The Economics of Political Correctness - WSJ

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One morning, chatting with Harvard undergraduates just before my class, I reminisced about my own college years in the late 1990s—debating religion in our residence hall or arguing about the role of discrimination in America in common rooms.

Those conversations were uncomfortable and even heated at times. But they were positive experiences for me and I’m pretty sure everyone else. Grappling with different views helped us understand one another, and that helped me understand, and sometimes change, my own outlook.

I asked a student in the front row: With all this technology and social media, where do you have these types of conversations? She looked up from her turquoise notebook and replied: “We don’t.” I looked around the amphitheater and asked, “Really?” A hundred heads nodded in unison.

I thought they were exaggerating until a student in another class dared to ask if racial disparities are due to systemic racism or differences in work ethic. He happens to be black and from a disadvantaged background, and he earnestly wondered why, in his neighborhood growing up, it seemed to him that black immigrants worked harder than American-born blacks. A white woman a couple of rows behind him called him a “white supremacist.”

If my dorm-mates and I had the threat of academic censure hanging over our heads back then, would we have been as forthcoming with each other? I’d like to think so, but I doubt it. We weren’t courageous; we lived in a world where the cost of information was higher and the cost of asking the “wrong” question was essentially zero, so debate was an efficient way to learn.

In my college dorm’s common room, I met an Indian woman who thought arranged marriage made more sense than dating. I found her arguments baffling for the obvious reasons—and besides, economists typically think more choice leads to better outcomes. She didn’t question my motives for asking; she simply pulled out data on divorce rates across the two continents to prove her point. That common room was the first place I debated chapters of the Bible with an atheist. The first time I had a chance to ask delicate questions of a gay man about his experiences.

A decade ago, I still interacted with dozens of undergraduates and doctoral students who were asking important and provocative questions about race and sex in America. But now students invite me to lunch and ask if their research idea is too risky; they wonder out loud what they are allowed to “say in public,” as though they are in the situation room discussing nuclear launch strategy rather than pondering the economics of policing in an overpriced cafe.

Some are turning to an app called Sidechat, where they can frankly debate others in the Harvard community without revealing their names. It’s good that these conversations are happening somewhere; it’s distressing that they require a veil of anonymity.

The issue affects research in economics, hardly known for its far-left politics. When I used artificial intelligence to evaluate all the race- and sex-related papers published in the top six econ journals since 2006, asking the algorithm to score how liberal or conservative the conclusions leaned, I found a more than 2-to-1 leftward tilt overall.

There were particularly big gaps in the late Obama years and the early 2020s. Did empirical output lean particularly to the left at those times, or were political-correctness pressures especially strong?

Realistically, either journal editors are refusing to publish controversial results, or academics are too cowardly even to do the research. One notable exception—a recent American Economic Review paper finding that children’s academic outcomes improve when parents are incarcerated—met with censorious derision from others in the field on social media. My own work on race and policing, which was published in a top peer-reviewed journal in economics, was labeled “hate speech” by (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter.

Even if stone cold economists have fallen prey to self-censorship, economics can tell us why. A brilliant analysis by Stephen Morris—a formalization of early ideas developed by Glenn Loury—develops the basic economics of political correctness. Here is an example:

Suppose there is an informed professor advising a less informed politician as to whether diversity, equity, and inclusion policies help minorities. If the professor says DEI is harmful, the politician might interpret the recommendation as the honest findings of an unbiased researcher. But he also might interpret it as the motivated reasoning of a racist, and might even stop asking the professor for advice.

Mr. Morris demonstrates mathematically that if the professor is sufficiently concerned about being thought a racist, he will lie and recommend DEI even when he knows it’s a bad idea for minorities. And if he does tell the truth, his advice may come across as tainted by bias. The implications are unsettling for anyone trying to make decisions based on academics’ recommendations.

A similar dynamic is at play on any socially sensitive topic, and social media turbocharges it. Online activists have major incentives to call out even obscure academic work they deem beyond the pale; doing so can help them shore up their own progressive bona fides and build their followings. And there are few penalties for misconstruing the target’s argument or being plain wrong.

The question is what can be done. First, we need to take a careful look at how we hire and promote faculty. Instead of having them sign statements swearing fealty to DEI, perhaps they should promise to tell the truth. Second, we need high-powered incentives for people who are correct regardless of politics. If someone scientifically demonstrates that systemic racism is the main factor in racial disparities in America, this should be celebrated. If someone finds that health disparities are driven by genetics rather than social factors—that too should be celebrated. We need something like the MacArthur Fellowship or the X Prize for telling the truth about data.

I am gravely concerned about the rise of political correctness on college campuses, its effect on the type of analysis that is being published and being taught, and how this will undermine, among many other things, efforts to help the marginalized in America. Such efforts will succeed only if they are rooted in the truth.

Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

When a wild dog is captured or cornered, it becomes even more ferocious. I have a sobering message for the people here: if you think a Tru.mp victory is going to make the enemies of civilization, the enemies of cognitive liberty, the enemies of civility itself, any kind of basic freedom, to quote the famous poem, "go quietly into this good night," I have a sobering message for you: you're a fool. You're grossly mistaken. That will not happen.

I predict that we will see a ferociousness and a tenacity and a pathological vengeance upon the people, and the cronies that we have thrown out of office, the people who have basically terrorized the United States and the west of the world for, at the very minimum of 12 years.

So, let's take a look at that landscape. What does it look like and who holds the levers of power>

Here's what we're fighting right now. In my opinion, the most important battle is in the academies. All of our academies are controlled by woke maniacs. All of them. If you look at the -- and this is not my, uh these are not my data points -- FIRE, Greg Lukianoff's organization does an excellent job of breaking down right, left, I don't think that those are very useful demarcations any longer. But just as a placeholder, we can use them. The overwhelming majority of college professors are in the far-left camp. That would be one thing, but they identitarians as many people on the panel have discussed. So, we have the control of the academies still belongs to the far-left, not merely the left. The control of teacher colleges of education, where teachers become certified, is controlled by the far-left.

The media landscape. Now the good thing about this, the positive news, and this is not a kind of pollyanna optimism, the positive news is that the media has been damaged tremendously from this. The legacy media. I wouldn't say that it's in tatters, but it's taken a blow. If you look at the number one, if you want one single indication of who will vote for whom, it boils down to a single sentence: how much do you trust legacy media? The higher the trust in legacy media, the more likely they are to vote Democrat.

So, let's take a look at the broader culture war. Four or five things pop to mind. One thing which is crazy. You have normal crazy and then you have extra-crazy. Anything with trans is extra-extra-crazy. So, for example there's someone, Eithan Haim, who blew the whistle on doctors mutilating the genitals of children in surgeries. And Dr Haim, instead of being given an award and thanked, was prosecuted by-- you're probably very familiar with this, yeah, he was prosecuted by the full extent of the law. And he told me in an interview, in no uncertain terms. If the Democrats get in, he's going to go to a Federal Penitentiary. For exposing the people who have mutilated the genitals of children, he will go to a federal penitentiary. The story is really-- I know someone will think, well there's got to be something more, but there's actually really nothing more to it than that.

Okay, so we have the trans issue, we have the quote-unquote transing children under 18. You cannot change your sex, by the way. That is, it's not even a myth. There's some great stuff if you have a chance, you want to look up the work of Mia Hughes which she's exposed something called the WPATH Files. So, the trans war, it plays large in the culture war.

Things that 20-30 years ago played in the culture War, for example abortion, plays much less in the culture war. Other things now have come to the fore: freedom of speech -- again the same ideologues, the same vicious ideologues who control the organs of the media, the organs of what ought to be independent, these are the people who will double down. These are the people who come with a ferocious tenacity, and part of the problem is that they have jobs for life. They're tenured. They're not going anywhere. And they look at the institutions to forward very specific messages to indoctrinate people. Very specific conclusions.

So, you can think about this in right or left. I personally prefer not to think about that, I prefer to think about it in terms of cognitive liberty. The people who want to tell you what to think and what to believe were just thrown out of office. And don't you for a single second think that these people are going to be happy about this and say, well you know, this is really unfortunate, this is really unfortunate we lost. These people will come back with a ferocity and a tenacity that I do not think that we have seen in a long, long time.

So, I leave you with this message. Now is not the time to rest on your laurels. Now is the time to work. Now is the time, right now, when we have momentum, using institutions like the Danube Institute, is the time to fight back and put the final nail in the coffin of the divisive madness which has thrown society off of a cliff in the last 12 years. Thank you.

Gaza’s top Islamic scholar issues fatwa against October attack

It is an embarrassing critique for Hamas, which has used religious arguments to justify its actions.

bbc.com

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

A fatwa is a non-binding Islamic legal ruling from a respected religious scholar usually based on the Quran or the Sunnah - the sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

Jihad means “struggle” in Arabic and in Islam it can be a personal struggle for spiritual improvement or a military struggle against unbelievers.

Dr Dayah adds: “If the pillars, causes, or conditions of jihad are not met, it must be avoided in order to avoid destroying people’s lives. This is something that is easy to guess for our country’s politicians, so the attack must have been avoided.”

For Hamas, the fatwa represents an embarrassing and potentially damaging critique, particularly as the group often justifies its attacks on Israel through religious arguments to garner support from Arab and Muslim communities.

The 7 October attack saw hundreds of Hamas gunmen from Gaza invade southern Israel. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign to destroy Hamas, during which more than 43,400 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Dr Dayah argues that the significant civilian casualties in Gaza, together with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and humanitarian disaster that have followed the 7 October attack, means that it was in direct contradiction to the teachings of Islam.

Hamas, he says, has failed in its obligations of “keeping fighters away from the homes of defenceless [Palestinian] civilians and their shelters, and providing security and safety as much as possible in the various aspects of life... security, economic, health, and education, and saving enough supplies for them.”

Dr Dayah points to Quranic verses and the Sunnah that set strict conditions for the conduct of jihad, including the necessity of avoiding actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

He also stresses that Muslim leaders are obligated to ensure the safety and well-being of non-combatants, including by providing food, medicine, and refuge to those not involved in the fighting.

“Human life is more precious to God than Mecca,” Dr Dayah states.

His opposition to the 7 October attack is especially significant given his deep influence in Gaza, where he is seen as a key religious figure and a vocal critic of Islamist movements, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

His moderate Salafist beliefs place him in direct opposition to Hamas’s approach to armed resistance and its ties to Shia-ruled Iran.

Salafists are fundamentalists who seek to adhere the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations who followed him.

Dr Dayah has consistently argued for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate that adheres strictly to Islamic law, rather than the political party-based systems that Hamas and other groups advocate.

“Our role model is the Prophet Muhammad, who founded a nation and did not establish political parties that divide the nation. Therefore, parties in Islam are forbidden,” he said in a sermon he gave at a mosque several years ago.

He has also condemned extremism, opposing jihadist groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and has used all of his platforms to issue fatwas on various social and political issues, ranging from commercial transactions, social disputes over marriage and divorce, to the conduct of political violence.

The fatwa adds to the growing internal debate within Gaza and the broader Arab world over the moral and legal implications of Hamas’s actions, and it is likely to fuel further divisions within Palestinian society regarding the use of armed resistance in the ongoing conflict with Israel.

Sheikh Ashraf Ahmed, one of Dr Dayah’s students who was forced to leave his house in Gaza City last year and flee to the south of Gaza with his wife and nine children, told the BBC: “Our scholar [Dr Dayah] refused to leave his home in northern Gaza despite the fears of Israeli air strikes. He chose to fulfil his religious duty by issuing his legal opinion on the attack”.

Ahmed described the fatwa as the most powerful legal judgment of a historical moment. “It’s a deeply well researched document, reflecting Dayah’s commitment to Islamic jurisprudence,” he said.

Social media star squirrel euthanized after being taken from home tests negative for rabies

A pet squirrel who was a social media star before being seized by authorities in upstate New York has tested negative for rabies.

AP News

Peanut, the social media star squirrel at the center of a national furor after it was seized from its owner in upstate New York and euthanized, has tested negative for rabies, a county official said Tuesday.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation took the squirrel and a raccoon named Fred on Oct. 30 from Mark Longo’s home and animal sanctuary in rural Pine City, near the Pennsylvania border. The agency said it had received complaints that wildlife was being kept illegally and potentially unsafely, but officials have faced a barrage of criticism for the seizure. Government workers said they have since faced violent threats.

The DEC and the Chemung County officials have said the squirrel and raccoon were euthanized so they could be tested for rabies after Peanut bit a DEC worker involved in the investigation.

Chemung County Executive Chris Moss said tests on the two animals came back negative during a news conference detailing the county’s role in the incident. He said the county worked with the state and followed protocols.

Peanut gained tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms in the more than seven years since Longo took him in after seeing his mother get hit by a car in New York City. Longo has said he was in the process of filing paperwork to get Peanut certified as an educational animal when he was seized.

Longo on Tuesday said the negative test results were no surprise and criticized the government’s actions.

“It’s no real big shocker to me, considering I lived with Peanut for seven-and-a-half years and Fred for five months. I’m not foaming at the mouth,” he said. “I knew the test results were going to be negative.”

The DEC said in a prepared statement there was an internal investigation and that they were reviewing internal policies and procedures.

A new global gender divide is emerging

Young men and young women’s world views are pulling apart. The consequences could be far-reaching

ft.com

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others?

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one.

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the hard-right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age.

Outside the west, there are even more stark divisions. In South Korea there is now a yawning chasm between young men and women, and it’s a similar situation in China. In Africa, Tunisia shows the same pattern. Notably, in every country this dramatic split is either exclusive to the younger generation or far more pronounced there than among men and women in their thirties and upwards.

The #MeToo movement was the key trigger, giving rise to fiercely feminist values among young women who felt empowered to speak out against long-running injustices. That spark found especially dry tinder in South Korea, where gender inequality remains stark, and outright misogyny is common.

In the country’s 2022 presidential election, while older men and women voted in lockstep, young men swung heavily behind the right-wing People Power party, and young women backed the liberal Democratic party in almost equal and opposite numbers.

Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

Seven years on from the initial #MeToo explosion, the gender divergence in attitudes has become self-sustaining. Survey data show that in many countries the ideological differences now extend beyond this issue. The clear progressive-vs-conservative divide on sexual harassment appears to have caused — or at least is part of — a broader realignment of young men and women into conservative and liberal camps respectively on other issues.

In the US, UK and Germany, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. The trend in most countries has been one of women shifting left while men stand still, but there are signs that young men are actively moving to the right in Germany, where today’s under-30s are more opposed to immigration than their elders, and have shifted towards the far-right AfD in recent years.

It would be easy to say this is all a phase that will pass, but the ideology gaps are only growing, and data shows that people’s formative political experiences are hard to shake off. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures.

Too often young people’s views are overlooked owing to their low rates of political participation, but this shift could leave ripples for generations to come, impacting far more than vote counts.

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." -- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

"Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages.

This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?"

-- Heinrich Marx, Karl Marx's father

Women protest for more support for male domestic abuse victims

The daughters of a west Belfast man, who was murdered by his girlfriend in 2022, were among those who attended.

bbc.com

Around 30 women gathered in Belfast on Saturday to highlight concerns about a lack of support for male victims of domestic violence.

The march was made up of women wearing fluorescent pink and included relatives of men who have been the victims.

The twin daughters of west Belfast man Tony Browne, who was murdered by his girlfriend in 2022, were among those who attended.

Bobbi-Leigh and Shannon McIlwaine say there “isn’t enough support services for men” who are going through domestic abuse relationships.

Mr Browne, 54, was at his home when he was stabbed to death by Wiktoria Maksymowicz.

Bobbi-Leigh said her dad didn’t tell any of his family members what was happening.

“He told one of his closest friends but made his friend promise not to tell me and my sister because he didn’t want anyone to know,” she added.

The death of her father has had a "huge impact" on her, said Bobbi-Leigh.

"There is not one day I’m not thinking about my dad and what he went through and thinking if it could have been prevented," she said.

“It’s extremely hard for a man to come forward and say that he is being abused. There is a chance he won’t be believed, he will be laughed at.

“Women coming out today to speak for men, that’s sending a powerful message. It shows we believe them and support them. There needs to be more support from Stormont.”

The march was facilitated by the Men’s Alliance NI who are calling for a men’s refuge in Northern Ireland and more support from Stormont.

In a statement, Stormont ministers said they have made it clear that domestic and sexual abuse transcends boundaries of gender, age, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

They have stressed their commitment to creating a society in Northern Ireland where domestic and sexual abuse are not tolerated, and where victims receive the support they need and where those responsible are held to account.

The Department of Health also said it provides funding for a 24-hour Domestic and Sexual Abuse Helpline, which is a confidential, freephone service available to any person impacted by domestic and sexual abuse in NI.

Shannon feels a men’s refuge is needed.

“If my dad had have been able to go somewhere it may have given him the courage to leave,” she said.

“It’s important that people come out today and show their support because domestic abuse isn’t a gendered issue and it needs to stop being stigmatised as a gendered issue.”

Carey Baxter from Men’s Alliance says domestic violence is a societal issue.

“Today is a women’s only march and women are doing this on behalf of men.

“We speak to men who are living in their cars or sofa surfing because they have nowhere to go."

Mr Baxter said there is a huge gap in funding and services for men.

“It’s not about taking services away from women, it’s about finding something extra for the men because those services are needed and we hear it every single day of the week in our support groups, but there is nothing there for them.”

Harrowing video shows Hamas torturing innocent Palestinians

The horrifying incidents appear to have been filmed inadvertently by CCTV cameras inside a Hamas military base in northern Gaza raided by Is

Mail Online

Israel's military says it has discovered thousands of hours of sickening footage showing Hamas interrogators torturing innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The harrowing videos show male prisoners with sacks over their heads, chained to floors and ceilings in painful positions.

Men writhe in agony as they are beaten with sticks on the soles of their feet.

In one distressing clip, a hooded man appears to be screaming and remonstrating with his captor.

The horrifying incidents appear to have been filmed inadvertently by CCTV cameras inside a Hamas military base in northern Gaza raided by Israeli troops earlier this year.

The footage was said to have been discovered on computers seized from the abandoned compound inside the Jabalia refugee camp. It is unclear why the men were being held.

But human rights experts have previously warned that innocent Palestinians have been kidnapped from their homes and tortured by Hamas thugs who have ruled Gaza with an iron rod since 2007.

Gay men and adulterers are among those who have been tortured by Hamas, along with political opponents and anyone accused of collaborating with Israel.

A time stamp in the corner of the footage suggests the torture took place between 2018 and 2020.

Often, the guards appear casually at ease, chatting as the abuse unfolds.

One interrogator reclines on a chair, with his arms folded behind his head, in front of a chained-up prisoner hanging from the ceiling by his arms.

Another film features a man, with a red sack over his head, chained up so awkwardly he can just about place one foot on the floor. One captor later appears to brutally choke the man.

A senior Israeli military source told The Mail on Sunday: 'The IDF found these CCTV images in March. It took months to go through them all.' It has not been possible for the videos to be independently verified but human rights groups have long warned of abuses by Hamas against civilians in Gaza. Amnesty International published a 44-page report detailing a brutal campaign of abduction, torture and killings by Hamas against its own people following the last Israel-Hamas war in 2014.

Many were accused of collaborating with Israel. Hamas has also tortured and killed gay men in Gaza, where homosexuality is against the law.

Hundreds of gay men risked their lives to cross over the border to Israel or Egypt before the most recent conflict.

One, Abdul, previously told Israeli media how he lived in fear in Gaza after Hamas discovered he was gay. He was tortured repeatedly before he fled to Egypt.

In a chilling account that matches up with the torture captured in the footage found by the IDF, he told i24News: 'They put me in a tiny room. They wouldn't let me sleep or go to the bathroom inside. There was no food.

'They would torture me so badly. Sometimes, they would tie my feet up and beat them with a stick. After that, every few years, they would arrest me and torture me in the same way.

'They made me swear on the Koran that I won't be gay again.'

Last night another Hamas torture victim, Hamza Howidy, 27, told The Mail on Sunday how he was detained for protesting against the regime in Gaza.

'They would torture you until you broke and say whatever it is they wanted,' he said. 'I could hear my fellow protesters scream in the next room.'

Mr Howidy, an accountant who later fled Gaza, said he believed he was held in western Jabalia in 2019 but it is unknown if he appears in the footage.

He said: 'Hamas controls everything. They confiscated my laptop and had issues with my conversations with my girlfriend.

'Collaborating with Israel would warrant a severe punishment and homosexuality would result in a death sentence.' Mr Howidy said one man was detained for three years and tortured three times a week. 'He had objects inserted into him,' he added. 'One man was given electric shocks for two years before his innocence was eventually discovered.

'The first thing he did was shoot dead the Hamas officer who reported him – his uncle.

'You would never get a lawyer and your family would have no idea what happened to you. I was lucky because my family paid a price for me. I managed to leave for Europe via the Egyptian border in September last year, which cost a fortune, but my family there were told that should I return I'd be a dead man walking. Luckily I got them safe passage too.'

He added: 'You just cannot tell who is a Hamas snitch or not.

'One friend of mine was forced to divorce his wife when he got caught for something. There is a growing hatred towards Hamas now, especially after the war, but because Hamas controls the media and people are afraid, we hardly hear of it.

'People outside of Gaza call Hamas freedom fighters when they are killing innocent Palestinians for nothing. Hamas is holding the people of Gaza hostage.'

A former Israeli intelligence officer, known as Guy C, told this newspaper that Hamas' leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by the IDF last month, was 'obsessed with finding collaborators and held thousands against their will'.

He added: 'They have been known to melt plastic over skin, electric cables on their body.

'Some are electrocuted on electricity pylons or dragged on a chain from a vehicle until they die.

'Even worse, they won't allow the families a proper burial, and the bodies have a sign on saying they were collaborating.'

Palestinian Ahmed Fouad Alkharib, who is now based in the US and is a fellow at the Atlantic Council think- tank, said: 'Extreme torture has been a fundamental component of Hamas' governance strategy to ensure they deter people and instil fear in those who speak out.'

"The cold, hard truth is that nobody gives a fuck about your political opinions anymore. You are some of the least qualified people in the world to be lecturing normal people on how to think and vote. Because you're not normal people. You don't work normal jobs. You don't live normal lives. You exist in a nice, comfortable bubble that protects and insulates you from reality, where you're surrounded by other people just like yourselves.

And the thing is, we don't actually hate you for that. There's nothing wrong with being rich and successful if you've earned it. And part of being rich and successful is that you get a bit detached from the mundane reality of daily life. Again, we understand.

And let's be honest. It's kind of fucking cool to be an actor. You guys get to do stuff and go places that most of us could never dream of. And we're happy to cheer and boo the characters that you play. We're happy to be captivated by the performances you deliver. We're happy to listen to you talk about your craft and share stories and insights into what it's like making movies.

But what we're not prepared to do anymore is be lectured by you, or told what causes we're supposed to support by you, or how to think and vote by you. This next bit is going to take a bit of humility and self-reflection, which I realize are two qualities you're not exactly hot on, but it's time to shut the fuck up about this stuff.

It's none of your business, it's not your area of expertise and it never was. Learn that lesson and you might just get back the respect and attention that you won. Learn it not, and, well, you might just find out how fickle a mistress fame really is."

www.youtube.com

Inside the hidden world of male victims of domestic abuse | National …

archive.ph

A residence in north Toronto in one of the rare places in Canada where abused men and fathers with children can find emergency shelter

Matt feared his wife was going to kill him. He had seen violent streaks before. Once, when he accused her of infidelities, Matt said she pulled a knife and “put it (at) my throat.”

Fleeing wasn’t an option because they had young children. He felt stuck without a safe refuge where he could take them. “As long as I had my kids, that’s all I cared about,” Matt said.

He expected the police wouldn’t take him seriously: a six-foot-tall Caribbean man scared of his wife. “If anything happens and she calls the cops, they’re going to come straight at me,” he told the National Post, requesting anonymity to protect his children.

A subsequent fight over cheating led to a similar violent encounter. Again, his partner allegedly threatened him with a knife and “said she’s gonna kill me,” according to Matt. Again, he refrained from calling the police, instead phoning a family member to tell them about the situation. The alarmed family member called the cops.

When the police arrived on the scene, Matt said he was asked to leave the premises. “The conversation went from ‘what happened?’ to ‘what did you do?’ really quick,” he said. It wasn’t until Matt, under police escort, went back into his house to get some belongings that the officers started to take his story seriously. His wife lost it, Matt said, verbally attacking him in their presence.

“I heard the police officer under his breath say, ‘Oh shit, that really happened,’” Matt said. A female police officer escorting Matt away from their house acknowledged his options were limited, but she had a suggestion for him of a safe haven in Toronto where he could stay temporarily with his kids.

“There isn’t a lot of help for men in situations like these but give this place a try. It might help you out,” he recalled her saying.

Down a stretch of York University’s student ghetto in the northern part of Toronto sits a non-descript, three-storey, red-brick townhouse that is a national treasure of sorts. It is one of the rare places in Canada where abused men and fathers with children can find emergency shelter.

“We’re the only game in town as far as family violence for fathers and children,” said Justin Trottier, who oversees the Family Shelter for Abused Men and Children. Opened during the height of the pandemic in March 2021, the shelter is an effort more than seven years in the making by Trottier and the Canadian Centre for Men and Families (CCMF).

The non-profit men’s centre has offered counselling and mental health services for male victims of abuse and violence —“filling critical gaps in men’s services” — since 2014. But the outpouring of demand for an emergency shelter pushed them to open an actual residence.

“We would get calls for years before we opened and that’s what lit the fire under us to open a shelter. The demand’s always been high,” Trottier said.

There are nearly 600 shelters across Canada for victims of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV), but only four per cent of them serve men. More than two-thirds of the shelters (68 per cent) are mandated to serve women and their children, while an additional 11 per cent serve women only. According to Statistics Canada, of the approximately 24 emergency abuse shelters in 2021-22 that opened their doors to men, virtually all of them also served women. More than 99 per cent of the 46,827 residents of domestic abuse shelters in 2021-22 were women and their children.

For male victims of domestic abuse, that leaves a smattering of dots on a vast map of Canada where they might find safety. Even rarer are places where abused fathers can bring their children.

Most people are aware of the tragic consequences for women of intimate partner violence. In June, Carly Stannard-Walsh and her two children, Madison and Hunter, were shot dead in a murder-suicide in Harrow, Ont. They were killed by Carly’s husband and the children’s father, Steven Walsh.

In the five years between 2014 to 2019, police-reported data showed 80 per cent of the 500 Canadian lives lost to domestic violence were women — 400 mothers, sisters, daughters and girlfriends killed by people in their lives. Overall, in 2019, women were the victims of 79 per cent of police-reported criminal incidents of intimate partner violence.

But what is less well-known is that men are also victims of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, including physical abuse, sexual and psychological abuse. The numbers don’t show up in police reports because, like Matt, men are less likely to call police.

Matt was one of the dads who turned up at Trottier’s doorstep with nowhere else to go. He thought about going to a motel but couldn’t afford it long-term. He also considered returning to his family in New York, but that would be too difficult with his kids. One shelter offered him a bed, but said no to the children, which meant they would be left with their mother.

About 90 per cent of residents at the Toronto emergency shelter are “male survivors of family violence and their children,” Trottier told the Post. But they also open their doors to male refugees, those suffering mental health issues and boys alienated from their families. “There is no hard rule against men in other situations,” he said.

Residents are offered a range of support, what Trottier likes to call “wraparound services,” from providing clothing and food, to emergency trauma counselling, mental health therapy, peer support and mentoring, fathering classes and legal aid. Stays are capped at 90 days. Trottier said the waitlist frequently balloons between four weeks and two months.

The majority of CCMF’s operating funds come from private contributions and institutional donations. The federal government does not provide any money, nor do most provincial governments. Alberta is one of the rare exceptions; the province gave CCMF just over $9,000 last year to help create a domestic abuse program.

On a recent visit, the shelter is a hive of activity. There are intake workers and mental health counsellors mixed in among the residents. Trottier is there most days, too, as well as graduate students in social work from neighbouring York University.

Many residents have day jobs, so they are coming and going. An observer arriving at the shelter just before lunch on a weekday, finds no kids in sight. Trottier said that children accompanying their fathers usually stick to the routines they had prior to arriving — going to daycare, babysitters and school.

From the outside, the shelter looks like any other townhouse, aside from the abundance of security cameras and signs calling for doors to be locked at all times. A rooftop patio offers panoramic views of the sprawling suburbia. But the overall aesthetic at the shelter is reminiscent of college dorms or cheap first apartments — drab-coloured walls, donated second-hand furniture. A massive kitchen has floor-to-ceiling cupboards stocked with personally labelled food. Residents buy their own groceries and cook their own meals.

The shelter can host up to two dozen people or 10 families “depending on size,” Trottier said. With the help of bunk beds, some rooms on the second floor are big enough for a father and three children. There is a kid’s room full of toys, a library and meeting space that can be converted into a bedroom, laundry facilities, even a small backyard.

A small network across Quebec, Maison Oxygène — Oxygen House — fills a similar gap in providing emergency accommodation for fathers and their children but does not position itself as a domestic abuse shelter. The non-profit is funded exclusively by donations and has faced chronic financial pains.

Outside of these options for male victims of intimate partner violence and their children, there aren’t many others, Trottier said.

Intimate partner violence, also known as spousal abuse or domestic violence, has been identified by the World Health Organization as a major global public health concern, impacting millions of people of all genders, ages, socioeconomic, racial, religious and cultural backgrounds. It can range from emotional and financial abuse to physical and sexual assault. It can happen within a marriage or dating relationship, whether or not partners live together or are sexually intimate, and after the relationship has ended. It can occur in public and private spaces, as well as online.

And it can happen regardless of gender. Self-reported data through surveys, questionnaires and the like, show the less publicized, much broader picture of male victims of intimate partner violence.

In Canada in 2018, self-reported statistics on abuse from StatsCan showed that 23 per cent of women experienced some form of abuse compared to 17 per cent of men. Forty-four per cent of women reported sexual abuse compared to 36 per cent of men, with similar comparisons for psychological abuse.

And though women are seven times more likely than men to be killed by their partners, men are not absent from those harsh victim statistics. In 2021, men comprised nearly a quarter (24 per cent) of 90 intimate partner homicides. National media often overlook stories such as Blake Bibby, a 36-year-old Newmarket, Ont. man fatally stabbed by his ex-girlfriend in July.

“Spousal homicide is not a good measure of domestic abuse because it is so rare,” said Don Dutton, a University of British Columbia psychology professor who has been studying the domestic violence issue for decades and has authored several books on the subject, including Rethinking Domestic Violence.

Dutton spent part of his early career in the ‘70s as a court-mandated counsellor working with men accused of abusing their wives. Over the decades, he began to see domestic violence as more of a two-way street with female abusers often overlooked in academic and legal circles.

Dutton said there’s an obvious explanation for the chasm between official police data that shows females as the primary victims of domestic abuse, and the self-reported data that suggest the ratio of abuse between the sexes is closer than most think: Men are often too self-conscious to come forward to police.

He found that men report domestic abuse to police at a tenth of the rate as women and that their reports are not taken as seriously by law enforcement.

Erin Pizzey had a similar wake-up call during her work as a pioneering force behind the emergency shelter movement in the United Kingdom back in the ‘70s. Her work set off a chain reaction as she spearheaded the creation of spaces for women escaping abusive partners to get back on their feet.

Within four years of opening her first shelter in 1971, more than two dozen similar initiatives had sprung up across the U.K. with more in the pipeline. “She single-handedly did as much for the cause of women as any other woman alive,” one British journalist reflected in 1997.

However, Pizzey grew disillusioned with the movement and what she viewed as the mainstreaming of men-bashing among activists. Her work on the frontiers of domestic abuse changed her view of domestic violence: Men were not solely perpetrators of violence, but also victims of abuse. True equality meant helping both sexes in need.

“I was the one who was saying, ‘Hey, hang on, this is not a gender issue. Men are equally in need of refuge; men are equally in need of social services,’” Pizzey, now 85, told the National Post over Zoom from her home in London.

“Apart from those of us who work in the field of domestic violence and dysfunction, we have been brainwashed into believing that all men are potential abusers. So, no, I don’t believe that there is much understanding or interest in male suffering or abuse,” Pizzey said.

Other academics and professionals in the field of social services have arrived at similar conclusions.

Elizabeth Bates, a specialist in the topic at Cumbria University in the United Kingdom, said in an email to the National Post that the perception one draws about domestic abuse is heavily influenced by the dataset one picks. Whereas police reports show a “large majority of perpetrators being male and victims being female,” survey data from government officials in England and Wales show “that for every three victims of domestic abuse, one is male and two are female,” she said.

In the academic literature, which typically relies on “self-reported data,” Bates said the ratio of female to male victims is closer to a 50-50 split. “There are a number of reasons for this difference, but one of the main ones, I think, are around the barriers faced in reporting victimization,” Bates said.

“There are barriers for any victim” Bates continued. “But I think for men, the stigma and stereotypes are still very prominent, and it prevents men from being able to disclose and so be included within those statistics.”

Alexandra Lysova, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, told the National Post that Canada’s federally commissioned General Social Survey (GSS) victimization survey in 2019 also found “very, very close” ratios between female and male victims of intimate partner violence, both when it comes to psychological and physical abuse.

Such findings should encourage the public to move beyond stereotypes of domestic abuse that depict men exclusively as abusers, said Lysova, because a vast swath of society is being deprived of much-needed social services. “What we see is that the tip of this iceberg, and the whole large part of intimate partner violence is underwater, not known to the police,” Lysova said.

“I have this conversation so many times: ‘Oh, it’s happening more by men to women.’ But no, that’s not accurate. What is accurate is that more women are reporting than men, and more women are reporting when the perpetrator is a man compared to when the man is abused by a woman,” said Phil Mitchell, a British counsellor specializing in male abuse victims.

When asked about the differences between men and women when it comes to reported incidents of domestic violence, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police directed the National Post’s request for comment to the Toronto Police Service. While the RCMP “absolutely investigates cases of domestic violence,” an RCMP spokesperson explained to the National Post by email, the matter is mostly dealt with “at the divisional (provincial) level.”

“TPS can only speak on intimate partner violence occurrences that are reported to us, recognizing that not every incident of IPV is reported to police. Reported incidents are thoroughly investigated by officers with specialized training,” Stephanie Sayer, a TPS spokesperson wrote in an email to the National Post.

“While women account for the vast majority of people who experience IPV, this issue affects individuals of all genders, ages, races, socioeconomic statuses, ethnicities, religions, educational levels, and cultural backgrounds. We encourage anyone experiencing IPV to report it to the police, regardless of gender, and to seek help from available support services in Toronto,” Sayer continued.

The Toronto shelter serves a crucial role helping male victims of abuse, including fathers and their kids, caught in the social services gap.

Peter, who asked that his name be changed for privacy reasons, was in his thirties when the fallout from a bad marriage “caused me to lose my job, my house and pretty much extinguished my family.” He turned to his extended Jamaican family in Toronto, but the situation grew intolerable. He was living with an alcoholic uncle in an uninsulated garage.

“He wanted to, I guess, take his rage out on me,” Peter said, recalling the incident which finally brought him to the shelter. When he wasn’t paying attention, Peter’s uncle punched him in the mouth.

“I wasn’t gonna do that (anymore). It was a common occurrence,” Peter continued as he spoke outside his basement room at the shelter. “I’ve seen things happen. I’ve heard of people accidentally getting hit the wrong way. I don’t want to be one of those people.

“I was desperate, you know. I was kind of skeptical about even coming… I thought, a big warehouse, cots everywhere,” Peter said. “I called this place, and they told me it was nothing like that.”

His time at the shelter has given him breathing room to contemplate his next steps. “As much as I like the people here, I don’t want to be here with them. Sorry guys! I hope you guys don’t want me here,” he teased as another resident, Malik, stood nearby. “I’m just gonna rebuild my life.”

Malik arrived in Canada from Japan via Sri Lanka with two children and a rocky marriage in tow. Within two months of arriving, his wife left with the kids and falsely accused him of abuse, he claims. Forced to find a new place to live in the middle of the pandemic, Malik found a bedroom in a shared apartment.

Then the roommate began showing signs of “severe mental breakdown,” he said. The roommate tried to attack Malik last Christmas. “I got the hell out,” he said, as he sat on his bed in the shelter.

A friend picked him up and he got connected with a central intake system that directed him to the shelter. There was nearly a three-week waitlist. When he was finally able to check in, “it was a huge relief. Like, finally, I was breathing after two years,” he said, smiling.

Malik recalled the first thing he did when he got settled in the shelter: “I just slept for a couple of days. I was so tired of two years of nonstop stress.” He sees his kids on weekends, taking them to the shelter, a privilege he would not have in a typical homeless or temporary housing facility.

The Toronto shelter wasn’t the first to offer a safe haven for abused Canadian men. In the 1990s, Earl Silverman trudged across Calgary fleeing a violent wife. He desperately searched for a place to get back on his feet, but whenever Silverman tried to check himself into a domestic abuse shelter, he was turned away and encouraged to seek counselling instead.

“When I went into the community looking for some support services, I couldn’t find any. There were a lot for women, and the only programs for men were for anger management. As a victim, I was re-victimized by having these services telling me I wasn’t a victim, but I was a perpetrator,” Silverman told the National Post in 2013.

He became an advocate for male victims of spousal abuse. Silverman created the Men’s Alternative Safe House, the first and only refuge in Canada at that time for male victims of domestic abuse. At its peak, the facility housed just over a dozen men and a handful of children, funded mostly through private donations but also from Silverman’s own pocket. He’d turned to the government for help but was turned away.

“Family violence has gone from a social issue to only a woman’s issue. So, any support for men is interpreted as being against women,” he told an Alberta media outlet at the time.

The battle for recognition and acceptance took its toll on Silverman. He’d fought his share of demons and trauma over the years, often falling into bouts of alcoholism. The project gave him new meaning and purpose — until the bills began piling up and he struggled to keep the door open. The finances eventually became unsustainable, and he was forced to sell his house.

Silverman was discovered soon after his 2013 National Post interview by the new owner touring the property, hanging in the garage. A four-page suicide note blamed the government for ignoring the plight of men.

Trottier seems on the surface an unlikely successor to pick up Silverman’s torch, a legacy he will make good on with the opening of a second men’s shelter in Calgary this month – more than a decade after Silverman’s closed.j

At 41, his life is dotted with seemingly disconnected initiatives. Throughout his twenties and thirties, he founded a secular organization and argued before the Supreme Court against public prayers in Quebec government meetings. He commissioned atheist bus advertisements and ran as Green Party MPP in the Toronto Parkdale-High Park riding. He lost the race but was on the right side of the Supreme Court ruling.

“I tend to gravitate to those underexplored issues that have the combination of being really critically important and yet, mysteriously, nobody’s doing anything about it. If there’s any kind of common thread that ties together all the otherwise eclectic interests that I have, I think that’s it,” he said.

A decade ago, Trottier stumbled upon men’s issues. “It’s very obvious to me anyway that these are life and death issues. I mean suicide prevention, parental alienation, workplace fatalities, homelessness, drug addiction — these things that disproportionately affect boys and men. And nobody notices that. So that really intrigued me and also frustrated me.”

The media attention Trottier previously got evaporated when he began talking about struggling men. “Mostly the media doesn’t even think this is a legitimate thing. They’re just very used to covering gender issues in a certain way and they deem the conversation to be complete when you tackle it from one, I would say, ideological perspective. There’s not a lot of appetite for more well-rounded conversation, to see things from a more … comprehensive picture.”

Matt, Peter, Malik and others have also touched the lives of the student social workers-volunteers from York University who play a vital role keeping the shelter running on its meagre funding. “It provided me inside information on the gaps that are in the system for men who are experiencing abuse and the lack of services that are not being provided,” said Thelcia Williams, a grad student volunteer.

“It also highlighted the stigmas and the sexist and gender biases that are incorporated within the field as well, where, you know, a lot of people don’t believe that there should be a shelter for men who are experiencing abuse,” she continued.

“A lot of people don’t believe men experience abuse, right? They just believe it’s women and children but, in fact, there is a demographic of men who are experiencing abuse. That needs to be addressed.”

Justin Anger, another social work grad student from York, said he also “didn’t realize how big of an issue domestic violence for men was until I came here.” Working firsthand with male survivors has changed the way Anger now looks at his coursework. “Even in some courses I’ve taken, whenever we speak about domestic violence, it’s (about) women,” he said. “It definitely shifted my perspective.”

Men as victims is an uncomfortable reality to acknowledge, even for men themselves.

“We don’t want to know about abused men,” Janice Fiamengo, a professor at the University of Ottawa and an outspoken supporter of men’s issues, wrote in an email to the National Post. “We turn our eyes away. And we definitely do not want to know about abusive women.”

Worse still, such men are often politically and socially homeless, with few advocates willing to take on their cause. “Male victims of abuse are caught between the progressive left, which doesn’t believe men can be victims because they have power, and the chivalric right, which tells men to man up and protect women,” Fiamengo added.

Matt is painfully familiar with this tension. “When you’re strong, when you look strong, people don’t even stop to ask you if you’re OK.”

Supporting Male Victims of Domestic Abuse Day 2024 #MenYouAreNotAlone

Supporting Male Victims of Domestic Abuse Day 2024 #MenYouAreNotAlone

Mankind

This year, we have set aside Thursday 7 November for the third ever Supporting Male Victims of Domestic Abuse Day (#MenYouAreNotAlone). Please do get involved.

We are asking every organisation providing support services for men experiencing domestic abuse to publicise the help they have available to the men in their local community.

In 2023, over 160 police forces, councils, charities, service providers, employers and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner took part. You can also be listed as a partner and supporter.

Only one in 20 victims accessing specialist support from their local commissioned service (community-based/IDVA service) is male. Our aim is to encourage more men to come forward and for those around them to support them to do so.

If we make a bigger collective and coordinated effort for one day, it will help amplify the message #MenYouAreNotAlone.

The date is  always after the autumn half term school holiday and after the clocks “go back” – which can be a time where men realise they need to do something about the domestic abuse they are suffering from.

We have produced a campaign logo and strapline but it does not matter whether you use them or not. The key issue is to promote what support YOU OFFER. If you already promotional material, please just use this (but do use #MenYouAreNotAlone on social media)

If you wish to support the day, please do let us know via emailing [email protected] and we can add your organisation to the supporters page.

One in every six to seven men will become a victim of domestic abuse at some point in their lifetime1.

This abuse can come in many different forms and includes :

(a) physical or sexual abuse; (b) violent or threatening behaviour; (c) controlling or coercive behaviour; (d) economic abuse; (e) psychological, emotional or other abuse;

Men trying to escape domestic abuse make up one in three victims of domestic abuse1  and make up are one in four victims of domestic-abuse related offences reported to the police (26%)2, yet only make up one in twenty victims accessing support from their local commissioned domestic service (“community/IDVA-based service”)3. We need to encourage more men to seek help from their local service including those specifically for men.

More than one person suffers when abuse is happening. Family members including children, friends, colleagues and neighbours and even the abusers themselves can all be  affected in a very negative and destructive way. We need your support to push the message that there is support available, there is a listening ear and there is hope for all men suffering any form of domestic abuse.

Differences in frequency of violence and reported injury between relationships with reciprocal and nonreciprocal intimate partner violence -

The context of the violence (reciprocal vs nonreciprocal) is a strong predictor of reported injury. Prevention approaches that address the e

PubMed

Objectives: We sought to examine the prevalence of reciprocal (i.e., perpetrated by both partners) and nonreciprocal intimate partner violence and to determine whether reciprocity is related to violence frequency and injury.

Methods: We analyzed data on young US adults aged 18 to 28 years from the 2001 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which contained information about partner violence and injury reported by 11,370 respondents on 18761 heterosexual relationships.

Results: Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5).

Conclusions: The context of the violence (reciprocal vs nonreciprocal) is a strong predictor of reported injury. Prevention approaches that address the escalation of partner violence may be needed to address reciprocal violence.

Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)

References Examining Assaults by Women on Their Spouses or Male Partners: An Updated Annotated Bibliography - Sexuality & Culture

This annotated bibliography describes 343 scholarly investigations (270 empirical studies and 73 reviews) demonstrating that women are as ph

SpringerLink

This annotated bibliography describes 343 scholarly investigations (270 empirical studies and 73 reviews) demonstrating that women are as physically aggressive as men (or more) in their relationships with their spouses or opposite-sex partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 440,850 people.

The sexual victimization of men in America: new data challenge old assumptions - PubMed

We assessed 12-month prevalence and incidence data on sexual victimization in 5 federal surveys that the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the C

PubMed

We assessed 12-month prevalence and incidence data on sexual victimization in 5 federal surveys that the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted independently in 2010 through 2012. We used these data to examine the prevailing assumption that men rarely experience sexual victimization. We concluded that federal surveys detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men-in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women. We identified factors that perpetuate misperceptions about men's sexual victimization: reliance on traditional gender stereotypes, outdated and inconsistent definitions, and methodological sampling biases that exclude inmates. We recommend changes that move beyond regressive gender assumptions, which can harm both women and men.

What is “gender identity”?

Why are so many government policies based on a concept that no-one can define?

andrewdoyle.org

Lord Lucas (Con): My Lords, do the Government have a working definition of gender and gender identity and, if so, could they share it with the House?

Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab): The noble Lord would be well advised to look at the Equality Act, for example. I have to say that this would be a better debate if we spent more time worrying about how we provide services and account for people’s needs, and less about how we catch our political opponents out.

Lord Markham (Con): As a previous Health Minister, I know that there is a serious health reason to have a proper understanding of the answer to the question of when a woman is a woman and needs to have treatment based on her sex. Please: this is a serious question that deserves a serious answer.

Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab): I agree – a woman is an adult female, and her biological sex may well determine what services she needs from the NHS. That is why it is important that, in statistics that are used both in the census and more broadly by our public services, we have a consistent and an agreed approach to that. That is what I have been talking about up to this point. Frankly, I was taking this seriously, and I hope that others around the House will as well.

National Health Service (NHS) “Gender identity is a way to describe a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female, or non-binary, which may not correspond to the sex registered at birth.”

Stonewall “A person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.”

Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) “Gender identity is a person’s internal, deeply held sense of their gender. For transgender people, their own internal gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.”

World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) “Gender identity is a person’s intrinsic sense of being male, female, or an alternative gender. This internalized sense of gender is not necessarily visible to others and may differ from the gender role traditionally associated with a person’s sex assigned at birth.”

American Psychological Association (APA) “Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply-felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or male; a girl, a woman, or female; or an alternative gender (e.g., genderqueer, gender nonbinary, gender-neutral) that may or may not correspond to a person’s sex assigned at birth.”

World Health Organisation (WHO) “Gender identity is defined as a person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech, and mannerisms.”

United Nations (UN) “Gender identity reflects a deeply felt and experienced sense of one’s own gender, which can include being male, female, a blend of both, or neither, and it may correspond to or differ from the sex assigned at birth.”

Human Rights Campaign (HRC) “Gender identity is one’s internal, deeply held sense of their gender. For transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same.”

Mayo Clinic “Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender. Gender identity can correlate with a person’s assigned sex at birth or can differ from it. Gender expression typically reflects a person’s gender identity.”

“In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from, outer, and so institutes the "integrity" of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”

Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App

@JohnDSailer: In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, a

threadreaderapp.com

In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, among other things, the use of whiteboards perpetuate whiteness in physics.

Here's what's crazy: this "research" was funded by the federal government.

But first: what's Critical Whiteness Studies?

Per the article, it's a research framework that starts with the assumption that omnipresent, invisible whiteness pervades our ordinary interactions and institutions to ensure "white dominance."

t's a bold starting point—with more than a hint of racial animosity. Applied to physics, it gets weird.

The article finds that the values of "abstractness" and "disembodiment" in physics ("physics values") reify whiteness and reflect human domination and entitlement.

It goes on to declare that, yes, even whiteboards "play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization."

They do this by "collaborat[ing] with white organizational culture" where ideas gain value "when written down."

Again, this is funded by, well, you...

Look at the National Science Foundation's recent budget requests: The federal agency has spent a quarter-billion-dollars annually on it's "Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM."

That doesn't account for projects on race and equity funded by other division.

Thus, "Observing whiteness in introductory physics" was funded by the National Science Foundation.

It was a part of a half million-dollar project unpacking which "strategies, tools, and materials" contribute to marginalization.

This sort of research is the most noticeable consequence of the NSF's now-well-documented push to fund social justice projects.

But, in my latest, I argue that it's not by any means the most consequential, and it's why I'm not at all convinced that "wokeness" has peaked.

Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? - American Compass

New developments on campus may seem promising for academic freedom, but the more meaningful problems are deeper

American Compass

It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural change, it seems that “wokeness” is in remission.

Viewed from a certain angle, even developments in higher education, despite the tumult of the last year, might serve as an example of how we’re past “peak woke.” In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suddenly banned the practice of requiring faculty job applicants to write “diversity statements,” becoming the first elite private university to ditch the policy. It turned out to be a watershed moment: Left-of-center academics applauded MIT. Bill Maher praised the decision on his late-night show. Even the Washington Post’s editorial board came out against the policy. Soon after, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences followed suit.

No doubt, MIT and Harvard’s decisions marked a real victory for academic freedom. The practice of requiring prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to a progressive social cause is so obviously contrary to the spirit of intellectual freedom that even many staunch progressives have voiced their opposition to it.

But this sort of policy—much like the decision by Vanderbilt, Stanford, Penn, and many others to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality on political issues—demonstrate far less serious reform than one might expect. This is because the policies most emblematic of “wokeness” didn’t simply leap onto campus out of nowhere in the summer of 2020. They are the result of structural incentives, and those incentives have yet to change. The worst offender might be the National Science Foundation.

A recent and widely circulated report by the Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hints at a serious problem for higher education reformers: structural impediments to change, built up in recent years, will be more difficult to undo than changing a few policies. The report reviewed the number of NSF grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—finding that it spent $2.05 billion funding DEI projects over the last four years.

It’s worth noting that even by the NSF’s own accounting, the spending on social-justice-related grants is immense. In the NSF’s annual budget, the spending by the “Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM” has gradually increased, from $214 million in spending in 2021 to $267 million in the NSF’s 2025 budget request.

The report highlights how these grants span the full gamut of DEI-related projects, including one grant to a Georgia Tech professor for a project on deconstructing “racialized privilege in the STEM classroom” by acknowledging “Whiteness and White Supremacy.” The report’s takeaway clearly frames the problem: “these kinds of projects mask Marxist social ideology as rigorous and thoughtful investigation. Many of these awards—based on subjective, qualitative research incapable of repetition—failed to follow basic tenets of the Scientific Method.”

Of course, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into universities to advance a social agenda will inevitably produce a string of consequences. It’s therefore worth expounding on the ranking member’s conclusion.     

First, and most basically, it is worth acknowledging that the National Science Foundation—and by extension, the federal government—is responsible for a substantial amount of research that typifies the absurdity of 2010s and 2020s academia. Such entries include “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study,” by Seattle Pacific University professor Amy Robertson—a study that “synthesize[s] literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory” to “identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.”

Robertson goes so far as to assert that whiteboards have perpetuated racism in the physics classroom: “Whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”

“Observing whiteness in introductory physics” could be mistaken for Sokal-style parody, but for Robertson, it serves as evidence of career success. As the article notes, the research was funded by the NSF, specifically as a part of a half-million-dollar project on “Centrality and Marginalization in Undergraduate Physics Teaching.”

When grantmakers flood academia with research dollars pointed at certain conclusions, they eventually create the illusion of consensus, irrespective of evidence. A 2020 paper purported to find that black newborn mortality is higher when the infants are cared for by white doctors. The paper has now been widely debunked, yet the conclusion still made its way into Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Even a single paper can shape a politically useful narrative; a steady flow of tendentious research can have a much greater effect.

Second, taking one step back, this type of funding shapes a wide array of downstream incentives at universities. For many in the sciences, the NSF is a career-maker that just can’t be ignored. As I’ve argued before, when a key source of cash and prestige declares a priority, everyone down the funding food chain—from graduate students to scientists to administrators—will inevitably adapt.

To give just one example of how this plays out: by NSF’s own account, the CAREER award is the agency’s most prestigious source of funding for early career scientists. As a further honor, the NSF nominated the “most meritorious” CAREER recipients or the “Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers” (PECASE). But, remarkably, one of the three criteria for selecting PECASE awardees is a “commitment to STEM equity, diversity, accessibility, and/or inclusion.”

The effect of this sort of mechanism goes far beyond politicized or low-quality research. It creates an incentive to act and speak a certain way. For young scientists, the value of “getting with the program”—that is, at the very least, getting behind race conscious policies—is too high to ignore. And of course, since the NSF openly funds this priority to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not just early career scientists who inevitably find themselves weighing the costs and benefits of a certain brand of social justice language.

Third, and most relevant to the pedantic “peak woke” debate: the funding ensures that universities will maintain the NSF’s race-conscious priorities in ways that are hard to roll back.

Last month, the New York Times ran an expose of the sprawling inclusion bureaucracy at the University of Michigan. The article notes how the university evaluates its job candidate diversity statements for their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” As it turns out, the University of Michigan’s hiring protocols—which encourage search committees to heavily weigh diversity statements—have been adopted across the country. This is thanks in no small part to the NSF.

The University of Michigan was one of the first recipients of the NSF ADVANCE award, which funds university offices focused on recruiting women and minorities in STEM. Michigan’s ADVANCE office—which has remained even after its funding expired—produced a hiring framework, “Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence,” or “STRIDE,” that heavily emphasizes DEI. The University of Louisville, Northeastern University, and Rutgers are among those that have adopted the STRIDE framework, through the work of their own NSF funded ADVANCE offices. At Rutgers, the diversity statement rubric rewards faculty who display their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities,” a rubric developed with the University of Michigan STRIDE committee.

Low-quality research propped up by excessive cash will end when the funding dries up. But institutional policies, once adopted, can endure. This is the real lesson of the NSF’s decades-long foray into social justice funding.

In fact, mandatory diversity statements, a policy increasingly unpopular amongst even several prominent staunch progressive, emerged as a “best practice” through programs directly funded by the NSF.

In 2013, faculty throughout the University of California System convened to discuss how to require and evaluate contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty selection—a convening funded by the NSF ADVANCE program. The result of the discussion was a rubric that evaluated such contributions in three key areas: their awareness of “inequities,” their track records of “removing barriers,” and their future plans for promoting diversity and inclusion initiatives.

This is the prototype for the now notorious rubric used at UC Berkeley, which calls for penalizing faculty who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.” Versions of this rubric—brought to you in part by, well, you, the American taxpayer—have ended up in the hands of faculty search committees from South Carolina to Texas to Ohio.

These cases make two takeaways inescapable.

First, in assessing the power of identity politics, race-conscious policies, or illiberal progressivism—however you want to define “wokeness”—policymakers should be careful not to mistake changes in weather for changes in climate. In advancing the peak woke thesis, one of the most astute theorists of wokeness, Musa al-Gharbi, points to the demonstrated decline in whiteboards-are-racist style papers. But if the underlying structure remains—if our sense-making institutions still require fealty to race-consciousness—this decline might turn out to be an epiphenomenon, a surface level change.

Second, once again, we should be ever mindful of the extreme power of federal grantmaking, especially in the sciences. MIT banned mandatory diversity statements. States like North Carolina and Texas have pushed a comprehensive reform agenda. Yet, even in these states, NSF funding continues to roll out ambitious personnel-building projects with the explicit goal of “cultural transformation.”

For reformers, this should be cause for sobriety—but also hope. Funders like the NSF shaped the American university we have today, a system inclined to sacrifice its basic mission for the cause of social activism. The same tools can be used to steer higher education back toward true intellectual freedom.