Cornflower,

In response to your post about women and child abuse ... The traditional power relationship of women over children is in many respects a mirror of the traditional power relationship of men over women. The fact that women are often perpetrators of violence against children (although still not as much as men) can be partly attributed to being an assertion of that power – going down the food-chain so to speak. This is why I believe that a more honest recognition of the distribution of political power in our domestic and social relationships – between men and women and between adults and children – would go a long way in isolating many of the factors that lead to violence, particularly domestic violence and child abuse.

MLK

So it is heads women win and tails men lose - women don't commit crime but if they do then it is ultimately men's fault?

Have you ever considered that maybe there could be other more relevant factors contributing to child abuse and neglect than the sex of the person?

Allow me to lead you a little, what about (say) poverty? Or maybe lack of education. Then you could look at..... Get my drift?

Now if we apply this thinking to crime and anti-social behavior in a more general sense, perhaps there might be factors at work other than the sex of the perpetrator?

Years ago, criminologists collected the heads of executed criminals and preserved them for scientific examination in the hope that head shape and features could foretell the propensity to commit crime.
Are you saying they should they have pickled scrotums instead?

MLK,
So feminists continuously malign the male gender and produce a whole series of mistruths and misinformation, in an attempt to bring about equality.

Seems an odd way of going about equality.

I understand that in the US it has been calculated that the average male is likely to receive a 75% grater prison term than a female for exactly the same offence.

The prison terms recently handed out to female paedophiles in Australia highlight a similar situation in this country also, (but it is something that is rarely mentioned by these wonderful “equality” feminists).

Discrimination, I have always found, is firmly in the eye of the beholder.

If I were so inclined, I might write an article that protested that because 80% of prisoners are men, it proves that our law enforcement processes discriminate against the male gender.

But that would be silly, wouldn't it?

However, the real authorial sleight-of-hand is found in the summary at the end.

>>Imagine crime prevention programs that targeted boys and young men<<

It is actually hard to imagine an existing crime prevention programme that *isn't* targetted at boys and young men.

Can the author perhaps supply some examples of one that isn't so targetted? I presume she has some in mind.

Or as an alternative, perhaps she could describe how such a crime prevention programme would differ from one that is targetted at girls and young women? Something a little more illuminating than her offering of

>>...early family intervention programs differentiated to acknowledge and nurture genetically determined strengths (sexual and otherwise)<<

Whatever that means.

In fact, what does it mean? Any ideas?

Many things are done in the name of political correctness. For instance you have never mentioned that people from migrant backgrounds are also more likely to commit crimes. Australia would never allow this statistic to be published, but most international crime statistics demonstrate this to be true. The most recent case was in Sweden last year when it was demonstrated that those from migrant backgrounds were more than 4 times more likely to commit violent crime. Of course even there, most of the media twisted the figures to hide the facts. That makes the average Aussie guy alot less likely to commit a crime.
Just the other day I heard about someone being gang bashed in Melbourne. I immediately knew that would not be aussies, as aussies don't gang bash as a general rule. Later that night on TV, my suspicions were confirmed. It was a group of 7-8 asian males.
So if we are going to tell the truth, tell the whole truth.

I don’t’ quite know what Bilson is pushing against. I would agree that because it is assumed it is worth explicitly stating that most crime is committed by men. And I fully agree with Bilson that there can be great benefit from doing so, in terms of more targeted research, programs, and greater insight into causes of crime. But this has certainly been explicitly discussed in criminology at least since the early 90s, and has been increasingly spreading through police practice and prison and parole administration.

Who or what are the people or institutions which are actively denying or wishing to obfuscate the issue? I agree that NSW BOSCAR does not publish gender-based stats, and this is a recognised problem amongst researchers, if not police. But other states do collect gender statistics, as does ABS, suggesting that there could be local or historical reasons for BOSCAR’s collection lacuna.

She says “imagine crime prevention programs that targeted boys and young men, without labels of them being sexist, discriminatory, or self-serving.” Could she provide examples where this has happened? I am not aware of any high-profile cases reported in the media. As one poster here comments, it’s hard to imagine such programs which DON’T have those targets – although perhaps her complaint is that this targeting is not explicit. If this is so, she could say this, which is a different point to the ones she makes.

Bilson claims she wants to get this issue on the agenda. But if she really does want it discussed and, more importantly, acted on, why did she bring it forward by claiming conspiracy? In doing so, she is eliciting similar highly polarised views, as evidenced by some comments posted here. Has she taken a leaf out of President Shrub’s book and launched a pre-emptive strike – just in case?