In honour of International Men's Day

So, today, 19th November is International Men's Day. 'International Men's Day?', you ask. Yes, I know it sounds a bit strange, what with all the talk about the low representation of women on the boards of our major companies, in parliament, and so on. But think about it for a moment. And if, like me, you're a feminist, think about it a bit longer too. Are things really so loaded on the side of the masculine, that we don't need to think about men as needing help sometimes too?

Think about boys for a moment. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are currently 18.2 million 'families' in the UK, of which 2 million are lone parents with children. Now, the majority of those lone parents are female. (Let's park the issue of lone fathers for the sake of this argument, but acknowledge that they have no end of problems, many of which International Men's Day was set up to highlight.) So, any boys in those lone parent families will be more or less fatherless. They may, if they're lucky have a strong male role model in a grandfather or other relative. They may not. If they are astonishing lucky, they may find themselves in a primary school with one or more male teachers and one of those might teach them. They probably won't. There's a pretty strong chance that most of their teachers at secondary school will be female too.

This isn't just a question of role models. The feminisation of the education system has a much more serious impact. It introduces different norms into what is regarded as acceptable behaviour: sitting still and listening quietly is good, jumping around and kicking a ball is disruptive. OK, that might be a caricature but the fact remains that an awful lot of young boys find themselves labelled as trouble-makers for typical boyish boisterous behaviour and from then on they are launched on a trajectory towards suspensions, exclusions and asbos. And probably, all they needed was a bit more time blowing off steam on a football field.

There's another, even more insidious side to this feminisation. It sometimes goes under the name of misandry and it has spilled out into the media and popular culture. It's the female equivalent of locker-room sexism: giggling comparisons of male inadequacies in the bedroom, around the house, cooking, driving, you name it, and culminating in the conception that the only thing men are good for is providing sperm. There are a whole TV programs centred on this idea. And they make me shudder.

Nicely reasoned articles like the one in today's Guardian by Ally Fogg make the case for men and women working together to solve common interconnected problems of, say, mental health or violence. He argues that before this can happen the commonality of those problems needs to be acknowledged and hopes IMD will help bring that about. No-one could fail to agree. But in my opinion there's a step that comes before this. Let's recognise all that female banter for what it is: sexism. And let's start by getting it out of our primary schools.

The other abuse of looked after children

Far be it for me to plough in with commentary on the BBC's woes, Jimmy Saville or paedophilia but several years ago I pitched to Lord Adonis, in his old post at the Department for Education, a proposal for, maybe, just maybe, improving the lot of looked after children. Needless to say it didn't meet the Department's priorities and while the good minister and his aides were interested, they respectively declined the opportunity to take it further.

Don't panic I'm not going to pitch it here. But all this talk about care home abuses got me wondering whether the plight of the main run of so-called looked after children had improved at all since I did all the research for that proposal back in 2008.

And I have to report things still don't look too good.

In 2011, there were over 89,000 looked after children in the UK of which about 65,000 were in England alone. Over half of these have been taken into care as a result of abuse or serious neglect. So they've not exactly had a great start to lives (and that, incidentally adds a further layer of poignancy when they are abused again in care). These numbers had been falling over the past 30year but since 2008 (co-incidentally when I had that meeting) they have been on the rise again.

About 13% of these unfortunate kids stay in care for more than five years. They're probably the most damaged ones and they're also likely to be the targets of choice for the abusers. Now, I'm not saying it's the same 13% but curiously, this is precisely the figure for looked after children who end up the subject of a serious case review, ie, they've been seriously injured or killed. It sends shivers down my spine just to think about it.

It's all pretty depressing isn't it? But what about the 87% who get through without this happening? On an educational front, things don't look too great. A quarter leave school without any qualifications. That compares with less than 1% of all school leavers. A further 25% attain fewer than 5A*-Cs at GCSE, compared with less than 7% of all 16 year olds. And only 7% make it into higher education compared with over 45% of all school leavers. The only statistic where looked-after children don't seem so out of kilter is for the so called NEETs (ie young people not in employment, education or training): 33% versus 20%. But that's hardly something to crow about given the appalling problem of youth unemployment at the moment anyway.

Back in 2008 I discovered that looked after girls were two and a half times more likely to get pregnant than other girls and looked after children in general were also two and a half times more likely to offend. I haven't been able to update those figures but I doubt they've changed much.

Now, if you ask me these figures speak of a different form of child abuse. These kids, mostly for no fault of their own, are taken into care and then dumped. I know there are lots of peope out there with the best intentions trying to help individual kids. But there's a systemic problem here. I cannot imagine what it takes to be one of those 7% who makes it into higher education but maybe we should ask them. Perhaps we should stop blaming lack of educational attainment on the fact that many have special needs too. Seriously, if the vast majority make it out into independent living of some sort, and they do, then their special needs can't have been severe enough to have prevented them from getting a few GCSEs.

So, when we're focussing on all those sad historic cases of child abuse, perhaps we could spare a thought about the routine daily abuse that's going on, and maybe someone would like to take a long, hard and unbiased look at what's gone wrong.