G'day Nicholas,
Thank you for this refreshing, well written article.

I appreciate your style and your encouragement (and challenge!) for men.

Regards,

Pete

>men need discipline, persistence, order and dependability<
Well young men who may well have none of the above, may find they gain/develop all of it from a (perhaps even enforced) period of military service.
And then add/get the needed empathy through humanity missions.
Like being first in after a natural disaster, and taking care of disaster victims and their needs.
And there's nothing more heart wrenching than to see an emaciated mum trying to suckle a skin and bone infant on a bone dry nipple!
Try looking into eyes that have lost everything except hope; (bless you and or, thank God you're here) and then try to deny your emotions or natural human empathy!
In the words of a song and a father's advice; "one doesn't have to fight to be a man"!
Just putting the needs of others first for awhile,(even if that also means emptying the wallet a few times during your life/going without a beer for a few weeks) will do nicely!
Rhrosty.

Thanks for the good, positive piece Nick. I think you hit the nail on the head with your focus on community.

The past few decades have seen the community in most Western countries become fragmented and the functional roles filled by organised corporate entities of various kinds. The family has lost its place as the fundamental social organisational unit, replaced by a rigidified set of overlapping structural elements that have emerged from the inexorable rise of managerial culture. At the same time, a rhetoric of self-determination has become prevalent, which has lead to the rise of a kind of tribalism based not on mutuality of need, but on need of mutuality. Self-esteem has become an abstraction that justifies an abstract emotionality as the primary driver of sociality. You can do whatever you want (as long as there is a social structure that enables and justifies it) and I must never do anything that might cause you to feel (not think, but feel) bad about that choice.

What has been lost is the recognition that self-esteem, the regard of others and happiness generally are not gifts or elephant stamps awarded by teacher for having neatly tied shoelaces, but require effort to earn and the value of any of them is directly proportional both to what effort is put in and even more importantly, why.

This applies to men and it also applies to women. My only criticism of your piece is that in focussing on the negative impacts on men you are to some extent perpetuating those aspects of ideological/political/cultural tribalism that you correctly point out has created dysfunction.

Men and women are both poorly served by the present model. We're in this together and the sooner we start acting that way, the better.

What we need to do is close the humanities departments of all universities, plaster over the navels of all folk like Nick, so they can't sit around all day cogitating on the damn things, trying to dream up new problems for them to solve.

If we had less people like Nick making up problems, then telling other people they had these problems, there would be a lot less people believing they have problems.

So Nick, please stop dreaming up problems to label people with. We did just fine for thousands of years, without specialists to tell us we were sick, & we will do just fine without you dreaming up new ways for us to be sick.

'As an example, when I asked friends and colleagues what percentage of men they thought were the perpetrators of child abuse, the answers were in the 80-90% range. New data from the United States shows only 45% of child abuse perpetrators were men.'

Here we go again ... still. I've seen this little statistical sleight-of-hand so many times now.

This 'statistic' is arrived at by lumping neglect in with abuse, which are really separate issues with very different motivations. As women are still expected to be the primary carer of children, they spend an overwhelmingly longer period of time with children than do men. Consequently, they feature significantly higher in the 'neglect' statistics (70-90%, according to most surveys). However, women still feature very low in the 'abuse' statistics, especially after factoring in the huge gender imbalance of time spent with children.

This of course severely distorts the overall 'abuse' figures, to make it look as if women are much more violent towards children than men are - when in reality, the opposite is the case.

That's not to say that neglect is not a serious issue - of course it is - but it does not constitute proactively violent abuse. Quote the neglect/abuse statistics by all means, but don't manipulate them to downplay male violence, which is still the number one global problem that negatively affects all men, women and children everywhere.

And the tribalism continues.

How exactly is male suicide a 'made up issue', Hasbeen? Seems like a pretty real, pretty serious issue to me.

Especially if it's your dad, brother, uncle, mate or lover that's suicided.

You can blame a stack of stuff on humanities studies. High rates of suicide in men isn't one of them.

Yes Pete, I agree that the young male, mostly country based, suicide statistics are a tragedy. The sooner we have more mental health facilities and staff to help our country folk as well as city people, the better.

Hasbeen is a relic from the good ol' days when men were men, and anyone with a mental health issue were considered weak., so don't look to him for any manly care.

The author's assertions that ...."45% of child abuse perpetrators are men." only serves to stir the gender wars re violence even further.

Of course child abuse comes in several forms, but it is well known that men are by far the most likely to inflict sexual abuse on children, so why not just say that if we are looking at statistics?
Maybe the university studies are not inundated with rabid feminists, as is often put out there by rabid mens groups, but it is the opposite that is true?

It's nice to see something positive about men being written.

Killarney,

Neglect is often worse than abuse. Most child deaths are caused by their mothers. Neglect causes real, life-long damage due to physical and emotional damage.

There are severe cases of abuse but there are also many trivial ones. I'm thinking of cases like the swimmer who ruined the career of her elite coach because he apparently 'touched her thigh' in a massage. These sort of trivial claims ruin lives but also count in the 'abuse' statistics.

We also know there are real incentives during relationship break-ups for women to claim their ex-partner abused their kids.

The fact is there is an entire abuse industry out there which distorts the severity and number of abuse claims.

It's a little sad to watch the way tribal loyalties establish the cognitive biases that define and constrain responses (and limit the ability of otherwise intelligent people to process ideas).

To paraphrase a well known aphorism: "It's hard to soar like an eagle if you think like a turkey".

Dane you must have ESP do you, to know all those child abuse claims are false?
You must also think very poorly of the justice system that must charge these child abusers after considering the evidence?
Or are the justice system staff all feminists as well?

No one is saying that women do not abuse children in the form of physical or emotional neglect, and rarely, sexual abuse, because of course they do.

Why do you find it so hard to admit that men are the predominant child sexual abusers?
The mental health system is full of patients who were sexually abused as children by male 'friends' or relatives...both male and female patients.
Maybe they are all lying, and just enjoy being in the awful mental health system?

. Do you believe men when they say they were sexually abused as children by male paedophiles?

You are so angry at women in general, I doubt you would believe much at all....

Suse,

'You must also think very poorly of the justice system that must charge these child abusers after considering the evidence?'

Who could not think poorly of our 'justice' system? When it comes to abuse all rights have been stripped away and the accused (nearly always male) must basically prove themselves innocent.

There is a whole victim industry out there that has worked assiduously to disempower men by portraying them all as violent rapists. They have been hugely successful. Men are now so marginalized they can be routinely discriminated against. For example, men in planes being asked to move if sat next to a child or just last week a theme park in the UK refused entry to a single man because he....was a man.

'Dane you must have ESP do you, to know all those child abuse claims are false?'

The Family court is so secretive that requiring ESP is not actually far fetched. What isn't far fetched is that false abuse claims are routinely made and that fathers rarely get custody of their children.

The problem is that sex abuse numbers are exaggerated while the damage that women do is routinely underplayed. Women who make false abuse allegations do incredible harm. They attempt to destroy their ex with the stigma attached to the worst possible crime and deny their children their right to a father all because they want to make their ex suffer. So here, destroying a man's life counts for nothing and is actually counted in statistics as 'abuse' which can then in turn be used to further bludgeon men with.

And you ask if I think poorly of the justice system?

So feminists have been working to achieve this goal of complete domination over men for over 40 years now and when they finally achieve it you ask if I should blame feminists.

Whilst I agree that there are differences between neglect and other forms of abuse I think in context with the point being made in the article about perceptions of who abuses children and the reality the diversion regarding splitting out neglect or a focus on child sexual abuse are diversions rather than valid rebuttals.

It is difficult for most of us to find credible breakdowns of substantiated abuse by gender of perpetrator and type of abuse (and I've not found a level of detail I am happy with).

Its also difficult to get a good handle on actual rates of abuse and neglect vs whats substantiated, numbers for overall rates ar to easily manipulated according to the agenda of the group making the claims. I suspect a lot of abuse either is not reported or can't be substantiated but substantaited cases are the best numbers available to try and avoid the excesses of agenda driven numbers.

A coverage of Australian numbers for substantiated abuse can be found at https://www3.aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/child-abuse-and-neglect-statistics

Emotional abuse is covered which was not something I recall from earlier version of the report. To highlight the nature of the diversion involved in a focus on sexual abuse, of 7618 substantaiated abuse and neglect cases in Qld in the period 350 were child sexual abuse. In NSW the proportions were far different however sexual abuse is still a relatively small proportion of substantiated abuse and neglect. For those who want to seperate out neglect the numbers are in the charts but I'm not convinced there is enough detail to do so in an honest manner.

R0bert

Hey guys,
Lets not this article be chopped up in the gender wars, feminism, the family court or abuse / neglect statistics.

I think we can all agree that family law is as imperfect as all of us and there will always be injustices.

Are there structural changes that could be made? Of course.

Let's focus on the article at hand though. How can men help other men? Is it a 'hey, what's up, want to go for a beer and shoot the breeze?' between men? Is it a heavier focus on mens mental health? It it a greater focus on both men and women to understand men more?

Men need men. Boys need their dads. Men need their dads, their uncles and their brothers.

Manhood can be a lonely road, especially if you want to walk the straight and narrow. Sometimes it will be hard. Sometimes it will feel like there's no support around. Men, you're not alone. There's no shame in having a chat with other blokes, getting some support and realising you don't need to walk alone.

Thanks Pete for bringing some good sense back into the argument.
I would add though that daughters need their dads too, and that women love and need all the menfolk in their lives too.

Dane, just think for a moment that you are one of the judges deciding on child abuse cases. If you give the accused the benefit of the doubt because you think the kids are being 'coached' to lie, and let them off, only to find they abuse the children later, then how awful that would be?
Yet, if you condemn someone for something they didn't do, it would be equally awful.

I think the courts do the best they can, and use the evidence they have been given.
I don't believe there is some great feminist conspiracy out there to target men.
That belief is just paranoid.

Suse,

'Dane, just think for a moment that you are one of the judges deciding on child abuse cases. If you give the accused the benefit of the doubt because you think the kids are being 'coached' to lie, and let them off, only to find they abuse the children later, then how awful that would be?'

This perfectly exemplifies what I mean.

How could any judge, in the context of an acrimonious divorce, possibly take any unsubstantiated claim of child abuse seriously? What a joke.

If it were true and the mother was only now bringing it to light shouldn't she too be punished for covering it up until the divorce?

What about the presumption of innocence? Hasn't that been around for around 1000 years?

It has been great to see some women sentenced to jail terms in the UK for making proven false rape claims. It's about time women were also held responsible for their actions.

Everyone knows that if a man holds up a bank with a fake gun he is still charged with armed robbery and faces 20 years in jail. Well, women have been getting away with using fake guns for far too long.

If you want me to take abuse/rape statistics seriously then punishments need to be just as serious for false claims as for actually offending.

You opinion is typical of feminists: better that 100 innocent man go to jail than 1 guilty man goes free.

Unless you are the accused man in these false accusation cases Dane, how do you know they aren't lying? How do you know the women are lying?

How many men accused of child abuse say " yep that's right, I did it."?
There are only very few accrimonious divorces that end up fighting over the kids in family courts, and you use these men as your pillars of goodness?

Neither you nor I know the real truth about what really happens in other family homes before break-ups.
It is up to the family courts to decide because that is the law, and I don't presume to know better than them.

Judges are expected to make judgements and there is a great deal of accumulated wisdom for them to draw on to help them make good judgements. In a perfect world they would have perfect information and they could make perfect judgements. Alas, this isn't a perfect world and they must rely on evidence adduced by self-interested parties who hope to thereby convince the judge that their case is the more meritorious or perhaps, less meritricious. The principles of jurisprudence must always guide the way to his decision, or an appeal will surely ensue.

The Judge must have regard to many things beyond the arguments presented or the relevant legislation and precedent, including the Practice Directions of the court, the potential for further litigation by dissatisfied parties, the possibility of negative publicity if the ruling is seen to be incongruent with the interests of third parties including advocacy groups and so on.

They don't always get it right, but I'd say it's remarkable that they ever get it right in the context of Family Law.

They would do even better if the public debate on Family Law matters was more nuanced, since there would very likely be fewer cases brought in which spurious claims were seen as a possible means of enhancing the power of a party's argument. We have had no-fault divorce for decades, after all.

I mentioned tribalism earlier and it seems to have failed to strike a chord. What I meant by that, in this context, is exemplified by the typical discussion on this forum on contentious matters, in which it's not uncommon to see dozens or more posts from a small set of people (who are obviously old sparring partners) which lead not to understanding or agreement, but reiterate what are essentially articles of tribal faith on both sides.

It's spear-shaking and shield-beating, ritualised and formalised and meaningless.

Surely all the clever tribespeople here can put their minds to finding a better way to go about things? Even the great Wall dividing Germany was eventually dismantled, after all.

Craig Mins,

Hi Craig, when you first mentioned tribalism I imagined I hope correctly, you were using it as Ayn Rand did.

While there is some truth in what you observe about tribalism among some posters here and some even use the exact same slabs of words years after year in parallel/tangential discussions, it is important I reckon that you don't join them and return to the helicopter view you had previously.

Is this what you meant in your earlier post, if so yes, there is a lot of good fodder there to get our teeth into,

file:///C:/Users/John/Downloads/104-362-1-PB%20(1).pdf
Excerpt below,

"Feminism has become a form of gender tribalism, a collectivism that denigrates individual agency
and accomplishment in favor of the group or sisterhood. Positing women as the victims of oppressive
forces beyond their control, feminism is today the leading voice in declaring women to be helpless and
incapable of accomplishment without significant government aid. A mentality of entitlement and dependency
has come to replace the more liberating idea of individual accomplishment; a “neo-hausfrau”
movement. Feminism has degraded men and women alike. The rhetoric of liberation obscures a movement
that replaces individual responsibility and achievement with a tribal mindset subservient to the
group."

I tried to read Atlas Shrugged some years ago and found it relentlessly misanthropic. However, google tells me that your observation is perceptive and I've made a note to acquire a copy of 'Global Balkanisation', so that's a surprise! Since my usage is my own though, Rand isn't relevant to this.

I would like to maintain my "hot air balloon" (seems more apt than a helicopter, as any of my victi...friends would agree)perspective and so I will refrain from a comment on your quoted passage.

We have much bigger fish to fry.

Instead of the dead remnants of a socio-economic model that has its feet in the Industrial Revolution we should be seeking inspiration from the 2005 Nobel winning work of Aumann et al, who drew on John Nash's brilliantly simple formalisation of game theory to show that competitive cooperation is the only path to a long-term stable strategic equilibrium.

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=624

This is so fundamental a thing to understand that it should be engraved on every flat surface everywhere.

It's also something we used to consider definitively Australian - the Fair Go for all.

How radical.

Onthebeach

Thanks for drawing my attention back to Rand. I have largely ignored her work over the years, probably because I first encountered it when I was quite young and didn't have a good framework to fit it into.

I was a little intrigued by the small reading I did as a result of your comment and it seems I may have to revisit her work. Thanks again.

This discussion seems to have run its course. What a shame. I hoped there may have been some among the loyal tribalists able to see over the forest of spears and past the wall of shields.

Never mind, at least nobody can get hurt in this playground where the spears are pointless and the shields are gossamer thin tissue, designed for ease of display. The display, after all, is the thing.

Funnily enough, even in this it seems that Aumann was correct and a stable form of equilibrium has been established based on cooperative competition. If only the competition and the cooperation had a more useful purpose than mere display and a more noble motivation than simple tribalism.

Imagine what might be achieved!

Thank you to all for the comments and the (mostly) useful discussion. The reason I wrote the article was to try to highlight what I see as a gap in the national and global discussion. That gap is that we need to do more to help men address men’s issues to benefit men. Not just because it will benefit families and women, which it will. But because we need to see men as more than a perpetrator, or even a partner. Men need to be front and centre as the primary beneficiaries and change agents. The evidence (imperfect as it often is) consistently allows us to see the health and social issues we face are completely unacceptable. This is not a rant against feminism nor a denial of other issues in society. It is a call for men to do more to help men address some real challenges. The best chance of success is when we see ourselves as the solution to our own problems.

Oh no, Mr Author, not more gender tribalism!

I am a man, you are a man, but we both only exist because a man and a woman got together to cooperate in the most fundamental way.

A real tribe is made up of men and women who rely on each other for the basic needs of survival and every human alive today is descended from people who lived in such tribes. They knew that there were differences between men and women and they had some things that were men's business and other things that were women's business, but both men's and women's business was needed for the tribe's success and everyone knew it. Women respected men who were good at men's business and men respected women who took their own business seriously.

We must not allow ourselves to become separate tribes of men and women, where women deride men for doing men's business and vice versa. We need women to respect and encourage men's business and men to do the same for women. This is the only fundamentally human way to be.

Competitive cooperation requires a deliberate decision to accept difference and working together to ensure that despite it, everyone gets enough of what they need to be satisfied well enough that they are prepared to keep up the cooperation. As soon as any one group puts their own needs ahead of that basic principle, we end up in a destructive cycle of spear rattling and shield beating and everyone ends up worse off because nobody is tending the garden or hunting the pigs or suckling the children or keeping the wolves at bay.

It's a no-brainer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sxpKhIbr0E

A TedX Talk by Scott Geller, a Professor of Behavioural Psychology.

Watch it.

"Of course child abuse comes in several forms, but it is well known that men are by far the most likely to inflict sexual abuse on children"

Many "well known" things are not necessarily so. Abuse by female staff of young male inmates in the juvenile detention system of the USA is rampant. And hardly anyone takes it seriously.

Oh - and here's a factoid for you: *most* rapists (outright knife-at-the-throat rapists) were sexually abused by a woman as a teen or child. Get it? The juvenile detention system of the USA is turning boys and young men into future rapists. And no-one does a thing.

It is *rare* for a father to sexually abuse a natural child. Almost all filial sexual abuse is at the hands of a step-parent, which brings us back to the fact that 80% of divorces are initiated by women.