Recently I received a letter from a mother whose family has spent the last two years in the criminal courts battling to protect their 16 year-old son from rape accusations. “The police investigation was so biased against our son and completely incompetent,’ she said, explaining that the police didn’t bother checking messages on the girl’s phone which proved the sexual activity was consensual.
After spending their life savings, over $470,000, on legal fees, the girl’s lies were exposed and the charges withdrawn. The emotional and financial cost on our family is unimaginable. No family should have to go through what we have been through,” wrote the mother, asking what could be done to warn other parents.
Over the last few decades, I have received many hundreds of similar emails from mothers seeking to get the word out about what is happening to their sons. Not just sons accused of rape but sons who have lost homes and their children after Family Court battles, men facing false violence accusations, #MeToo charges, discrimination in the workplace. It’s not just our court systems which are now weaponised against men. Unfair treatment is rife throughout our society, with so many men suffering as women’s word is believed, women always supported while men are distrusted and ignored.
I have often helped mothers to contact others who have faced similar experiences. Women who have managed to fight off false sexual assault allegations have offered support and advice to other mums who find themselves just embarking on this nightmare. I have connected women seeking advice for sons who have spent years fighting off violence accusations, or cripplingly unfair child support assessments, or women facing the heartbreak of children alienated not only from their sons but their grandparents.
Whilst the entire family is impacted by what’s happening to these men, there’s something very powerful about hearing mothers speaking out about these issues. As women their voices are more likely to be heard in a society which is so often indifferent to the pain suffered by men.
New group to fight the good fight.
I was delighted to be approached recently by a group of mothers who had come together as a result of being connected by me. As mothers of sons who have suffered unfair treatment, they have decided to go public to expose what’s going on here. They are starting a Mothers of Sons website which will showcase their own stories, exposing the real-life experiences being faced by these families. And here are women in a position to offer practical advice – warnings to other mothers about how to protect their sons from a system geared towards persecuting men and boys.
I’ve made a video with one of these mums. I’ve called her “Mary” we had to disguise her details and her voice because the family is still in court. It took seven years to convince the Family Court to give her son given residency of his children – seven years after their mother first threatened to kill herself and the children. Still the mother was able to simply front up to a magistrates court with an unproven violence accusation against her ex-husband, and the children ended up back in her care – without the magistrate even bothering to check out the family’s Family Court history. Such is the state of our broken court system.
Here’s the video – I hope you will listen to this mother’s story and her exciting news about the new group.
Help Mothers of Sons get their message out
Many of the men reading this have been through similar ordeals. I’m hoping those of you whose mothers have shared this painful history might persuade them to join the Mothers of Sons group.
Mothers of Sons has put together a list of the many ways you might contribute. Here’s their request for help:
We’ve pulled together a team of designers, graphic artists and IT people to help build the website but can always do with more expertise for building and running the site.
Among the dozen or so mothers working together to make this happen are a few professional women who will be on the management team but we will need more people with relevant time and skills.
But we are also looking for the following:
- People – we want volunteers with relevant experience such as: editing copy and video, running and updating websites, managing online forums and helping to build the public profile of our organisation.
- Personal stories – we welcome your personal stories for publication on the site covering all the areas where your sons have experienced unfair treatment. These include in the Family Court; false accusations of rape or violence and difficulty with the police and criminal courts; AVOs, #metoo accusations; workplace harassment and gender discrimination.
- Videos – we plan to make videos or podcasts with mothers. Ideally women who can openly tell their son’s stories but if you have to be anonymous, that’s also fine. You can record your own videos to send in as well.
- Spokespeople – eventually we hope to find articulate, preferably media-savvy mothers able to speak on behalf of the group.
- Advice – we are collecting advice, lessons learnt from mothers who can offer do’s and don’t to mothers and their sons facing similar ordeals. What do you wish you had known about protecting your son?
The website is just a beginning of our plan to mobilize mothers to speak out and share knowledge of how to protect men from society’s injustices.
If you would like to help Mothers of Sons, please write to janemos1@outlook.com giving a brief outline of your story and what you may be able to contribute.
Join my Q&A on Thinkspot next week
I’m about to do a live Q&A celebrating thinkspot going public. Jordan Peterson’s platform has had restricted viewing for over a year but finally the doors have been opened and you can have free and immediate entry. I hope you enjoy my postings. I’m planning to get really active on the site which is a far friendlier place for me right now, compared to the Australian media environment.
You can access my thinkspot pages here. I hope you will join my growing band of over 66 K followers. And I’d love some good questions for my Q&A. That’s next Wednesday night, May 27 at 6 pm US Pacific time, which is 11 am AEDT on Thursday May 28 here in Sydney. Hopefully, that might still work for people working at home during our current lock down.
Mark Latham still having a go
Finally, I wanted to give a shout out to Mark Latham who is one of the very rare politicians out there exposing the misinformation being promoted about domestic violence. Here’s his recent speech to NSW parliament pointing out that contrary to all the scaremongering there has not been any rise in the incidence of domestic violence during the current lockdown.
As Latham points out, far from men being bashers, most men in New South Wales are protectors, good men whose natural instinct is to protect their loved ones, protect their families.” What a shame this is so rarely said.
Until next time, Tina