About a year ago I met a senior official of Amnesty's Irish operation, at his invitation.
He said Amnesty had been listening to my arguments about male suicide and the disenfranchisement of fathers and was convinced these were genuine human rights issues. However, he explained, Amnesty had not publicly supported me because I was (a) too angry and (b) mixing these issues up with "irrelevancies like domestic violence".
Having absorbed that it is now a requirement of Amnesty that its clients not be angry, I pointed out that domestic violence is frequently relevant to both suicide and family law, because men are sometimes driven to suicide as a result of either suffering female violence in a climate that refuses to recognise this phenomenon, or having had domestic violence legislation used improperly against them.
Amnesty claims it is not "anti-men", that its campaign in favour of female victims of male violence is in keeping with its tradition of defending human rights. I believe that, through lack of rigour and even-handedness and the adoption of a pernicious ideological position, Amnesty has undermined its own venerable human rights tradition.
In the preface to its latest report on violence against women, Amnesty betrays an occasional telling defensiveness. "In the context of violence in the home," the report states, "Amnesty agrees that some victims are men and, also, that some perpetrators of violence against intimate partners are female. However, there are claims that violence, and domestic violence in particular, is not a gender issue, with suggestions of parity of violence perpetrated by men and women, or that the root causes and consequences of all violence are the same for women and men. Such assertions are wrong. They are belied by sound national and international research, and by the very experiences of statutory and voluntary services in Ireland that deal with victims of such violence very day."
This is a mixture of semantic evasion and misstatement. Amnesty has not once raised its voice on behalf of male victims of domestic violence, but adopted in its totality the extreme feminist analysis of domestic violence as a symptom of what is ludicrously termed "patriarchal society".
Moreover, what independent research there is does precisely the opposite of what Amnesty claims. The international research was some years ago collated in a study entitled Men and Domestic Violence: What Research Tells Us by Kieran McKeown and Philippa Kidd, Social and Economic Research Consultants. They concluded: "The results of representative studies are fairly consistent in showing that, in approximately half of all intimate relationships where domestic violence occurs, both partners use violent acts, with the remainder divided equally between male-only violence and female-only violence. As a result, the self-reported prevalence of domestic violence among men and women, both as victims and as perpetrators, is broadly similar for all types of violence, both psychological and physical, minor and severe."
As for the rest of Amnesty's apologia, one reason agencies dealing with victims of domestic violence support the extreme feminist position is that the entirety of our support services and their grounding ideology is constructed on the man-hating analysis that Amnesty has recently surrendered its credibility by supporting. Men do not seek help from such quarters for obvious reasons. What is deeply nauseating about this latest report is it implies that Amnesty has been a fearless champion of male human rights in the matter of existential alienation and family law.
"Disturbingly", the Amnesty report asserts, "serious human rights issues such as suicide and its connection with young male alienation, or the rights of caring fathers to access to their children, are misrepresented as reasons to deny redress for violence against women". And the argument is further corrupted by suggestions that to campaign against gender-based violence is somehow "anti-men". This is as disingenuous a construction as I have come across. The inference to be drawn is that, when it is not campaigning against violence against women, Amnesty is sleepless in pursuit of justice on behalf of alienated males. This is laughable.
Moreover, I have never once heard demands concerning the rights of men offered as a reason to deny redress for violence against women.
Nor have I heard a single voice raised in objection to redress for genuine cases of violence against women. Not one. Ever.
The idea that there are groups or individuals out there seeking to deny adequate protections to women genuinely at risk from violence is a figment of Amnesty's imagination.
What some of us find objectionable about domestic violence propaganda is that it (1) seeks to impose on all men the guilt of the few; (2) insists there is little or no violence against men by women; (3) lobbies assiduously to prevent organisations representing male victims getting equal treatment; and (4) has fostered a widespread fraudulent abuse of domestic violence legislation by women, some of whom are themselves abusers, to deprive men of their children and homes.