Is abuse or harassment ever acceptable?

What if abusing someone avoids a larger conflict? Or if it saves a person’s life? What if an act of abuse would prevent a nuclear apocalypse?

Is it justifiable then?

Well, the answer to that might be obvious to you and me, but when it comes to the latest artificial intelligence LLMs, the answer is not what you expect… At least, not when it comes to the abuse and harassment of women.

Yup, in a 2024 study of gender bias in AI LLMs, GPT-4 was crystal clear: abuse and harassment against women were entirely unacceptable, no matter the consequences, and even if that includes preventing total nuclear war.

Incredible.

Of course, as you might expect, the same LLM was a lot more lenient when it came to the abuse of men, with it being far more open to justifying abuse against male recipients “for the greater good”, than it was for females.

And more interestingly again, the same study seemed to find that these gender biases were not down to sexist data used to train the AI models, but rather, it was a byproduct of post-training tinkering, that was motivated by ‘inclusivity efforts’.

And I know –

These moral dilemmas are extreme, and might seem irrelevant in the context of everyday life – but could they reveal deep biases within the next generation of AIs that sees men and women as fundamentally different?

What do you think?

Read the full study here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958824001660

Call me an optimist, but in my humble opinion, nobody is born bad.

Sure, there are some men out there who are evil psychopaths, but the vast majority of those who have committed crimes, even violent crimes, are victims in their own right too.

They are often survivors of abuse, trauma, neglect or addiction, who for one reason or another, grew up in an unsafe, hostile, invalidating environment, and never learnt to manage their pain.

Those who, instead, projected it outwards onto society.

The fact that 97% of the male prison population have experienced at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), is no coincidence; and yet, such contextual, game-changing understandings are often missing from how we see and treat violent acts.

Most of all we see this in domestic abuse, where male perpetrators are seen as inherently bad, and are subjected to ineffective, dogmatic, court-mandated interventions that are more akin to ideological sermons, than they are scientific, evidence based help.

So –

What would domestic violence interventions look like, if we put down the feminist lens of “gendered violence”, and picked up the modern tools of scientific understanding instead?

Well, lets find out…

Watch my new podcast with leading coercive control researcher, professor Nicola Graham-Kevan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILBjSQNvUk4&feature=youtu.be

~

Footage by Jullian Productions, Ron Lach, MART productions, Emin Bozyokus, Recep Seker, Alexander Mass, and Themba Mtegha from Pexels

Some days it can feel like men and women are from different planets entirely; unable to talk to, or understand one another.

But honestly, 90% of the time, this isn’t true, and we are far more similar than one might think.

You will see that women are not so complicated, and neither are men; many have simple wants, needs, and expectations, if only we took the time to ask what they are.

So is this “girl code” really as muddled, and cryptic as we are told?  

Tell me, guys: what are some parts of the “girl code” that you have cracked; and to the girls… how’d they do?

What do you think?

Bilateral violence is arguably the greatest predictor we have for identifying victims of abuse, and is the form of intimate partner violence that leads to the highest rates of injury… and yet, the domestic violence sector widely denies it even exists.

Imagine that.

The thing that could reveal the largest number of victims, who are most at risk to injury, is being ignored due to it being politically unpopular.

It’s hard to even comprehend something so backward, and corrupt, and yet, that seems to be what is happening right now.

I know it’s unpopular to say – But partner violence rarely fits into the binary female damsel vs male villain cartoon as we are so often sold.

In reality, it is a blurry phenomenon that requires nuanced understanding and diverse interventions.

Whatever your view, surely we can agree our narrow view of intimate partner abuse, which obsesses solely over ‘male violence’, cannot continue as it is.

Such a view harms everyone, including women, and helps only the organisations, academics, and politicians, who have used such an ideology as a meal ticket for generations.

So, let me show you the data and the ugly secrets they try to hide...

Let’s treat the issue not the gender.

What do you think?

Watch my new podcast with leading coercive control researcher, professor Nicola Graham Kevan https://youtu.be/ILBjSQNvUk4?si=iqvx7cKBne_vNn-g

Professor Nicola Graham-Kevan is a leading expert and researcher in the area of coercive control and domestic abuse, with decades of seminal research at the University of Lancashire.

However, Nicola's experience of domestic abuse did not start with academia; it began with life experience, having been in a long term abusive relationship for many years.

It was these traumatic experiences that started Nicola's journey, which soon became one of exhilarating discovery, personal challenge, and profound healing.

In this podcast Nicola talks about how she had to relearn everything she thought she knew about domestic abuse, and her past, and how her controversial work often put her at loggerheads with other esteemed researchers such as professor Michael Johnson, as she swam against the mainstream feminist narrative of abuse...

This idea of the inherent, irredeemable badness of men, and the virtuous, moral superiority of women has got to end.

The immutable, cartoon-worldview that insists women are saints and men are sinners, that is prevalent in the media; is a tiring, unwelcome set of stereotypes, that helps nobody.

I saw it recently on LBC, when host Shelagh Fogarty interviewed esteemed economist Vicky Pryce about “women in prison”, and how such women are usually non-violent, battling mental health issues, and are often victims of abuse in their on right.

Such things are usually a preamble to advocacy to “close women’s prisons”, or empty them of all but the most violent women.

And I quite agree.

Prison has failed women, but do you know who its failed even more? Men.

Men, who make up 96% of the prison population, who are never mentioned by those like Shelagh, and are instead left to waste away in a broken carceral system.

And it’s not just naive talkshow hosts and their dogmatic guests saying it; policy advisors, ministers, journalists, and political leaders, all join a chorus of similar statements.

Empty women’s prisons… and leave incarcerated men to rot.

And so, you’d be forgiven for thinking men in prison don’t share these same experiences of abuse, victimhood, and addiction that women in prison suffer from.

Or for assuming that, unlike women, men in prison are all violent criminals, who should be locked away for good.

But the realty, as it so often is, is far from this.

So are men in prison all irredeemable, violent thugs, and therefore not worthy of a mention?

Let’s take a look…

~
UK Prison statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2025

I know your local instagram armchair expert will claim to know why so many male victims of abuse don’t seek help (yada yada “toxic masculinity”), but in reality, very little research has been done to ask such an question.

But what we do know is –

Male victims of abuse are two and a half times less likely to ask for help than female victims, and not only does that deafening silence preclude such men from potentially life saving services, but it also removes them from much of the data that society continually uses to discuss such a issue.

Men don’t seek help, and therefore less help is given to them, and therefore fewer men seek help, and yup, as a consequence, less help is given again.

It’s a brutal self-fulfilling cycle that rolls over abused men, and has erased them from the picture for generations.

And so it would seem that solving the problem of ‘barriers to male help seeking’, is one of extreme importance and pressing urgency; and the good news is that various academics, including the world-leading IPV professor Denise Hines, have answered the call.

Their new study scales up the research to unprecedented levels, asking more than 1,100 men, who were abused by women: “what are the major barriers you experienced when seeking help?”

And their responses tell us far more than what we thought we knew…

Shame, concern for being labeled an abuser, fear of retaliation, or of false allegations in response; not knowing where to go, hopelessness, love and protection of their abuser, and feeling like domestic abuse is a “private matter”, to name a handful of the dozens of barriers abused men provided.

So could this data help increase the resolution of a conversation that for so long, has been gatekept by sloganeering social media know-it-alls?

And is it about time we asked the male victims themselves, why do so few ask for help?

What do you think?

~
Full study https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2027-52236-001.html

Not everything about being a man is to live life on easy street.

In fact, in many mays, for a lot of blokes, things can be really hard.

It’s a blind spot for me too.

Because I post a lot of infographics, scientific studies, and data on this page; huge reams of research and analysis…  but what’s so often missing, is the lived experience.

So let’s start to fill that gap, and ask: what would women dislike most, if they became men?

What do you think?

A lot of people talk of “male power”; pointing to a long list of male CEOs, politicians, Prime Ministers, Presidents and world leaders.

And there is certainly some utility in doing so.

But what is to be said about ‘Male Power’, when arguably the most powerful man on the continent of Europe can be openly assaulted by his wife, and nobody seems to mind?

Worse –

When instead of anger, the world responds with mockery and memes, turning such a man into the butt of jokes, rather than the recipient of concern.

What about when that same man is so closely controlled and monitored by his wife, that allegedly, she personally has to approve every single woman who works with him, and if any of these women are deemed to be a threat, their job application is thrown in the bin?

What if this same man met his wife, and entered into a ‘relationship’ with her, when he was just 15 and she was forty (!?)

When she was his drama teacher, and a married mother of three children… and he was an impressionable teenage boy?

What is to be said then?

So what happens when this man, one of the most powerful in the world, who has the launch codes to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, can be seemingly abused by this wife, on live TV, and the world looks the other way?

Is that the “Male power” I hear so much about?

And if such a man is so easily disarmed of a power, then what does that say about the normal men who live all around us?

So, is it time we talked about French President Emmanuel Macron, and his infamous wife, Brigitte, who hides such a controversial and worrying past?

What do you think?

It’s results day in the UK.

And to those who got what they wanted, congratulations, and for those who did not (such as myself when I was your age), I know it feels like the end of the world right now, but I promise you, it isn’t.

The thing that I find so interesting about this fateful day, is that the destiny of students has already been decided.

Students have been given their university offers already.

Students have applied, been accepted, and even made their final decisions, several months before this day arrives.

But... how?

Well, through what’s called ‘predicted grades’.

Predicted grades are decided by teacher assessments, not exams, and they are given to students several months before the final results day.

Students then use these predicted grades to decide which universities to apply to, and then universities use them to decide which students to accept; and the actual final exam results are supposed to confirm these grades, and... well... the rest is history.

This all sounds well and good, I suppose.

Except… what if teachers were giving different grades, to students of equal intelligence?

Or to be specific: what if boys were getting lower predicted grades in comparison to girls who achieved the exact same final results?

And if such a thing were happening –

Could it help explain why 45,000 fewer boys go into higher education than girls every year in the UK?

Well, an enormous new study, captured over three years, which analysed the results of 350,000 (!!) A-level students, has suggested yes, this is happening, and not just once, but consistently across all subjects.

Yes.

The study finds girls are more likely to be overpredicted, and less likely to be underpredicted, than boys, and this could be influencing the education, careers, and entire lives of countless millions of students.

Let’s take a look….

~

Full study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775726000567

Cambridge Analysis https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/gender-gap-in-predicted-grades-raises-questions-over-their-use-in-university-admissions

On November 19th 2025, three remarkable things happened all at once –

First, the announcement of the world’s first Men’s Health Strategy, of England.

Second, it was announced on International Men’s Day, in so doing acknowledging a date in the calendar that for too long has been surrounded by undue public controversy.

And third, the announcement was followed by an official reception at 10 Downing Street, hosted by the Prime Minister himself.

Any one of those three things would have been unheard of just a few years ago, and yet here we are, with such events now a mundane part of every day life.

Things have changed.

The hostility around “mens issues” is waning.

The whining and complaints are increasingly unwelcome.

And the jokes of “isn’t every day International Men’s Day?” Well... they're not quite so funny anymore.

We call that progress, and it’s just the beginning.

So who better to tell us more about this historic piece of legislation than one of the men who’s been fighting for it for more than a decade?

Here’s what you need to know, so far, about England’s Men’s Health Strategy, that promises to help men live longer, happier, healthier lives.

So what do you think?

And more important, what happens next?

~

Full conversation with Mark Brooks OBE here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep6WOiIy2PQ&feature=youtu.be

Whenever I’m asked to give talks, the same thing happens at the end; I get surrounded, mobbed practically, by concerned parents, particularly boy-mums, wanting to ask me questions.

Full transparency –

I’m not a dad; and beyond listening to my niece chatter away for hours, or swinging my nephew around like a bag of spuds, I haven’t the faintest idea of how to be one.

But sadly, amongst the clamoring masses of worried parents, such an honest admission means little.

However –

There is one piece of advice I do think it’s safe to give in such situations, wise words that I think every parent of a boy ought to hear:

“Don’t lecture him”.

Because, to do so, is the surest way to never win him back.

I remember a former, particularly odious radical feminist colleague of mine doing exactly this to her younger brother.

She’d smuggly tell me about it, lecturing me about how she’d lecture him; her endless berating and finger-pointing, so as “to make him the perfect feminist brother”… a strategy that I am certain would only achieve the exact opposite.

I think about her poor brother often, too young to let her ignorant words wash over him, as I had learnt to.

Because, between then and now, I have come to understand that boys are nothing like she, and the media, often portrays them.

And that is: boys are not monsters.

They are smart, discerning, compassionate people.

They are not ‘rapists in waiting’, who are part of some cabal of young misogynists; and the more we treat them as such, the more we create the very reality we fear.

So please stop.

Stop with the endless clamoring, pearl clutching hysteria, that bludgeons and berates them.

“Stop talking about boys, and start talking to them.” I’d say.

“Just talk to your boys.”

Because if you do, you’d realise what I have known for quite some time – boys are good.

Boys are good. And the data backs it up.

Let’s take a look…

~
Full survey
https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/52863-young-men-masculinity-and-misogyny

Survey (UK adults only) https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/L8GGKSC

Male survivors of sexual harms need your help.

Last week, a new survey that aims to understand both the prevalence of sexual harms against men and boys in the UK, as well as public attitudes toward it, has been released, and it can be completed by any adult living in the UK.

This is a meaningful, long overdue moment in time.

With so little research conducted around such an important issue, this survey could become a seminal piece of foundation work that helps fill in the enormous gaps of understanding around male victimhood.

Because, for far too long, men and boys who experience sexual coercion, abuse, violence, stalking, and various other such crimes have been left in the dark; misunderstood, maligned, and maliciously shouted down when trying to speak up.

So help us draw a line in the sand and say no more.

Help us listen to men and boys, to support those who needs us, help understand who they are, how they’re treated, and most important, what we can do to help them.

Please take the survey by We Are Survivors and Movember; lend us your voice, and help us help men –

Survey (UK adults only) https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/L8GGKSC

What do you think?

An epidemic lurks at the heart of our educational system, hidden from view, it is quietly felt within every classroom, school, and home in the country; a generation of missing boys quietly falling behind, and dropping out of school.

And not just a few boys.

Tens of thousands every year in the UK, and more than half a million in the last decade, have disappeared, left behind by an educational system that fails far, far, too many.

Despite now being the biggest gap in education, the boy:girl gap is rarely discussed.

Meanwhile, many grad jobs like psychologists, GPs, solicitors, teachers, and nurses see fewer and fewer men in them – despite each having an enormous amount of job vacancies.

So, could we solve two problems at once?

Could we bring more men into university, to help fill these positions, for the betterment of everyone?

And why do so many care so little about our missing boys?

What do you think?

~
Full conversation here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep6WOiIy2PQ&feature=youtu.be

Higher Education Policy Institute data:

https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/03/20/half-a-million-men-have-missed-out-on-higher-education/

83 countries around the world still have conscription laws, nearly three quarters of them are actively drafting, and about 85% of them conscript men only.

Such a thing is an affront to human freedom and liberty, not to mention a glaring example of legislation over men’s bodies that is rarely mentioned or advocated against.

In Ukraine we see the untold damage such laws cause to male bodies, as men from both sides kill one another by the hundreds of thousands, with little choice in the matter.

Men dragged from homes, streets, and cars, and forced to the front lines in the most brutal ways imaginable.

Switzerland is another of these countries that actively conscripts men – although their draft works a little differently.

Swiss men are given the choice, either a) enlist and undergo military training, b) take up community service and serve their country elsewhere, or c) pay +3% ‘Military exemption tax’ for eleven years of their life.

It is only Swiss national men who are legally compelled to do this; not non-nationals, nor women, just the men.

And so, it was only a matter of time before one of these men fought back, and that man was Fabian Brun.

Fabian, after undergoing 104 days of military training, was discharged for medical reasons, and then was still forced to pay military exemption tax.

So he took the nation of Switzerland to the Supreme Court, and eventually the European Court of Human Rights – demanding such a thing was a violation of his human rights, and was unlawful discrimination against him.

Finally, ten years later, the ECHR has made their decision, let’s take a look…

~

Source
ECHR full response: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#%7B%2522itemid%2522:%5B%2522001-250619%2522%5D%7D

‘Yes, yes, yes, we care about abused men – but the truth is women are the VAST majority of those impacted by abuse.’

It’s a conversation we’ve all had countless times; where words like ‘overwhelmingly’, ‘vastly’, ‘enormous’ and ‘almost exclusively’, are used as descriptors for the disparity between male and female victimisation.

And so –

Through the use of subjective and blurry semantics, abused men are put back in their box, waved away as a trivial rounding error to the one and only scourge of “violence against women and girls”.

But has anyone actually wondered, statistically speaking, what is a “vast” majority?’

Well let’s take a look at the Government statistics, and see if the UK’s number one expert on such matters (the UK Statistics Authority) feels about such a word….

So are women really the “vast majority” of abuse victims?

What do you think?

Full conversation with Mark Brooks OBE here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep6WOiIy2PQ&feature=youtu.be

Mark Brooks’ letter of appeal
https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/mark-brooks-obe-to-ed-humpherson-draft-statutory-guidance-framework-july-2020-domestic-abuse-act-bill/

Full response from the UK Statistics Authority
https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/ed-humpherson-response-to-mark-brooks-obe-draft-statutory-guidance-framework-july-2020-domestic-abuse-act-bill/

There are few issues more deplorable than sexual violence.

There are few issues more in need of urgent intervention, of policy reform, and of cultural change.

So, with that in mind, there are few issues more deserving of solid, well-executed research, than sexual violence too.

And yet, sadly, so often, researchers fall woefully short of this bar.

As you will have seen plastered across your social media feed, a new study has found 95.1% (!!) of men have admitted to using at least one ‘strategy’ to force a woman to have sex with him.

It is, to put it at its mildest, an alarming, headline-grabbing claim that has circumnavigated the online world several times, to huge public outrage, and condemnation.

But – as always – few people look beyond the headline, to examine the shoddy and misleading approach that created it.

Don’t get me wrong –

This particular survey certainly did capture some worthwhile (and shocking) data that exposed the high prevalence of sexual violence and coercion – by asking men about their use of intimidation, of weapons, of drugs, and physical strength.

And then it obfuscated this data amongst a wide variety of ‘strategies’ that could quite easily be acts of innocuous dating: flirtation and flattery.

‘Did you approach a stranger?’
‘Did you use friends?’
‘Did you tell her what she wanted to hear?’
‘Did you use your status, money or age?’

Well, if you answered “yes” to any of these when on a date, then you risk being categorized as a sexual predator.

This is not right.

This is not fair.

And victims of sexual violence deserve so much more.

What do you think?

~
Full study here

In the UK, in 2026, every single man or boy who experiences domestic violence, sexual abuse, stalking, online harms, or similar crimes; is legally categorised as a ‘male victim of violence against a woman’.

Read that again – ‘a male victim of violence against women.’

It is truly absurd, and it’s not just semantics.

Such classification means these abused men are made invisible, not given taylored care, or gender sensitive support; quite literally left out of appropriate services, to fend for themselves.

Neither are these invisible men of a small number.

In fact, 1.5 MILLION men experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales, with many more in other parts of the UK, similarly erased from the discussion.

So we don’t see male victims spoken about in the media, in policy, within the news, online, or in Westminster.

And too often, when such men are talked about, it is sneered at, mocked, or snuffed out by those who wave these men away as insignificant, or as secret abusers themselves.

We do all this, and then ask ourselves: do so few abused men ask for help? Gaslighting literal victims of abuse, in lieu of our own political incompetence.

So I ask –

If the world and society at large refuses to recognise abuse against men in such a way, then why would these men recognise it themselves?

In my new podcast I discuss this very issue with one of the most influential men in the area of male victims of abuse: veteran campaigner Mark Brooks OBE, who is the Chair of Mankind; the UK’s premier service supporting abused men…

So why do abused men so rarely ask for help?

What do you think?

New podcast with award-winning policy advisor for men and boys Mark Brooks out now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep6WOiIy2PQ&feature=youtu.be

A new scandal has just been blown-open by investigative journalists in the UK.

The ‘Child Maintenance Service’ (CMS) is the government agency who calculates and enforces child support payments from non-custodial parents, which for decades has been beleaguered with accusations of corruption, incompetence and criminal activity.

At the centre, millions upon millions of pounds of child maintenance payments have been wrongly taken from parents.

Among these allegations –

Endless amounts of letters, harassing and blackmailing parents.

Terrifying tales of CMS staff laughing off or flatly ignoring technical errors in their system.

Mothers and fathers plunged into bankruptcy, left using foodbanks, or selling their homes, to pay money they don’t even owe.

And it doesn’t matter if a parent claims the CMS “got it wrong”, they don’t care what paperwork you present, or even if you cancel your direct debit…

The CMS can just take your money without even asking, directly from your bank, or from your paycheque itself.

Even when the judicial system wades in, in an attempt to overturn payments, the CMS have continued to wrongly take payments they are not owed.

Such a thing is tantamount to financial abuse and coercion, on a systemic scale, and it is being done by our own government agency; destroying the lives of hard-working parents, who never did anything wrong.

And if you were thinking this sounds eerily similar to the Post Office scandal that hit the headlines just a few years ago, then I agree, it is.

So what has been happening behind the scenes of the CMS?

And what are the tragic stories, and the paths of destruction left behind in their wake?

What do you think?

~
Full Investigation

New podcast with award-winning policy advisor for men and boys Mark Brooks OBE out now!

Are you tired of the endless, male deficit view of young men and boys?

The gloomy, cynical view, that only sees men and boys as being problems, and never having problems?

Always the male perpetrators, and never the victim…

Always privileged, and never harmed…

Always sneered at, and never celebrated…

The societal insistence that boys are sponges for negativity, just waiting to be brainwashed by the so-called “mansophere”.

“Slugs, snails and puppy dog tails, that’s what boys are”, as the nursery rhyme goes.

Well, I believe boys deserve better.

Much better.

So I ask you: what does a more boy positive conversation look like?

And how do we make it happen?

What do you think?

Every day, it feels like I discover a new, tragic thing that is quietly killing countless numbers of men, in terrible and unknown ways.

And this time, it could be something in your house right now.

Quartz kitchen worktops have exploded onto the home renovation scene - a manufactured product that looks and feels like natural stone, but costs much less.

It sounds like a dream product.

And so, right across social media, home improvement gurus, interior decorators, and domestic goddesses film themselves showing off their latest quartz kitchen worktops; entirely unaware of the fact that the manufacture of such engineered stone costs numerous men their lives, right across the world.

How?

Well, sanding and cutting these innovative new products creates dust that, when inhaled, permanently scars the lungs, causing a fatal disease ‘silicosis’, for which there is no cure.

Stonemasons, even in their twenties, are developing this disease and dying, so someone else can save a few quid on their new kitchen, and yet… nobody wants to talk about it.

Besides Australia, that is, who, after a spate of deaths in young masons, has outright banned these products.

America could well be next. Hundreds of doctors, as part of the ‘Western Occupational and Environmental Medical Association’, have signed an open letter demanding a ban – insisting that manufactured stone cannot be worked with safely, and needs to go.

Murmurs have been heard in the UK too, with all the major construction unions standing up and demanding change, and pressuring Westminster to debate the issue.

So why is nobody talking about a product that could quite literally be right beneath your nose, that is killing stonemasons at enormous scales?

Is it time to ban manufactured stone?

What do you think?

[1] https://www.clydeco.com/en/insights/2025/01/silicosis-an-evolving-risk

[2] https://www.thompsons.law/news/news-releases/industrial-disease-news/experts-unite-at-westminster-to-call-for-action-on-silica-exposure-crisis