Stephen Baskerville > Quotes

“Seldom does public policy stand in such direct defiance of undisputed facts, to the point where the cause of the problem—separating children from their fathers—is presented as the solution, and the solution—allowing children to live with their fathers—is depicted as the problem. It is unambiguous and undeniable that if you want children abused, take them away from their fathers.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“The presumption of innocence for gender crimes has been inverted into a presumption of guilt; knowingly false accusations are unpunished and even encouraged; patently innocent men (and some women) are taken away in handcuffs and put behind bars without being convicted, tried, or even charged; clear miscarriages of justice are rationalized and excused by government officials and politicians with legal jargon and weasel words about “progress” and “changing attitudes.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Restraining orders” separating fathers and children (often for life) are routinely issued during divorce proceedings without any evidence of legal wrongdoing, often without notifying the father to be present to defend himself or without any hearing at all. These orders do not punish criminals for illegal acts they are proven to have committed but prohibit law-abiding citizens from otherwise legal acts—like being in their own homes or with their own children. With the stroke of a pen, judges can simply legislate new crimes around each individual, who will then be arrested for doing what no statute prohibits and what the rest of us may do without penalty. “Once the restraining order is in place, a vast range of ordinarily legal behavior”—most often contact with one’s own children—is “criminalized.” Because violent assault and other statutory crimes are already punishable, the only people punished are peaceful, law-abiding citizens.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Feminist-dominated administrations in the United States have elevated child protection to a paramilitary operation. In 1993, US Attorney General Janet Reno used unsubstantiated child abuse rumors to launch military operations against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children that she was ostensibly protecting. The militarization of child protection was seen again in the largest seizure of children in American history, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without any evidence of abuse. “A night-time raid with tanks, riot police, SWAT teams, snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriff’s deputies—that is the new face of state child protection,” writes attorney Gregory Hession, “social workers backed up with automatic weapons.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Much like secret police operations in totalitarian states, the child abuse gestapo turns citizens into informers by providing for anonymous reporting, requiring mandatory reporting by doctors and other professionals of even suspected child abuse (whatever that might be), complete immunity from criminal prosecution or civil liability for knowingly false reports, and confidentiality of records and proceedings. “Much as we see in totalitarian regimes,” writes Krason, “The laws . . . have created a system driven to a certain extent by fear . . . Physicians, teachers, day care center workers, and other mandated reporters make reports—often on the slightest pretext—because they figure that it is better to speak up than not speak up for the sake of self-protection.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Quoting one another’s unsupported clichés is a favorite technique among feminist scholars.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Also like child support agents, child protection officials are recruited largely from the ranks of divorced women and from graduates of social work and “women’s studies” programs, where they are trained in feminist ideology that is hostile to parents and especially fathers. It appears that homosexuals are also entering the social work profession in large numbers.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“With most crimes, police generally do not arrest suspects without a warrant unless they personally witness it. Yet the mob justice surrounding domestic violence has brought the innovation of mandatory arrest, even when it is not clear who has committed the deed or even that any deed has been committed at all. One prosecutor in Hamilton County, Ohio, notes that this is “turning law-abiding citizens into criminals.” Judith Mueller of the Women’s Center in Vienna, Virginia, who had lobbied for the mandatory arrest law, says, “I am stunned, quite frankly, because that was not the intention of the law. It was to protect people from predictable violent assaults, where a history occurred, and the victim was unable for whatever reason to press charges. . . . It’s disheartening to think that it could be used punitively and frivolously.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“In the infamous Duke University lacrosse case, Durham, North Carolina, prosecutor Michael Nifong suppressed solid evidence of the innocence of the three rape defendants for months and proceeded to prosecute men he knew to be innocent in an effort to send them to prison for as much as thirty years each.

Nothing suggests the Duke case was unusual. Nifong had willing accomplices throughout the state and local governments: assistant prosecutors, police departments, crime lab technicians, judges, and the state bar, plus the media. And again, no grand jury exercised its function to restrain Nifong. Though Nifong was eventually challenged and disbarred (but only after the evidence became overwhelming), he was never criminally prosecuted for framing innocent people. Moreover, his downfall occurred only after highly unusual media coverage; his fellow prosecutors’ first response was to circle the wagons around their obviously crooked colleague and defend his prosecution of innocent men, an open admission that he did nothing out of the ordinary and that they all use similar techniques to railroad the innocent.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Like other new gender crimes, the critical feature of “domestic violence” is that it has no definition. The fact that violent assault is already illegal in every jurisdiction on earth is ignored amid the hysteria and rush to punishment. Legally, domestic violence is adjudicated not as violent assault but as a conflict within an “intimate relationship.” Like rape and sexual harassment therefore, it blurs the distinction between disagreement and crime. Indeed—and this is difficult for the uninitiated to fully comprehend—it need not be, in fact, violent. In fact it need not be even physical and almost never is, since true battery can be formally charged as criminal assault.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“In Britain, centuries-old protections for the accused are set aside in the zeal to punish those routinely labeled not as “defendants” but as “abusers.” “Special domestic violence courts” allow third parties such as civil servants and feminist groups to use “relaxed rules of evidence and the lower burden of proof” by bringing “civil actions” against those they label as batterers, even if their alleged “victim” brings no charges—or does not exist. “Victim support groups,” with no first-hand knowledge of the alleged deed, can now act in the name of anonymous alleged victims—with no proof that such alleged victims even exist—to loot men who have been convicted of no crime.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Even more than rape and sexual harassment, and like the divorce industry with which it is closely connected, domestic violence has become a multi-billion dollar industry and “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Bar associations and even courts themselves regularly sponsor public seminars counseling mothers on how to fabricate abuse accusations. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of one seminar quoted in the Chicago Tribune tells divorcing women. “You just have to accuse.”227 “The number of women attending the seminars who smugly—indeed boastfully—announced that they had already sworn out false or grossly exaggerated domestic violence complaints against their hapless husbands, and that the device worked!” writes an astonished Thomas Kiernan in the New Jersey Law Journal. “To add amazement to my astonishment, the lawyer-lecturers invariably congratulated the self-confessed miscreants.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Because mandatory arrest laws resulted in an unexpected rise of arrests of women, feminists began devising procedures effectively requiring, as clearly as possible without stating it categorically, that only men be arrested. Though about half of all incidents are mutual, with no clear instigator or victim, feminists began demanding that police arrest the “primary aggressor.” “Police manuals often instruct officers to determine who is the primary aggressor based on ‘who appears to be in control,’” though with no guidance on how to determine which person appears to be in “control.” In many police departments, “the unofficial policy is to simply arrest the larger person. So in practice the primary aggressor standard becomes the flimsy rationale to arrest the man.” In Massachusetts, a training manual tells officers to ignore men’s “excuses” such as, “She hit me first.” The manual encourages officers to downplay the significance of a man’s injuries, warning that “injury alone doesn’t determine who is the abuser.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Criminalizing fathers and mothers is closely followed by the criminalization of children. Another recent hysteria concerns “bullying,” another new quasi-crime with no clear definition. Yet it is replete with programs and spending to “raise awareness,” in the words of First Lady Michelle Obama, so that what everyone thought was adolescent misbehavior is in fact a federal civil rights violation and perhaps a federal crime. The US government’s “interagency bullying-resource web site” includes such infractions as “teasing,” “name-calling,” and “excluding someone from a group on purpose.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Almost daily we see new crimes being legislated, usually by regulatory authorities, to criminalize what had previously been discouraged by moral disapproval. Most can only be committed by men. Two men were recently arrested on the New York subway for sitting with their legs too far apart. The male-only nature of this criminal practice is indicated by the terminology: “manspreading.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“The panoply of punishments ostensibly directed at domestic violence was created almost entirely to win advantage in divorce and child custody cases and answered the problem of how to physically remove the father from the home. “It’s an easy way to kick somebody out,” says one family law specialist, who claims to see at least one case a month where patently false charges are used to remove a spouse.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“So-called “battered women’s shelters” have been called “one-stop divorce shops” because they are “extreme militant feminist” operations that exist mostly to separate children from their fathers, even without any demonstration of violence. Erin Pizzey, who founded the first shelter in London in 1971, claims that her movement has been “hijacked” by feminists. Extended investigations by Canada’s National Post and others revealed a violently anti-male agenda, corruption, drug and alcohol use, child abuse, and even, ironically, violence against women. Yet they continue to receive government funding. One woman whose husband “didn’t beat me up or nothing, we just had an argument,” says shelter workers ignored her pleas and pressured her to leave her marriage. “They asked me if I was abused, and I said, ‘No.’ They wanted me to get a lawyer, and I said, ‘For what?’” She maintains shelter employees tried to “trick” her into making incriminating statements about her husband. “Everything negative about him, they wrote it down. If I said something nice about him, they wouldn’t write it down. I kept telling them, ‘No, he didn’t hit me.’” She was offered financial incentives to leave her husband. “They said, ‘If you leave him, we can help you find a place right away.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to leave him.’ . . . They wanted that so bad. They were trying to break up a family, and I didn’t want that.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Dale McAlpine was arrested for preaching about homosexuality by a policeman who identified himself as the “liaison officer for the bisexual-lesbian-gay-transsexual community” and who admitted taking the action because of his own personal feelings. “I am a homosexual, I find that offensive,” officer Sam Adams apparently told McAlpine before arresting him. The power to arrest and incarcerate people with whose beliefs they disagree is not one that free societies normally leave to individual policemen. Nor do they normally create special police units with mandates to protect only certain citizens or ignore the distinction between hurt feelings and crime. Only those classing themselves in sexual categories enjoy these privileges.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“In their relentless determination to punish, the family police have little regard for the rights of children (that elsewhere they claim to champion). Long and intrusive interrogations of children, with relentless suggestions of the alleged brutality and lust of their parents against them, poison their relationships with their parents, sometimes permanently. “Long, repeated interrogations by social workers—and the outright intimidation that sometimes accompanies them—forced physical and sexual examinations in some cases to determine if they have been sexually abused, and (essentially) forced therapy by psychologists, counselors,” is described by Krason (and others), who suggests they could be “considered torture under international human rights law.”

The foster care into which children are placed after being taken from their parents is a far more likely setting for serious abuse than the children’s natural family, with more than 10 times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse of children in group homes than in the general population.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Continuing the Bolshevik logic, forced confessions, familiar from the Stalinist show trials, are extracted in family courts and domestic violence courts on pain of losing access to one’s children or of incarceration. Pre-printed confessions state, “I have physically and emotionally battered my partner.” The father must then describe the violence, even if he insists he committed none. The documents require him to confess, “I am responsible for the violence I used. My behavior was not provoked.”

Scholars of totalitarianism furnish an apposite description: “Confessions are the key to this psychic coercion. The inmate is subjected to a constant barrage of propaganda and ever-repeated demands that he ‘confess his sins,’ that he ‘admit his shame.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison with no evidence that they had committed any crime or abuse. Yet it is embarrassingly clear that, as the price for getting published, Pendergrast must issue repeated, seemingly gratuitous protests, unconvincing and contrary to his own evidence, that this hysteria was not incited by feminist ideology.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“It is implausible that judges are unaware that the most dangerous environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they themselves create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they have no hesitation in removing them, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable for any harm that comes to the children. On the contrary, if they do not they may be punished by feminist-dominated family law sections of the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose earnings and funding depend on a constant supply of abused children. A Brooklyn judge, described as “gutsier than most” by the New York Law Journal, was denied reappointment when he challenged social service agencies’ efforts to remove children from their parents. A lawyer close to the Legal Aid Society said that “many of that group’s lawyers, who [claim to] represent the children’s interests in abuse cases, and lawyers with agencies where [allegedly?] abused children are placed, have been upset by Judge Segal’s attempts to spur fam ily reunifications.” Though no evidence indicated that his rulings resulted in any child being abused or neglected, “most of the opposition [to his reappointment] came from attorneys who represent children in neglect and abuse proceedings.” An Edmonton, Alberta, judge was forced by feminists to apologize for saying, “That parties who decide to have children together should split for any reason is abhorrent to me,”...”
― Stephen Baskerville

“Even truth itself is no excuse for offending a sexual ideologue: “Truthful statements can be presented in a manner that would meet the definition of hate speech,” the Court adds, “and not all truthful statements must be free from restriction.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“This perversion of criminal justice, criminalization of masculinity, and power of sexuality as a political weapon can be grasped only by understanding how central is the sex act itself to the power dynamic. The most potent but least understood feature of the new gender crimes is how smoothly they use expanded sexual freedom to diminish civil freedom.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“The very concept of fathers as protectors is so politically incorrect that researchers must hedge their findings with politically acceptable weasel words: “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.” In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule. While men are assumed more likely to commit sexual than physical abuse,333 sexual abuse is much less common than severe physical abuse and is almost entirely perpetrated by boyfriends and stepfathers (who are falsely classified as “fathers” in most statistical studies).

Yet feminists would have us believe that father-daughter incest is rampant, and feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy, rationalizing the forced removal of fathers and creating the very problem they claim to be solving. “An anti-male attitude is often found in documents, statements, and in the writings of those claiming to be experts in cases of child sexual abuse.” These scholars document techniques by social service agencies to systematically teach children to hate their fathers, including inculcating in the children a message that the father has sexually molested them. “The professionals use techniques that teach children a negative and critical view of men in general and fathers in particular,” they write. “The child is repeatedly reinforced for fantasizing throwing Daddy in jail and is trained to hate and fear him.” From the father’s perspective, the real child abusers have thrown him out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“The logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the fathers, feminist officials can then present themselves as the solution to the problem they themselves have created. The more child abuse—whether by mothers or foster care providers or even by social workers themselves (which is often the case)—the only option on the table is to further and endlessly expand the child abuse bureaucracy. Even when the horrors are exposed, meaningful reform is then deftly deflected with the self-serving argument that the welfare agencies are “overworked and underfunded,” thus rationalizing expansion of the very machinery creating the horrors. “State agencies . . . frequently complain that they are understaffed and overworked—even while justifying more and more intervention into families.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“On "gender crimes"
The outcome is usually a foregone conclusion because (like the show trials of the 1930s and 1950s), the procedure is effectively scripted. Typically, the accuser will be “training herself in correct victim behavior by reading” government literature “made available for the purpose,” as Daphne Patai explains. “A script is being played out. All the characters have roles to perform.”29 But acquittal is not part of the script, and everyone accused receives some punishment.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“The corollary of new crimes that only some people can commit is to exempt others from punishment for standard crimes—indeed, to pro vide a license to kill. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the British Labour Party and Minister for Women, proposes allowing women to kill their “intimate partners” with impunity if they kill while “claiming past, or fear of future, abuse from male partners.” Murder would thus be condoned if a woman claimed to have suffered “conduct which caused the defendant to have a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged.”

How the dead (and unproven) “abusers” could establish their innocence is not discussed in the proposal. “Effectively, what Harman and the ultra-feminist lobby want is a licence for women to kill,” writes Erin Pizzey, a long-time advocate for domestic violence victims, who has reacted in horror at the hijacking of the movement by ideological extremists. “Women can murder as long as their sense of victimhood is sufficiently powerful. . . . Rather than reducing violence, Harriet Harman’s proposals could become a charter for domestic chaos, as vengeful women believe they can butcher partners they come to loathe, inventing incidents of abuse or exaggerating fears of assault.”

Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank accused the government of introducing “gang law” into the legal system. Lyn Costello of Mothers Against Murder and Aggression described the changes as “utter madness.” “We need clear laws, not more grey areas. . . . Unless there are really exceptional circumstances, such as self-defence or protecting yourself or family, then there is no excuse for killing someone, and it should be murder.”
― Stephen Baskerville

“What is presented as the individual’s “right” to exercise a new sexual freedom without restriction by the state quickly translates, by a sleight-of-hand that few perceive, into a government power to punish both those who partake of the new freedom and those who stand in the way of it. This is the logic that transforms the Rights of Man into the Reign of Terror. The fanatical Antoine de St. Just could have been speaking for the Sexual rather than the French Revolution when he declared, “No freedom for the enemies of freedom!”
― Stephen Baskerville