White boys are falling further behind at school and more middle-aged men are committing suicide, yet men's issues are still dismissed as a laughing matter, says Martin DaubneyOne stormy day last February, I watched a few of my former raving pals wobble their way across a waterlogged field near Brighton, carrying a wicker coffin with my mate Nobby inside.
Smiling, beautiful, gentle Nobby was gone. Barely 40, a husband, dad-of-three and a teaching assistant, he’d long suffered from depression and one evening, he decided he just couldn’t take it any more.
For those of us left behind, it was a wake-up call. The grim reality of male suicide until then mercifully hadn’t touched my life. But once I started talking about it, it turned out, almost everybody I knew had in some way been touched by its dark shadow.
Tragically, it’s on the rise. This week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission released a report that contained two chilling facts. Firstly, the number of men in their forties committing suicide is up 40 per cent in five years.This announcement came days after a touchingly raw BBC3 TV show “Suicide & Me” in which rapper Professor Green explored the ‘silent epidemic’ of male suicide, and tearfully poured out his heart over thesuicide of his father.The second grim finding was that working-class white boys are not only the lowest-attaining of all educational groups, but they are falling further behind than ever.
At every educational level, girls now outperform boys, and to our eternal shame impoverished, white boys are faring the worst of all ethnic groups.Just 28.3 per cent of white boys on free school meals achieved at least five GCSEs at A* to C in England in 2012-13. In contrast, Chinese pupils perform exceptionally regardless of wealth, with 76.8 per cent of those on free school meals achieving the GCSE threshold.Only 26 per cent of white British boys on free school meals gained five A*-C GCSE grades.Many of us have previously written on the shockingly poor educational attainment of poor white boys, yet there has been no governmental enquiry nor emergency think-tank set up. Instead, high-profile pushes for more girls in STEM subjects attract ticker-tape fanfares.
Most tragically of all, absolutely nothing is being done about any of this – yet when men do speak up about it, we are ridiculed, ignored or even called misogynists, simply for having the temerity to care about men dying or boys failing.
This week, the Conservative MP for Shipley, Philip Davies, had the common decency to call for a House of Commons debate around serious men’s issues such as suicide and boys’ poor educational attainment on International Men’s Day, which is November 19th.
Yet the idea was not only rejected by the Backbench Business Committee, but openly mocked by Labour MP Jess Philips, who openly laughed and childishly pulled faces as Mr Davies spoke.She scoffed, “You have to excuse me for laughing. But as the only woman on this committee it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day.”
That incident was brilliantly critiqued by Glen Poole of InsideMen and UK organiser for International Men’s Day in an article which strongly resonated with Telegraph readers. Indeed a poll on his article showed that 97 per cent back Davies’s call for a debate on men’s issues.
Yet when I tweeted that encouraging news out, the Essex Feminist Collective replied, “I’ll get back to you when I’ve stopped laughing” – allowing us to make the cruelly bleak conclusion that male misery is becoming comedy gold for some women. Why?
Why is it that MPs like Ms Philips and likes of the Essex Feminist Collective find the idea of men’s rights variously hilarious, ridiculous or misogynistic? What are they so afraid of?
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