Police and social workers ignored sex-trafficking, rape and abuse by Muslims

From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

The gang recruited its victims from the Oxford area between May 2004 and January last year, deliberately targeting vulnerable girls.

Some were spotted drinking or playing truant along the city’s Cowley Road, while others were chosen because they were living in care homes.

Once under their control the abusers forced the girls to have sex using threats of extreme violence.

Some were gang raped, while others were prostituted to men who would travel from all parts of UK to have sex with them.

If they did not comply they were beaten and burned with cigarettes while one girl was even branded with her abusers’ initials.

When one victim fell pregnant at the age of 12 she was forced to undergo a dangerous backstreet abortion.

Another girl was abused with a string of bizarre sex toys to ‘prepare’ her for one of the gang rapes.

Police were first alerted to the activities of the grooming ring in 2006 when a 14-year-old girl complained that she had been held against her will by two Asian men and forced to take drugs.

Seven months later the same girl was found by officers in an Oxford park complaining that she had been forced to perform a sex act on one of the defendants, Akhtar Dogar.

Dogar was interviewed by police but denied raping the girl and the case was dropped when the girl withdrew her complaint.

The same year another 14-year-old girl informed police she had been forced to have sex with several different men, but again the case was dropped when she became too scared to press charges.

Again in 2006 police were called to a guest house in Oxford after a man staying there dialled 999 to report that he feared a prostitute was being beaten up in an adjoining room.

When police arrived they found a 14-year-old girl cowering in the basement and complaining that had been raped and beaten.

She too eventually withdrew her complaint and the case was dropped.

Social workers also claimed they alerted police to concerns about one of the victims who regularly ran away from her care home and was often seen in the company of older Asian men.

A serious case review was announced while Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council apologised for their failure to spot the pattern earlier.

[...]The case is the latest in a string of high profile trials involving Asian gangs who have convicted of targeting and abusing vulnerable white girls.

Last May eight men of Pakistani origin and one Afghan were convicted of trafficking and raping girls in the Rochdale area.

Five Asian men were also jailed in 2010 after being convicted of grooming girls as young as 12 in the Rotherham area.

Just last week a gang of Asian men who groomed vulnerable white girls in Shropshire between 2006 and 2009 were jailed for more than 50-years.

More here from the Evening Standard:

Police and council leaders today apologised for their failings as a gang of paedophiles was convicted at the Old Bailey of serial abuse of schoolgirls while in care.

The girls, some as young as 11, were drugged, raped, trafficked and used as prostitutes while supposedly in the safe-keeping of the local authority in Oxford.

They had all been targeted because they were vulnerable, drinking and taking drugs.

The exposure of this child sex ring comes less than a year after a similar gang was jailed in Rochdale and an inquiry by a group of MPs found systemic failings in care across the country.

Last month police revealed that new evidence had emerged of abuse by 84 staff at the Bryn Estyn home in North Wales dating back to the 1960s.

Today five men of Pakistani origin and two from North Africa were convicted of more than 40 charges spanning eight years. They will be sentenced at a later date by judge Peter Rook QC. Two defendants were cleared.

The charges involved six girls between the ages of 11 and 15 who were abused over nine years in the Cowley area of Oxford.

After the guilty verdicts a fight broke out in the dock with one of the convicted paedophiles punching another who had been cleared.

The men were described by police as “predators who identified the most vulnerable girls in society and corrupted them entirely”. Police missed several chances to catch gang members before they were finally arrested.

The victims were forced to relive the horror in some of the most distressing witness evidence heard at the Old Bailey.

One after the other, the girls broke down as they described how they were groomed, beaten, betrayed and sold into prostitution around the country.

Girl D told how, at the age of 11, she was branded with a heated hairpin by a trafficker and loaned to other abusers for £600 an hour.

Over five years she was repeatedly raped by large groups of men in what she described as “torture sex”.

She was so frightened of her attacker that she refused to give evidence for fear he would hurt her again.

It was only after she was given legal advice that Girl D agreed to tell her story from a videolink from another room in the building.

Another victim, Girl A, complained of her plight to police on two occasions but no one was charged.

What caused police and social workers to avoid rescuing the white girls from the Muslim men? Well, I think if you ask any university-educated liberal, they would explain to you that charging Muslims with crimes in Western societies  is “Islamophobia”. This is what people learn in university. You can’t treat Muslims like everyone else, equal under the law, because that’s “Islamophobia”. The Labor Party, which enacted the lax immigration policies of the last decade in the United Kingdom, would tell you that those British pre-teen girls just need to be more sensitive to other cultures and stop being so racist while they are being raped.

The previous Muslim sex-trafficking gang

Here are the facts from the previous “grooming” case from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

A sex grooming gang targeted white girls because they were not part of their ‘community or religion’ said a judge as he jailed them for a total of 77 years yesterday.

Detectives are now preparing to make more arrests after they revealed they suspect up to 50 mainly Pakistani-born men took part in the abuse.

But despite the judge’s hard-hitting comments, police in Greater Manchester continued to insist that the men’s race and religion were not factors in their crimes.

Yesterday senior politicians clashed over the case – with one former Labour MP claiming police and social workers ignored complaints because they were ‘petrified of being called racist’.

With experts on paedophilia insisting street grooming by Muslim men was a real problem, Judge Gerald Clinton made it clear he believed religion was a factor.

He jailed the 59-year-old ringleader for 19 years and eight other men for between four and 12 years, telling them they had treated their victims ‘as though they were worthless and beyond all respect’.

He added: ‘I believe one of the factors which led to that is that they were not of your community or religion.’

But he branded outbursts by some of the men claiming the prosecution was racially-motivated ‘nonsense’, telling them they found themselves in the dock because of their ‘lust and greed’.

The gang raped and abused up to 47 girls – some as young as 13 – after plying them with alcohol and luring them to takeaways in Heywood, near Rochdale.

Detective Inspector Michael Sanderson, of Greater Manchester Police, said none of the convicted men had ever shown ‘the slightest bit of remorse’.

The keeping of sex slaves is sanctioned by the Qur’an.

What’s interesting about this case is that the police knew about the ring years before, but refused to prosecute:

A victim of the ring said she was ‘let down’ by police and the Crown Prosecution Service because the issue of Asian gangs grooming young white girls was ‘unheard of’ at the time.

The girl, who was 15 when she was targeted by the gang, reported the abuse to police in August 2008 but the CPS decided not to prosecute because they did not believe a jury would find her ‘credible’.

After reporting the abuse she suffered for four more months at the hands of the gang and continued to be forced into having sex by her ‘friend’ – a teenage girl who was acting as a pimp for the men.

She said the problem got ‘worse’ after telling the police.

‘I felt let down. But I know that they (police) believed me… but… because they said to me at the end that something should have been done but the CPS just would not – what’s the word? – prosecute is it?

‘It’s like, then, in 2008 it weren’t really heard of… Asian men with white girls.

‘It was just unheard of. I’ve never heard of it. Now it’s going on everywhere. You think of Muslim men as religious and family-minded and just nice people. You don’t think… I don’t know… you just don’t think they’d do things like that.’

The girl, now 20, only escaped the gang in December 2008 when she fell pregnant and moved away. She was then made to wait until August 2009 for the CPS to tell her they were not taking the case to trial.

She called the men who abused her ‘evil’ and said she hopes they pay for their crimes.

‘They ripped away all my dignity and all my last bit of self-esteem and by the end of it I had no emotion whatsoever because I was used to being used and abused daily,’ she said.

‘It was just blocked out, it was just like it wasn’t me any more. They just took everything away and I just think hopefully they’ll pay for what they’ve done.’

Under the policies of the UK Labour Party, the police had all been fully trained in multiculturalism and political correctness. Some groups favored by the secular left are above the law and cannot be persecuted, even when they rape little children. We can thank Harriet Harman and her ilk for this. We can even thank her for the immigration policies that created isolated communities that do not respect the laws and values of Western civilization, and Judeo-Christian values in particular.

But that’s not all. Think about what the feminism promoted by the Labour Party achieves. The feminism embraced by the Labour Party under Harriet Harman had one goal. To destroy the institution of marriage and eject fathers from the home. Men were to be replaced with government handouts and welfare payments. Under the rule of the Labour Party, illegitimacy has skyrocketed while marriage has declined. The UK government literally pays women to have children out of wedlock – children who will grow up fatherless. IVF is taxpayer-funded under the NHS.

When women do not have to care about whether a man is a good provider, they can have sex with any man – whichever one they like, based on the unwise standards of the culture. But men who have not been carefully picked by women to be husbands and fathers do not stick around. Who is left,then, to protect the girls who are born without fathers to raise them? No one. This is the end result of feminism’s attempt to destroy the traditional roles that men play in the home: protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. Government programs, politically correct social workers and welfare checks are not a substitute for a father.

Filed under: News, Diversity, Egypt, EHRC, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Harriet Harman, Human Rights Commission, Immigration, Immigration Policy, Islam, Libya, Lynne Featherstone, Multiculturalism, Muslim, North Africa, Pakistan, Pedophilia, Police, Political Correctness, Rape, Religion Peace, Sensitivity Training, Sex Slavery, Sex Trafficking, Torture

The psychological profile of atheists

Triablogue has a fascinating quote posted from “The Cambridge Companion to Atheism“. (H/T J. Warner Wallace)

Take a look:

Findings regarding those who come from religious homes and then give up religion show that they have had more distant relations with their parents (Hunsberger 1980, 1983; Hunsberger and Brown 1984). Caplovitz and Sherrow (1977) found that the quality of relations with parents was a crucial variable, as well as a commitment to intellectualism. Hunsberger and Brown (1984) found that lesser emphasis placed on religion in home, especially by the mother, and self-reported intellectual orientation had a positive impact on rejecting the family’s religiosity as a young adult. Dudley (1987) found that alienation from religion in Seventh-Day Adventist adolescents was correlated (0.72) with the quality of their relationship with their parents and other authority figures. Alienation was tied to authoritarianism and harshness on the part of the parents. But parents may also have a more consonant effect on their children’s religiosity. Sherkat (1991), analyzing large-scale U.S. surveys in 1988, found that parents’ religious exogamy and lapses in practice led to their children’s apostasy. Thus, children may be following in their parents’ footsteps or acting out their parents’ unexpressed wishes.

Attachment theory (Kirkpatrick 2005) assumes that interpersonal styles in adults, the ways of dealing with attachment, separation, and loss in close personal relationships, stem directly from the mental models of oneself and others that were developed during infancy and childhood. Attachment styles can be characterized as secure, avoidant, or anxious/ambivalent. Secure adults find it relatively easy to get close to others. Avoidant adults are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others. Anxious/ambivalent adults find that others are reluctant to get as close as they would like. Kirkpatrick (2005) reports that in a study of 400adults in the United States, those having an avoidant attachment style were most likely to identify themselves as either atheist or agnostic.

Does losing a parent early in life lead one to atheism? Vetter and Green (1932–33) surveyed 350 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, 325 of whom were men. Among those who became atheists before age twenty, half lost one or both parents before that age. A large number in the group reported unhappy childhood and adolescence experiences. (The twenty-five women reported “traumatic experiences” with male ministers. We can only wonder about those today.) Vitz (1999) presents biographical information from the lives of more than fifty prominent atheists and theists as evidence for his theory that atheism is a reaction to losing one’s father.

This is why Christians need to do more than quote the Bible to people. We need to be concerned with politics. We need to support policies that promote and strengthen marriage and parenting. We need to oppose policies that undermine the stability of the marriage commitment. Not only should Christians be informed and outspoken about same-sex marriage, but we should also be informed and outspoken on other laws that weaken marriage, such as no-fault divorce laws. Not everything we need to know is in the Bible. The Bible does say that divorce is wrong, and homosexuality is wrong, but we need to look outside the Bible at research in order to influence the society as a whole. Most of the people who need influencing in public policy discussions will not accept Bible verses alone – they need arguments and evidence.

If we really care about bringing people to Christ, then we need to understand that public policy plays a role. Christians need to stop being pious about being apolitical.

Related posts

• Why do famous atheists believe that God does not exist?
• Why do people become atheists?
• Why do young Christians become atheists in college?

Filed under: Commentary, Atheism, Authority, Autonomy, Belief, Blind Faith, Children, Christianity, Faith, Family, Father, Fatherless, Fatherlessness, God, Hoping, Marriage, Paul Vitz, Psychology, Rebellion, Relifion, Religion, Sin, Unbelief, Wish Fulfillment, Wishing

Carolyn Castiglia: a liberal feminist comedian and her beliefs about God

Note: Earlier versions of this post were edited and proof-read by Mary and Dina, whose help I greatly appreciate.

I noticed this article that was mentioned on the latest Reasonable Faith podcast. The article is written by a liberal ex-Catholic woman whose 7-year-old daughter is an atheist. What I want to focus on is her own article on Babble.com, but I really recommend that you listen to Bill Craig’s commentary on it as well.

First the biography of the author:

Carolyn Castiglia is a New York-based comedian/writer wowing audiences with her stand-up and freestyle rap. You may recognize her hip-hop alter ego Miss CKC from Comedy Central, VH1 and MTV2. Carolyn’s web vids have been nominated for an ECNY Award and featured in two issues of EW magazine. She’s appeared in TONY, The NY Post, The Idiot’s Guide to Jokes and Life & Style. You can find Carolyn’s writing elsewhere online at MarieClaire.com and The Huffington Post.

Look at what she wrote:

I was raised Catholic, and like most people my age who were raised Catholic, I no longer attend church on Sundays. We’re “recovering Catholics.” That’s what so many of us call ourselves. We’re still disgusted with the Church for the way it covered up the sex abuse perpetrated against my generation and roll our eyes at the Church’s stance on things like abortion, gay marriage and women’s rights.

[...]I learned a lot about being a Good Person from the things I heard in church… I wanted to be a Good Person, not just because only Good People go to Heaven. I just liked the idea. The meek shall inherit the Earth. It sounded right. Somehow all this shit I’m swallowing now, it’s gonna pay off later.

I’m pretty much agnostic now (sometimes believing more strongly, other times thinking the concept of God is kind of a joke), but I value the way the idea of God has gotten me through the rough patches. And that has been the payoff. Somehow this notion that there is a giant man in the sky with long hair and a big robe who will hug you from heaven if you need it and carry you on the beach when you’ve had one too many wine coolers to walk without falling down and getting sand all up in your bikini has been very comforting to me. The image of Jesus but as God but totally as a bro (a homeboy, if you will), there’s something righteous about it, if you know what I mean.

But the way I imagine God has changed over the years — He’s gone from being a person, a man, to being more of a Thing, a notion. Goodness. The Oneness of the Universe. With something female in there. The energy that keeps the whole thing afloat. God as I know it now when I know it is kind of a cocktail made from a shot of Buddhism, a shot of feminist activism and a splash of ginger ale (because that, my friends, is something you can always count on).

Now the Christians who are reading this will be cringing because we know that these beliefs are not taken out of the Bible. She seems to be speaking more about her opinions rather than what is true. She doesn’t seem to be focused on finding truth, but more on being a “good person” and having God as a crutch to pull out if she falls down while pursuing her own plan.

She’s wrong that “good people” go to Heaven. Only people who accept Jesus as their leader (Lord) and accept his death as a sacrifice for their rebellion against God (Savior) are resurrected to eternal life. If she is a relativist, then I guess what she means by being a “good person” is that she thinks of herself as good and that the people around her think of her as good. However, the main purpose of Christianity is not to be a good person, or to have people like you or to be happy and comforted.  The main goal of Christian living is to puzzle about the truth about God’s existence and character, and then to re-prioritize your life based on who God is and what God has done. So the focus in Christianity is on truth, and that’s what her church should have taught her from a young age.

In my opinion, the Catholic church is NOT a good place to learn the full story about what the Bible says about God, nor to learn the importance of searching for truth over and above being a “good person”. It’s not surprising to me that she would catch the idea from Catholicism that God is more interested in humans being good to other people than in having true beliefs. In my experience, Catholics emphasize doing good works more than they emphasize having true beliefs that are rooted in evidence rather than church tradition and authority. Catholics believe many things that are not in the Bible or history based on authority.

For example, Jesus strictly forbids calling church leaders “Father” in Matthew 23:1-12, as well as having elaborate garments for church leaders. But the Catholic church has an entire hierarchy of titles from Father to Holy Father, as well as special uniforms for church leaders up to and including elaborate costumes for the pope. Catholicism claims that Jesus has no brothers and sisters, but the Bible (and history!) says he had brothers and sisters, including James, whose role in the early church is solidly attested by history. Catholicism says that Mary was bodily assumed into Heaven, but there is no record of that tradition in history for 700 years after Jesus died. The earliest records even have a burial location for her. Catholics also embrace inclusivism, which is the idea that you can be made right with God by being a sincere adherent of a religion that does not teach the truth about who Jesus was and what he did. So clearly the emphasis there is not on having true beliefs.

Those are just a few examples. The Catholic focus is more on doing good deeds, and they do a lot of that, especially on opposing abortion, promoting adoption and defending marriage. But there is a disadvantage for people raised with a focus on good works compared with a person who is focused on developing true beliefs. In Protestantism, each person is responsible for reading their own Bible and for testing and debating everything against science and history. Protestants prefer people like William Lane Craig and Mike Licona, because they study things using evidence outside the Bible and church tradition, and then debate outsiders to see what is true and false. Catholics are more likely to prefer people like Mother Teresa, who do lots of good things, but then on the other hand they encourage Hindus to be good Hindus and Muslims to be good Muslims. This is not what Jesus actually taught about the exclusivity of salvation. Catholics care about doing good actions. Protestants like good actions, too, but those good actions are secondary in importance to loving God. See Jesus’ own words in Matthew 22:36-40. And in order to love God, you first have to have accurate beliefs about who he is and what he’s done. That’s what Protestants emphasize.

I think another problem with a Catholic upbringing is that there is too much dependence on authority figures to tell people what to believe. I once worked with a Catholic guy who dismissed my every question about what he believed with the same line: “whatever the Catholic church tells me to believe, that’s what I believe, because I’m Catholic”. This sounds similar to what happened the woman who wrote the article. We really need to make truth the main thing about Christianity. We really need to show people how to develop true beliefs by using the laws of logic and empirical evidence. It’s important for us to show our work and explain how we arrived at our beliefs instead of just picking and choosing what we like from what people around us (or over us) say.

But there is more to her story – her child has been affected by her problematic views of Christianity and God.

She writes:

My daughter, on the other hand, at the ripe old age of 7, is convinced that there is no God. Not even a god. Yup, my kid’s an atheist. And she pretty much has been since she was 5.

It’s not for lack of exposure to God or god or even gods and spirituality, because she has attended Church and church and a UU “church” and it has made no impact. We’ve prayed together. I talk about God sometimes, in a good way. When I asked her recently why she doesn’t believe in God she told me, succinctly, “Because I know too much about science!”

Is it a good idea to take scientific advice from a 7-year-old child? Children who grow up fatherless are already predisposed towards atheism. I think that we should instead prefer to learn from scholars who research and debate issues in science and religion, and then teach the child based on what we have learned. Perhaps the woman could get the debate between Mike Behe and Keith Fox, or the debate between Stephen Meyer and Peter Ward, or the debate between William Lane Craig and Peter Millican and teach the child from that. This is why it was so important to emphasize how people arrive at true beliefs in the church. If she had done the work herself to arrive at true beliefs, then she would know what to say to her child’s presumptuous ignorance.

More:

The other night over dinner my daughter looked up at me and said, “Who created the Earth?” And I said, “Well, some people believe that God created the Earth, and some people believe that nature is a creation unto itself.” My daughter replied, “I think nature is a creation unto itself.” I said, “You know, you’re pretty staunch about the fact that there is no God.” And she told me, “Well, I don’t think he exists. If he does, he’s a ghost, and that’s weird. I just don’t believe it. You know, there are Universes beyond our Universe. Once you get outside the Milky Way galaxy, there’s a lot more stuff out there.”

Wow. When I was 7 I didn’t know there was a world outside my town.

So the universe created itself? How could it create itself? It would have to have existed in order to do anything like create. So it would have to have existed… before it began to exist. That’s a contradiction, and so it cannot be true. It would be great if the mother had read books or sought out people who had thought about logic and science, so that they could  advise her child about self-contradictory statements as well as the Big Bang cosmology. But she never did the work. We should be teaching people to do the work in church, not to just be spectators and then pick and choose what feels good. Nobody picks and chooses what feels good when it comes to chemistry lab or the stock market. In church, we need to show that religion is no different from anything else in life that can be studied. Truth is the main thing.

She continues:

Oh sure, my mother thinks raising a child without religion is dangerous. “I understand you don’t think she needs God now, Carolyn. But you gotta give her religion so it’s there for her when she needs it later.” When the shit hits the fan, when everything falls apart. When you realize there is no one but God you can trust.

See, here is where she needs someone to point out that it’s not God’s job to help you through crises. It’s not his job to make you happy. It’s not God’s job to make sure that your selfish pursuit of pleasure ends well. It’s not God’s job to keep you free from suffering and evil. This is where it would have been great if she had taken some of her time to read the Bible, and real theology books. It would have been better if she had sought out real scholars instead of relying on her mother for theology. But again, that’s her decision, to believe the people who tell her that religion is a crutch, instead of seeking truth and then bending her will to fit what is true.

Don’t be that gal

One last point. You might be wondering where the father is, since it is the father’s responsibility to teach the children about spiritual and moral things in Christianity. That’s what Christian women should be taught to look for in a man, along with protecting and providing abilities. That’s what the church would be telling them to look for if the church was not thoroughly compromised by feminism and egalitarianism. In the case of the woman who wrote the article, she has separated from the father of her child. She says so in the article.

Did she pick a man who was good at theology, apologetics and moral issues? Well, we don’t know. But judging from her politics and her profession, I would say that she did not. If there is one thing that liberal feminists absolutely detest in men, it’s exclusive truth claims about religion and exclusive moral judgments. They tend to choose men who know nothing at all about God as he really is and morality as it really is. They want to avoid men who will try to lead them on moral and spiritual issues. Unfortunately, though, a man who does not know what he believes and why he believes about religion and morality cannot persuade anyone. And a man who cannot persuade cannot lead.

What happens to children when such women choose men who cannot lead on moral and spiritual issues? Men like that have no reason to stick around in a marriage, because they have no plan and no purpose for the marriage other than pleasure. A religious and moral man sticks around in a marriage because he has a plan and a purpose that is above his own feelings and needs. He is motivated to teach the children and to lead the wife, because he has definite spiritual and moral convictions, and he is able to persuade others to buy into them using evidence and arguments. Smart women choose men like this when they are looking for someone to fulfill the father role. Women need to know the duties of the married man, and choose the right man for the job.

Filed under: Polemics, Apologetics, Atheism, Buffet Theology, Catholicism, Christianity, Comedy, Fatherless, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Freestyle Rap, Happiness, Ignorance, Laziness, Leftism, Mysticism, New Age, Oprah, Oprah Winfrey, Pop Culture, Postmodernism, Rap, Relativism, Religion, Selfishness, Single-Mother, The Secret

New study: feminism in education causes boys to underperform academically

From the Belfast Telegraph.

Excerpt:

A five-year study of hundreds of post-primary pupils in Northern Ireland has found flaws in our education system that could be hindering boys’ ability to learn.

The research — funded by the Departments of Education and Justice — was carried out following concerns about boys’ educational underachievement, health and well-being.

It has previously been noted as a particular problem among boys from working-class Protestant areas.

Key findings of the ‘Taking Boys Seriously’ report, by Dr Ken Harland and Sam McCready from the University of Ulster, include:

• A lack of basic literacy and numeracy skills from primary school which is not being dealt with early post-primary.
• Boys from lower academic class streams perceiving they are not given the same opportunities to learn as those from higher.
• Boys being unprepared for key transitional stages (such as moving schools or moving from junior stream into senior) during adolescence.
• Bullying.
• The formal nature of the classroom leaving a significant number of boys feeling bored, frustrated and impacting negatively on their concentration.

The study of 378 male pupils from nine post-primary schools across Northern Ireland quizzed the boys annually between Years 8 and 12.

[...]Recommendations in the 114-page report include:

• Encouraging more males into teaching.
• Teacher training should support teachers to understand the changing needs of adolescent boys.

Life Site News adds:

The problem of boys’ underachievement in primary and secondary school follows them into their later lives. Research from 2006 has tracked the decline in male academic performance over the same period as the rise of feminist-dominated ideologies in academia and policymaking.

The ratio of males to females graduating from a four-year college stood at 1.60 in 1960, fell to parity by 1980, and continued its decline until by 2003, there were 135 females for every 100 males who graduated from a four-year college. Another study found that half of the current gender gap in college attendance can be linked to lower rates of high-school graduation among males, particularly for young black men.

The work of one American researcher may offer clues to the question of why and how. Professor Christopher Cornwell at the University of Georgia has found that a heavily feminist-driven education paradigm systematically favours girls and disadvantages boys from their first days in school.

Examining student test scores and grades of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, Cornwell found that boys in all racial categories are not being “commensurately graded by their teachers” in any subject “as their test scores would predict.”

The answer lies in the way teachers, who are statistically mostly women, evaluate students without reference to objective test scores. Boys are regularly graded well below their actual academic performance.

Boys are falling significantly behind in grades, “despite performing as least as well as girls on math tests, and significantly better on science tests.”

After fifth grade, he found, student assessment becomes a matter of “a teacher’s subjective assessment of the student’s performance,” and is further removed from the guidance of objective test results. Teachers, he says, tend to assess students on non-cognitive, “socio-emotional skills.” This has had a significant impact on boys’ later achievement because, while objective test scores are important, it is teacher-assigned grades that determine a child’s future with class placement, high school graduation and college admissibility.

Eliminating the factor of “non-cognitive skills…almost eliminates the estimated gender gap in reading grades,” Cornwell found. He said he found it “surprising” that although boys out-perform girls on math and science test scores, girls out-perform boys on teacher-assigned grades.

In science and general knowledge, as in math skills, the data showed that kindergarten and first grade white boys’ grades “are lower by 0.11 and 0.06 standard deviations, even though their test scores are higher.” This disparity continues and grows through to the fifth grade, with white boys and girls being graded similarly, “but the disparity between their test performance and teacher assessment grows.”

[...]The study, he said, shows that “teachers’ assessments are not aligned with test-score data, with greater gender disparities in appearing in grading than testing outcomes”. And the “gender disparity” always favours girls.

This is why I recommend homeschooling for boys especially up until grade 6 or later, when grading is more objective. And boys should focus on math, science, technology and engineering, where there is less room for discrimination by feminist teachers who are biased against boys. Unfortunately, even though you are homeschooling, you still have to pay taxes for the feminist-dominated public school system, which enjoys overwhelming support from women voters, especially single women voters.

The best book on this topic is by Christina Hoff Sommers, entitled “The War Against Boys“. If you click through to the Life Site News article, they have a section on it towards the end of the article. It is very important that pastors and other conservatives understand that the current problems with boys and young men are not going to be solved by ignorant male-blaming slogans like “Man Up!”. Christians and conservatives need to think more deeply about these problems, and they may find that they are actually espousing the very thing (feminism) that is the root cause of the decline in men, and their lack of interest in marriage. Let’s take a look at the studies and be bound by research instead of the desire to please women in our churches by telling them that men are to blame for their woes.

Check out my previous post about the Cornwell study, which compared teacher-assigned test scores with standardized test scores for girls and boys.

Filed under: News, Achievement Gap, Anti-Male, Boys, Discrimination, Education, Family, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Men, Misandry, School, Social Programs, War Against Boys

Study of elementary school children finds entrenched discrimination against boys

The study is here (PDF), and Susan Walsh writes about the study on her blog. (H/T Stuart Schneiderman)

Excerpt:

A new study of nearly 6,000 elementary school children has found that boys are discriminated against beginning in kindergarten. Christopher Cornwell, an economics professor at the University of Georgia, says that ”gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls.”

Despite having higher scores on standardized tests, boys get lower grades than girls. Why? Because teachers are basing grades at least partly on classroom behavior, and the standards are very much geared to female norms.

[...]Here’s what the disparity looks like for kindergarten boys:

Std. Deviation	Test Scores	Grades
Reading	-.017	-.27
Math	+.02	-.15
Science	+.035	-.14

(Note: Values are approx., gauged visually from study graphic.)

Another interesting finding was that boys who adhere to female norms on non-cognitive skills were not penalized. Effectively, the more female behavior was rewarded with a grade “bonus” for males.

The implications of this are obvious. Masculinity, even normal maleness, is being punished in schools from a very young age. Only the most female-acting boys are rewarded with a fair assessment.

I found this story on Stuart Schnederman’s blog, and this is what he had to say about it:

The results demonstrated that schoolteachers are prejudiced against boys. When teachers do not just grade on performance, but include a number of intangible qualities that girls are more likely to possess, they are acting as bigots.

I recommend that everyone pick up a copy of “The War Against Boys” by AEI scholar Christina Hoff Sommers to learn more about this anti-male discrimination problem.

I see a lot of people raving at men to “man up” these days. Many of those people are pastors who remain ignorant about the real, systemic causes of male underachievement. Even very obvious factors – like the dominance of female teachers and administrators in schools – are ignored by the blame-men crowd. Boys generally learn better when they learn from male teachers in all-male classrooms. But unfortunately for boys, there are people who don’t want to do what works for men, especially when it doesn’t fit with feminist ideology.

Filed under: News, Achievement Gap, Anti-Male, Boys, Discrimination, Education, Family, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Men, Misandry, School, Social Programs, War Against Boys