The call to punish men less and to punish women more recurs frequently throughout these websites and is tied up with allegations of discrimination against men. Men are unfairly stereotyped and unjustly accused of violence, while women can behave badly with impunity. To remedy this injustice, women’s transgressions should be dealt with severely. False allegations of domestic violence ‘should be properly punished to the full extent of the law’.[667] Women should also be punished if they do not allow child contact.[668] More generally, the law should ‘recognise the cruelty of persistent or unrelenting verbal and emotional abuse which women can use.. . against men, and which may provoke a violent reaction.’[669] Families Need Fathers reports that female-on-male violence is not taken seriously and that male victims are treated as perpetrators:[670] ‘[W]hatever the exchanges and events that might have preceded allegations of violence, it is the male of the couple that takes the rap.’[671] Gordon[672] takes a similar view:
Men feel that the criminal justice system is heavily stacked against them. If they hit their partner they are punished, if their partner hits them, then little or nothing is done. All too often this means that the man has to defend himself, if that defence involves any level of violence, then he is the perpetrator.[673]
The Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Bill (now Act) was seen as further evidence of unfair discrimination: ‘[T]hey [the government] are now forcing the criminal courts to become as corrupt as the family courts.’[674] Certainly, there is a perception that men are being disadvantaged. A ‘Comment’ from the Daily Mail linked to the Fathers4Justice website and reproduced on the Justice in Family Law site says of the Bill:
From a government that has shown its contempt for marriage comes another assault on men, whose rights under the law are being systematically dismantled. . . [T]he British political establishment, including the judiciary, are declaring war on half the human race, creating a new official received wisdom that men are programmed to be violent towards women and children while women are blameless. In fact all the evidence suggests that women are as violent towards men as men are towards 201
women.[675]