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Men\'s Rights involves the promotion of male equality, The rights to equal treatment in custody battles, rights, and freedoms in society. Its aim is to promote the physical, economic and emotional well-being of all men and boys, as part of a general human rights, civil rights, or equal rights agenda. It is frequently concerned with family law, paternity fraud, and domestic violence. There is no single unifying manifesto or organization which can claim to speak for the entire movement and the term is used in various ways.
Related areas of the men\'s movement include:
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The Men\'s Rights Movement is concerned with the promotion of male rights and freedoms in society. The development of the modern men\'s movement, with its own Community and philosophy, is a recent development.[citation needed][attribution needed]
In the 2000s men and concerned women began to share their concerns on the Internet, often bringing forward unheard statistics or viewpoints. Its supporters are considered part of the Men\'s Movement, and often call themselves Men\'s Rights Activists, or MRAs. Father\'s rights and Domestic violence are areas central to the men\'s rights movement. It is primarily concerned with legal equality and representation, health, education, employment, civil rights and Constitutional rights.[citation needed] Many supporters are particularly concerned with the effect that Divorce, Custody, Rape and Violence Against Women Act-type laws have on men\'s rights and freedoms. It is argued that these laws cause violation of Constitutional rights such as the right to a fair trial and the right to due process.[citation needed][attribution needed]
Affirmative Action programmes, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 are also areas of prime concern. One group, S.P.A.R.C., argues that these policies have a far more discriminatory effect than is widely reported or acknowledged. http://www.deltabravo.net/custody/waronboys.php
Men\'s Rights Advocacy and Masculinism also promote the concept of "defending male identity". Typically MRAs would subscribe to masculinity as strength, honour and honesty.[citation needed][attribution needed]
Prior to 1995 the men\'s movement was predominantly a reactive and disorganized movement that received little attention or recognition. The American Coalition for Fathers and Children was founded in 1995 by mature activists such as Stuart A. Miller, and Dianna Thompson. ACFC founded the shared parenting movement and organized the largest protests in the history of the men\'s movement, the largest held in over 225 cities around the world on father\'s day, 2001 in the "Bridges for Children" campaign.[citation needed]
Like most social movements, those concerned with men\'s rights comprise a wide variety of individuals and organizations, both united and divided in various ways on specific issues including the mistreatment of men in the media, the abortion debate, family law and false rape allegations. Some groups are formally organized or incorporated, while others are casual alliances or the work of a few individuals.[citation needed]
Although the vast majority of men\'s rights leaders and activists are men, there are many women, including those in significant positions within the movement. For example, Sue Price in the Australian Men\'s Rights Agency has been at the forefront of activism there. Naomi Penner was a women\'s rights activist in the 1960s who later helped to create the National Coalition of Free Men in America in 1981. B.N. Saraswati founded one of the earliest Men\'s right group in India. Dianna Thompson, the first Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children founded the Second Wives Crusade, which gained popularity very quickly, and later became part of the True Equality Network operated by Terri Lynn Tersak. Self-labeled feminists, such as Wendy McElroy, regularly advocate for men\'s rights.[citation needed]
Although most men\'s rights advocates are from the developed world, they form a diverse group, which include both singularly religious and atheistic individuals, as well as those from the left, right, and center of politics and every echelon of society. Significantly, however, the Men\'s right movement caught strength in India with Purush Hakka Sanraskhshan Samsta, of "Save Indian Family".[citation needed]
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Within the larger context of human rights, men\'s rights advocates are concerned with many of the same general issues as proponents of women\'s rights, only with special attention and consideration to the role of men and boys.[citation needed]
In recent years, girls in the United States have tended to perform better in most educational levels and subjects. Yupin Bae, Susan Choy, Claire Geddes, Jennifer Sable, and Thomas Snyder, "Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women", Education Statistics Quarterly, U.S. Department of Education, 2000 In the United States, 57% of college students are women and growing. USA Today "College gender gap widens: 57% are women" The trend is similar in other industrialized countries.
Employment law is another area of concern, with such problems as unequal treatment around parental leave, retirement age, and pension entitlements. They also assert sexual harassment policies are de facto directed against the male style of inappropriate sexual behaviour in the workplace, while ignoring the female style of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. Others assert that many sexual harassment laws restrict men\'s basic freedoms, and cause men to be constantly on edge[citation needed]. They express anger towards the fact that a man telling a joke or simply referring to a co-worker by a nickname is grounds for dismissal or lawsuits. Spain\'s recent 40% requirement on boardroom members has come under harsh criticism from the movement, in particular as it violates EU law which would make working for a company with 65% male board members illegal, while a company with 100% female board members would be acceptable under Zapatero\'s new law.[citation needed][attribution needed]
Family law is an area of keen interest among men\'s rights groups. Men\'s rights advocates say that there is a systematic bias against men by family courts regarding issues related to child custody. http://menshealth.uws.edu.au/documents/NONRES%20FATHERS.html
Health areas addressed by the men\'s rights movement include:
Another issue of concern is the perceived anti-male bias in the media. Men\'s rights activists claim that men are portrayed unfairly on television, radio and in newspapers and magazines. They claim that not only does the media not pay serious attention to men\'s rights issues but that men are portrayed in a negative light, particularly in advertising[citation needed]. The lack of concern over male issues such as suicide, boys of education, and a willingness of the press to re-print feminist statistics such as the "wage gap" has led to the term "Lace Curtain" being used. The term was coined by MRA Warren Farrell.
In Australian immigration policy a distinction is regularly made between women and children (often treated erroneously as equivalent to "family groups") and single men. The details are subject to current debate and recently failed legislation (August 2006) in the Australian Parliament. But for example in one famous recent case, the Minister for Immigration, Senator Amanda Vanstone, determined as follows concerning Papuan asylum seekers (all forty-three of whom have since been accorded status as refugees): "The single men on the boat would be sent to an immigration detention centre, but families would not be split up and would be housed in facilities in the community"."Vanstone refuses to return Papuans", Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2006 The discriminatory treatment of single women (routinely assumed to be members of some family) and single men evident in such a practice is rarely examined in the Australian media.
In some societies there is legislated discrimination against males in provision of social security. In Australia, for example, a woman over 50 years of age may obtain a Widow Allowancehttp://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/payments/qual_how_wid.htm approximately equal to a pension if, after turning 40, she becomes widowed, divorced, or merely separated from a spouse (who may be a de facto spouse). She must have "no recent workforce experience", but she can easily qualify for this well after the loss of her partner by going through a period of underemployment. There is no similar allowance for men. In Australia and the UKhttp://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/atoz/atozdetailed/retirement.asp#state, some of these discriminatory arrangements (including also women\'s earlier qualification for Age Pension, etc.) are being legally phased out. The policy of "age 65 for men, age 60 for women" remains in place in most Western countries, however.
Domestic Violence is often shown as a problem of abusive men and battered women. However, a CDC study showed that women were the perpetrators in 70% of nonreciprocal violence. Women are also just as likely to initiate reciprocal violence.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17395835&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum It was determined that self-defense was not a significant motivation for violence perpetrated by women.
An article published in Clinical & Research News Volume 42, Number 15, page 31 states, "In a 2001 CDC (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia, USA) survey using a nationally representative sample of young adults aged 18 to 28, 11,370 who were in heterosexual relationships provided answers to violence related questions. Researchers found that women were far more likely to instigate nonreciprocal violence than were men (IPV = Interpersonal Violence).
"As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). \'This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious,\'
Whitaker discovered, of the 24 percent of relationships that had been violent, half had been reciprocal and half had not. Although more men than women (53 percent versus 49 percent) had experienced nonreciprocal violent relationships, more women than men (52 percent versus 47 percent) had taken part in ones involving reciprocal violence.
Of the study\'s numerous findings, Whitaker said, "I think the most important is that a great deal of interpersonal violence is reciprocally perpetrated and that when it is reciprocally perpetrated, it is much more likely to result in injury than when perpetrated by only one partner.
These findings on intimate partner violence come from a study conducted by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The lead investigator was Daniel Whitaker, Ph.D., a behavioral scientist and team leader at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (which is part of the CDC). Results were published in the May Journal of Public Health."
Critics accuse men\'s right advocates of ignoring, trivializing, and/or defending male violence. In response, some men\'s rights advocates say they "don\'t disagree that some men rape"[citation needed], but state that some figures put out claiming that 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 women are raped are exaggerated or are inherently sexist. They also suggest that women can be as violent as men in intimate partner relations, often citing Dr Martin Fiebert\'s bibliographyhttp://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm/ and Straus and Gelles findings.http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS21.pdf
Michael Flood states that studies based on the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS) are unreliable and that men\'s rights advocates ignore this when they cite statistics based on CTS studies.http://www.xyonline.net/husbandbattering.shtml Murray Straus (co-creator of the CTS) refers to such claims about the CTS as \'erroneous\'.http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS44G.pdf
Richard Gelles (co-creator of the CTS) describes the claim by "the right of center" that: "Women Initiate Violence as Often as do Men" is a "significant distortion of [his] research". One that "conveniently" ignores that "no matter what the rate of violence or who initiates the violence, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men." As found in surveys conducted by himself and Murray Straus as well as the Bureau of Justice Statistics.Richard J. Gelles, "Domestic Violence Factoids" University of Rhode Island Family Violence Research Program, 1995
Critics including Michael Flood cite statistics suggesting that of reported assaults by a partner, men are more likely to call the police, press charges, and keep them than women (Schwartz, 1987; Rouse et.al; 1988; Kincaid; 1982).
While the media awareness group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting acknowledges that violence against men by women takes place, it also suggests that a misreading of the Straus/Gelles studies accounts for the difference in numbers alleged by some men\'s rights advocates and those from the American government\'s Bureau of Justice Statistics.http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1247
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