed for a rape that he says he did not commit. He has mounted a campaign to make people aware of the problem of false complaints of rape.[8]

Women making false accusations of rape, etc., should not get off lightly, or even scot free, as seems to occur at present. They should pay the same penalty as their victims would have paid if their false accusations had been believed.

In addition, as Neil Foord advocates, there should be compensation for men falsely accused or convicted of rape, the present restrictions on cross--examining rape complainants should be removed, monetary rewards for false complaints of rape should be removed, and there should be directives issued to Police to enquire more closely into the motives for complaints of rape.

People making false accusations (such as accusations of rape or child sexual abuse) should be prosecuted as a matter of course and police policy, and the penalties should be made equivalent to the penalties involved in the type of crime that the false accusation related to. This is necessary as a deterrent.

A balance needs to be achieved between:

   1. the needs of society to protect itself against sex abusers and rapists,
   2. and the need to protect innocent people from:

• manufactured memories of supposed abuse in childhood produced in adult minds by Feminist counsellors and
• false accusations of rape.

2002 Version

CHAPTER 6
FALSE ACCUSATIONS AND THE CHILD ABUSE LIE

Introduction

Western societies have been put into a state of collective paranoia about child sex abuse by men. This near-hysteria has been induced by the media: they lapped up the Feminists' anti-male propaganda and passed it on to the rest of us, who perhaps naively believed the media would not lie to us. In fact, until relatively recently, when I started taking an interest in the subject, like most people I believed "Child Abuse" and "Child Sex Abuse" were the same thing, though they are not.

Some therapists have encouraged adult patients to attribute a vast range of symptoms to suppressed memories of men sexually abusing them as children. Mothers have also used accusations of child abuse increasingly as a weapon in child custody disputes, according to World Wide Divorced Parents. Women have nothing to lose from using this tactic to gain sole custody and/or restrict the father's access to his children, since no proof, by the standards of the criminal court, is required for such allegations in the divorce court. Nor are they likely to be prosecuted for making false allegations of this kind – by the standards of proof required by the criminal court, it would be very hard to prove the allegations were false. So men are found guilty on the basis of mere, unproven allegations in the divorce/family court – and their accusers are immune from prosecution, because any prosecution for perjury would require actual proof!

It is important to protect children, but we need to achieve a balance between protecting society from sex abusers, and protecting innocent people from manufactured memories of abuse in childhood produced in adult minds by Feminist counsellors.

The Statistical Abstract of the United States 1992 (Table No. 301) reports that in 1976 sexual maltreatment amounted to only 3.2 percent of total cases of child maltreatment in the USA. As we all know, the Feminists have given huge amounts of publicity to this kind of crime. Consequently, other types of child maltreatment have languished from relative neglect by the Feminist-dominated media.

They have also concentrated on male sexual abusers, so it may well be that sexual abuse of children by females is greatly under-reported. The proportion of reported sex abuse in this table experienced a big jump in 1977 to 6.1 percent, then stayed fairly static until 1984, when it made another big jump to 13.3 percent. By 1986, the level had climbed to 15.7 percent of the total child maltreatment cases in the U.S.A. It is quite reasonable to assume that all the publicity about a relatively infrequent crime is motivated by a hatred of men, who are usually the victims of false accusations of sex abuse.

It would be interesting to try to link these jumps to academic and media events in America concerning child sexual abuse cases. Bob Kirkpatrick, of the World-Wide Divorced Parents organization, believes there is a connection:

"During the 1970s (according to the organization COSA), child abuse issues began to get noticed by the psychological community. At that time, the first comprehensive and control longitudinal studies of this were begun. In the late eighties, we began to see the results of these studies emerge, and make their way into the hands of government, and equally to the courts and people. (www.wwdivorcedparents.unquote.com/false.htm)"

In the 11 years from 1976 to 1986 (inclusive), the percentage of perpetrators who were female ranged from a high of 61.9 percent in 1979 to low of 55.9 percent in 1985 and 1986. The tendency has been downwards, beginning the period with 61 percent in 1976, and ending the period with 55.9 percent in 1986. It is tempting to link this to the increase in reported child sexual abuse, where most alleged perpetrators would have been male. It is also noticeable that the balance between the sex of victims was 50:50 in 1976, but the proportion became more and more weighted towards female victims, who made up 52.5 percent by 1986. This is also consistent with the influence on the figures of the reporting of the hyped-up crime of child sexual abuse, where most alleged victims would have been female.

This general scenario is given additional support by data from the Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services of the United States in Table 28 (www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/cb/stats/ncands96/table28.htm), which indicates women committed 60.7 percent of all child abuse, and Sexual Abuse accounted for only 15.3 percent of the cases. In the United States, clearly most cases of child maltreatment are non-sexual in nature, most perpetrators of child maltreatment are female, and the government bureaucracies and a politically correct media are covering up these facts. A perfect environment for Feminists to use the issue of child sexual abuse as an anti-male propaganda weapon in their war against men.

Thomas (1993) points out that women are more likely to smack children than men are – for the simple reason it is the women who carry out most of the child-minding and child-rearing:

"This leaves us with sexual abuse. Clearly, women don't do it in the same way that men do. They don't have penises with which to penetrate their children. What they do instead, as those who have suffered it will tell you, is envelop and overwhelm their little victims. The experience can leave those victims psychologically crippled. For Kerry, ... the effect of his mother's abuse had been to leave him one of life's automatic victims. His mother had regularly got into bed with him, lain over and around him and fondled his genitalia. Now adult, he was the sort of man who seemed always to be getting ready to cower in the nearest available corner. All through his childhood and teens he had been mercilessly picked on and frequently beaten up by gangs at school and in the street.... Kerry's body language screamed out his defencelessness. In the urban jungle, he was easy meat." (Thomas 1993, pages 135-6)

I would have liked the survey to include questions about how many wanted events of a sexual nature these women experienced before the age of 16. If the number of unwanted events greatly outnumbered the number of wanted events (according to the women, at least), then I would suspect they were not telling the truth. Do women start wanting sexual events at exactly age 16? Do women have weaker sex-drives than men? (Most Feminists would hate us to believe that!) And it is so easy for a woman to say, after the fact, that she was an unwilling party to a sexual episode. Women typically (but not always, of course) take a passive role – particularly insofar as initiating sexual intercourse is concerned.

Thomas (1993) also raises the question of how damaging "sexual abuse" really is. It is a very fashionable crime and one of the most publicised of the late 20th Century. Nevertheless, he cites a German police study that found few "victims" of sexual abuse suffered any actual harm from the abuse itself. However, some children did suffer from the process of investigating the cases of alleged sex abuse.

In such cases, of course, consent by the child is deemed to be irrelevant. Children are supposed to be too young to know what they are doing in such situations. This is misleading, as children do have a kind of sexuality. Certainly it is different from adult sexuality but children do derive pleasure from touching their private parts. Moreover, many also take gleeful delight in violating taboos. Over the years, I have observed a few quite young girls initiate explicit sexual talk, which they learn not to do as they grow older, in many cases. And quite young children also enjoy looking at the private parts of the opposite sex.

Nevertheless, society sets age-limits to mark the transition from childhood to adulthood. These limits regulate the institution of marriage, sexual relations, censorship of pornographic and violent information, and so on. Consequently, adults are accustomed to thinking of children as being relatively innocent, and would like them to remain innocent until at least their teenage years.

It certainly makes sense for children not to take part in "adult" activities until they are physically and psychologically ready for both the relationships and for any child-rearing that may result from their activities. Most parents must surely feel a strong abhorrence at the thought that some adult (particularly a stranger) might have consenting or non-consenting sex with their non-adult children. Yet it seems the judicial and welfare systems are more alert to the possibility of female victims of male abusers than male victims of female abusers.

For example, I know someone who phoned up a Social Welfare Department anonymously, because he was worried that his female partner was sexually molesting their infant son.[2] Almost the first thing the female social worker asked was, "Did the boy get erections at such times?" He apparently did, but what has that got to do with it? When they convict men for molesting young girls, I'm sure they don't ask irrelevant questions like, "Did the girl's nipples get hard at such times?"

No wonder few people think sexual abuse of boys by females is a problem, despite the fact that mothers have vastly more opportunity to molest their children, in most cases, than fathers do. On June 1, 1996, the New Zealand Listener, for example, reported that in one study of 97 sexually abuse males, 15 had been sexually abused by females.

Feminist propaganda depicts women as victims of males. This message is drummed into us with an efficiency that would have made Goebbels proud. Society's learned propensity to treat males as abusers and females as victims, however, has turned all males into potential victims of false accusations. I've heard many male lawyers are growing more paranoid as well – some have a policy of never giving a bath to their children, in case they are later accused of sex abuse in court if their marriage breaks up.

I am a teacher, and I had one experience of a girl in senior high school who put herself into a situation where she obviously hoped her male teacher would take the initiative (and possibly get himself into trouble). This girl always sat in the front row, right in front of my desk. She started staying behind after class, after all her classmates had gone. She would just sit there - saying nothing and doing nothing - while I tidied up and got ready to leave the class. A male teacher is bound to see that sort of behaviour as an invitation for him to chat her up, if she is attractive, because that's the male role when a female behaves like that. If a male student did that to a female teacher, however, she would not feel it as an invitation to chat him up, because it is not the female role to initiate such encounters. So I consider that that girl was sexually harassing me by just sitting there and doing nothing every day. That form of sexual harassment by female students should be recognised, otherwise a male teacher who chatted her up would get into trouble for something that was essentially her fault.

Teacher unions warn their members about this sort of thing. Maybe it's time for the authorities to warn men about women who set them up. Women should get punished by the legal system if they manoeuvre men into situations where the men take initiatives that the women can then make a criminal complaint about.

There is an apparent double-standard at work in the education system in New Zealand – and probably in all Western countries: men are judged more harshly than women for similar behaviours. For example, a woman teacher who admitted having sex with some of her male students was not refused a renewal of her registration as a teacher, because her school did not lodge a complaint against her, and she was, moreover, able to get another teaching job! Her only excuse, on television, was that the boys were attractive! It is impossible to imagine a male teacher being treated with that sort of leniency. So it is not surprising that the overwhelming majority ( about 90%) of New Zealand teachers who were refused a renewal of their registration in the year 2000 were males!

Another important aspect of sex abuse allegations is that some of them are made by adults about events that supposedly happened when they were children. The typical scenario is that the adult had no inkling anything like this happened until they went to see a therapist. In some countries, the therapist will get state funding and the patient will get state compensation provided they can "recover" memories of some child abuse the patient allegedly suffered.[3] This is known as the False Memory Syndrome, and can result in the accusation and even conviction of innocent parties and the destruction of families – see, for example, the Paul Ingram case:

"In 1988 his two daughters accused him and a number of prominent men in the community of satanic ritual abuse and sexual abuse. There were months of whispered rumors, extensive questioning, and finally, arrest, incarceration, interrogation, and even an exorcism to "cast out" the evil that Paul's pastor was convinced caused Paul to perform such insidious acts. ... Paul, not wanting his daughters to suffer through a trial, pled (sic) guilty, was sentenced, and then transferred to a facility outside of Thurston County.” (members.aol.com/IngramOrg/index.htm)

1. World Wide Divorced Parents – www.wwdivorcedparents.unquote.com
2. False sexual allegations – www.geocities.com/peterzohrab/wcosacus.html
3. False Accused newsletter – www.accused.com

We all know how easy it is for a woman to get an abortion in western countries. The law frequently states that the mother's mental health, or something, needs to be at risk, but that is subject to loose interpretations in practice. You and I were just lucky, I guess, that our mothers didn't feel like aborting us!

But once we are actually born, we can breathe a sigh of relief: we don't have to worry any more that our mothers can kill us and get away with it. Or do we? It turns out that infanticide, by women only, amounts to abortion by other means – and the mother can get away with it almost as easily as with abortion, in some western countries.

As a New Zealand magazine observed, "Even though it involves the taking of life, probably no other crime is treated so sympathetically by our legal system as infanticide."[4] (Apart from abortion, of course, but that is a completely legal crime, in most cases. I wonder if the Pro-Choice lobby will now start campaigning for women's right to kill their under-age children if the mother's health is in danger?) The magazine described the case of a mother who was sentenced to two years' supervision for infanticide. If a man had committed that crime, he would have received a twenty-year sentence. Men get much longer sentences just for rape – when no loss of life is involved. The difference is, of course, that a woman is always treated as a victim, even if she is a criminal.

The journalist, Denis Welch, raised the men's rights issue of equal punishment for men and women for equal crimes. The law requires the balance of the mother's mind to have been disturbed at the time of the crime of infanticide, before she can get off scot-free. In practice, that clause is interpreted so liberally that she doesn't actually need to have had an unbalanced mind at all. Welch states that a father who kills his child may get a prison sentence of 20 years, whereas a mother who does the same will usually just just get sentenced to counselling![5]

As Thomas (1993) says, infanticide is a terminal form of child abuse. He cites figures from the U.S.A. which show it is committed mainly by women (55.7 percent of cases) on male children (53.7 percent of cases). He notes this is exactly the opposite of the picture painted by the Feminist-dominated media. Infanticide receives very little publicity compared to sexual abuse. But most people would agree infanticide is a much more serious crime than sexual abuse. After experiencing sexual abuse, after all, at least you're still alive!

Lyndon (No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992) cites figures from England and Wales in 1989 for the ages of murder-victims (excluding aborted fetuses). The "Under 1" age-group, with 28 victims per million population, is by far the largest group. The next largest group stands at 16 victims per million population – but that covers the 14 years between the ages of 16 and 29 (inclusive) – not just twelve months, as the "Under 1" group does.

Most of those babies are murdered by their mothers. Many of them are beaten to death. The crime is not counted as murder. It exists in the separate category of infanticide. The perpetrators are accorded special treatment in the courts and are most unlikely to be sentenced to any long term of detention. (Lyndon 1992, pp 37-38)

Most of the perpetrators, however, go nowhere near the courts. As Thomas (1993) points out, the police seem uninterested in arresting people for infanticide – because the offenders are mainly women. In Britain in 1989-1990, for example, only 2 percent of infanticide cases were solved by the police. It would be useful to find out if the offenders were mainly the mothers of the victims. "Unfortunately," writes Thomas (1993, page 145),"the numbers dry up once men stop being the bad guys."

False Accusations of Rape and Sexual Abuse
Some Feminists like to pretend that no woman would put herself through a rape court case unless it were true, but that is obviously just another one of their lies. I'm sure it must be terrible for a genuine victim of rape to go through the trial process, but why would a false complainant suffer any anguish when perjuring herself to pursue some personal vendetta?

Eugene Kanin (False Rape Allegations, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol.23, No. 1, 1994) studied rape allegations in a small US metropolitan community covering a 9-year period. In that period, he found that 41 percent of the rape allegations made were false – by the complainant's own admission! He states:

These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention.

Similarly, Feminists have been perpetrating the myth children never lie in court about sexual abuse. This is just more Feminist propaganda. The article Liar! Liar! in the New Scientist of 14 February 1998 reports that three-year-old children are perfectly capable of skillfully hoodwinking other individuals, according to research carried out at the University of Portsmouth.

Moreover, when women lie, they generally go unpunished. For example, here is the opening paragraph of a news item about a false accusation:

A man has been acquitted of wounding a woman after police gave new evidence in the Court of Appeal that the woman's leg injury may have been self-inflicted.[6]

The man who was acquitted in the Appeal Court had originally been sentenced to ten months' imprisonment in the District Court on the basis of the false testimony given by this woman. He spent some time in jail on remand, plus six weeks of his actual sentence before the appeal. It would seem only fair that she should also be sentenced to ten months imprisonment for her perjury and false complaint.

The police say they don't like to prosecute people for making false complaints because it might have a "chilling effect" and put off people with genuine complaints. But you do see in the paper from time to time cases where the police have actually prosecuted people for making false complaints. How do they decide when to prosecute someone for making a false complaint? Are men more likely to be prosecuted for making a false complaint than women? I wrote to the police in my locale asking for details of their prosecutions for false complaints, according to the category of crime involved. They replied that they don't keep such statistics, they wouldn't compile them for me, nor would they let me go through their files to compile them myself.

Neither the Ombudsman nor the Police Complaints Authority would help. I am left with the impression there is something going on that should not be hidden.

In the year ended 31 December 1993, almost 40 percent of sexual violation cases were cleared as "no offence." That is, the police found that almost 40 percent involved false allegations.[7] In actual numbers, 361 cases were in the "No Offence" category. And, of course, some of the 60 percent who were considered by the police to have committed the offence were acquitted in court later on. This means that a lot of women are lying to the police, and just in this one area of sexual violation alone. But do any of them get prosecuted for it? Probably not. Nor are they likely to stop until they are.

The police are not God, nor are the courts. They can all make mistakes. The odds are that at least some of the false accusations are going to result in wrongful convictions. But the power of the Feminist lobby is such that police and the courts are almost ideologically compelled to believe women's accusations against men. It also means they are unlikely to punish women who lie. False complaints of rape, domestic violence, and child abuse are one way that women oppress men today.

No one would like to be convicted for something they didn't do – but imprisonment is not the only way men suffer from the false accusations of some malicious woman. Another frequent consequence is the almost certain loss of custody of their children, and/or access on reasonable terms after divorce or separation. Not to mention the damage to their reputation, the public opprobrium and even witch-hunts they may suffer. This is one reason for the growth in the international fathers' movement. Individual men are prepared to put up with a lot of unfairness and oppression, but once it starts cutting them off from their children, even the work will turn!

Neil Foord, for example, was jailed for a rape he says he did not commit. He has mounted a campaign to make people aware of the problem of false complaints of rape.[8] Women making false accusations of rape, etc., should not get off lightly, or even scot-free, as seems to occur at present. They should pay the same penalty their victims would have paid if the false accusations had been believed. Beyond this, Foord advocates compensation for men falsely accused or convicted of rape. He demands that the present restrictions on cross-examining rape-complainants and the monetary rewards for false complaints of rape should be removed, and that there should be directives issued to police to enquire more closely into the motives for complaints of rape.

People making false accusations (such as accusations of rape or child sexual abuse) should be prosecuted as a matter of course and police policy, and the penalties should be equivalent to the penalties involved in the type of crime the false accusation related to. This is necessary as a deterrent.

We need to achieve a balance between the needs of society to protect itself against sex abusers and rapists, and the need to protect innocent people from manufactured memories of supposed abuse in childhood produced in adult minds by Feminist counsellors, and false accusations of rape. And crimes that are typically committed by women – or which happen to be committed by individual women -- should not be treated any differently than those committed by men.
 
 

Last Update: 28 December 2004

©Peter Zohrab