“A man is known by the company he keeps.” Aesop

“When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.” Japanese proverb

“Birds of a feather flock together.” William Turner, 1545

I have spent two years researching this saga, and getting deep into the minds and motives of all sides of the argument. I have very mixed feelings. I am sure that some fathers are genuinely loving, capable parents who are driven to desperate acts when they feel ignored by the family courts. And I know that women are just as capable of behaving badly as men. However, when I find some of these men hanging out on virulently misogynistic men’s rights, fulminating about feminism, I wonder how much of their victimisation is real and how much is imagined or self-inflicted. How many are the abusive, threatening, controlling men the courts perceive them to be, and how many are truly the victims of appalling, manipulative women willing to lie about domestic violence and coach their children to lie about child abuse? How much of the fury poured out on Karen Woodall’s blog is authentic grief and how much deluded self pity? A dedicated band of grandmothers also haunt Karen Woodall’s site - mothers of sons denied contact, or the amount of contact they want, with their children. How many of these grandmothers are fighting for truly “alienated” fathers and how many refuse to acknowledge that their darling sons are abusive? I have a fourteen-year-old son myself and would hate to be denied contact with any grandchildren if he were to have a poisonous split with a future mother of his children. Perhaps, in desperation, I too would find myself drawn towards Karen Woodall and her persuasive, toxic anti-feminism, though hope I would retain enough perspective to resist such extremism.

It is very difficult to untangle.

What is certain, though, is that Karen and Nick Woodall are closely aligned with several prominent men’s and fathers’ rights activists, including some who hold extremely unpleasant views about women, or who frequent websites which do.

“Don’t bother posting anything else because in the spirit of all the best fathers rights groups I shall be removing your dissenting voice from my blog.”

Karen Woodall, 23 November 2012

“I have been accused of being an MRA (men’s rights activist), and advocate for the equal parenting movement and in the nastier assumptions common amongst feminists, a danger to the families that I work with.  In truth I am none of those things, I never was and I never will be.”

Karen Woodall, 22 January 2014

In fact, Karen Woodall and husband Nick fit the mould of men’s rights activists perfectly. Karen Woodall is a firm favourite, even a fixture, on several men’s rights websites, such as The Rights of Man. Now defunct men’s rights website Red Pill UK said:

“Karen is a UK family counsellor and reformed former feminist. She’s not an MRA but you couldn’t put a Rizla between what she writes and MRM views.”

Note: “red pill” is an MRA term meaning the moment when a man wakes up to the reality that he is crushed by oppressive feminism and must start to fight back. MRM is an acronym for men’s rights movement.

The Christian Right and the men’s rights movement have found common cause in battling feminism and women’s rights for nearly half a century.

The charity CARE (Christian Action, Research and Education), for which Samantha Callan, the architect of the child support reforms, has worked for two decades, emerged from the 1971 Nationwide Festival of Light, a movement to revive traditional Christian morality. It is is interesting that a similar alliance developed in Australia, where, sociologist Michael Flood observed:

“Some men’s rights and fathers’ rights groups have links to conservative Christian organisations and support a traditional patriarchal family as the only real and natural form of family. For example, one of the key groups in Australia currently lobbying for a rebuttable presumption of joint custody is the Shared Parenting Council, a new coalition of fathers’ rights groups with links to such conservative Christian groups as the Festival of Light. Another, the National Fatherhood Forum, has close links to the Australian Family Association, a conservative Christian and ‘pro-family’ organisation. A handful of men’s and fathers’ rights groups do have more flexible visions of family and gender relations. But most share the common enemy of feminism, as well as gay and lesbian politics and other progressive movements and ideals.”

Correspondingly, the British Christian Right charity CARE (Christian Action, Research and Education) behind the child support reforms in Britain originated in the Nationwide Festival of Light, which began in London in 1971 before being taken up in Australia.

In 2013 the Australian Family Association sponsored the seventh World Congress of Families in Sydney. Samantha Callan and CARE have a long and close association with the World Congress of Families, a powerful international group lobbying against LGBT and women’s rights. Iain Duncan Smith was billed as a headline speaker alongside Professor Patrick Parkinson, who was a consultant for the 2009 Centre for Social Justice report, “Every Family Matters”, until the organisers withdrew his invitation after he voted in favour of same sex marriage.

On 31 January 2015 Karen Woodall was interviewed alongside Erin Pizzey by Dean Esmay for the website A Voice For Men.

One AVFM listener commented approvingly:

“If you understand the mind of a sociopath, then you understand the mind of most women… Most women don't care about anything but themselves. Most women are narcissistic sociopaths… Pizzey is a rare find… The majority would walk you off the cliff if they thought it would benefit them in a modest financial way…Most women simply manipulate men to get what they want out of life… MRAs are naive, lovable, brave, honorable fools. MRAs need to wake up.”

Another listed all the things he tells his son about women, including this nugget:

“I tell my sons, "The best thing about feminism is going to be the look on your mother's face when another feminist destroys your life and you end up a newly depressed, addicted, homeless, suicide statistic."

Dean Esmay features in this hideous video, with a voiceover by Paul Esmay, the founder of A Voice For Men, sharing obscenities about two American feminist journalists.

A Voice for Men is designated as a male supremacy hate group by the US civil rights organization, Southern Poverty Law Center.

Choice articles include “How to get your man to punch you in the face” and a piece about the family courts:

“The day I see one of these absolutely incredulous excuses for a judge dragged out of his courtroom into the street, beaten mercilessly, doused with gasoline and set afire by a father who just won’t take another moment of injustice, I will be the first to put on the pages of this website that what happened was a minor tragedy that pales by far in comparison to the systematic brutality and thuggery inflicted daily on American fathers by those courts and their police henchmen.”

According to Paul Elam, AVFM’s founder: “Valentines Day, for far too many men, is actually Lighten Up and Don’t be such an Insufferable Bitch Day, but only if you get the present right.” And he tells the cautionary tale of men who should have stuck with prostitutes over materialistic wives and girlfriends: “they went fishing with stink bait and caught bottom dwellers.  And then they ended up silently stewing over it.” The rest of the article is too obscene to quote here.

In 2011 Paul Elam and a colleague created register-her.com, a website for men to register the names, addresses and work routes of “false” accusers of rape and domestic violence, explaining that:

“I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage.  I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.”

Mike Buchanan is the founder of “political party”, Justice 4 Men and Boys. His website is hosted by A Voice For Men.

The J4MB website has permanent hyperlinks to Karen Woodall’s blog as well as several other anti-feminist websites and blogs such as Conservative Woman and Judgy Bitch.

Mike Buchanan sometimes comments on Karen Woodall’s blog, as in this exchange on about former Labour minister, Yvette Cooper on 8 July 2014.

This short 2015 interview in The Independent is a useful, brief introduction to Mike Buchanan.

Vincent McGovern comments regularly to the online discussions below the line on Karen Woodall’s blog. He is the Chair of the Central and North London branches of Families Need Fathers, and is listed on the Families Need Fathers website as a paid McKenzie Friend. A McKenzie Friend is an individual, who can be paid or unpaid, who helps litigants in person to represent themselves in court.

In her article ‘Giving Hope to Fathers’: Discursive Constructions of Families and Family Law by McKenzie Friends Associated With Fathers’ Rights Groups”, published in the International Journal of Law, Policy and The Family on 22 May 2017, Angela Melville of Flinders University in Australia, argues that McKenzie Friends associated with fathers’ rights groups such as Families Need Fathers “promote powerful social myths that support gender inequality and violence against women, and deny children’s rights”.

A selection of Vincent McGovern’s comments on Karen Woodall’s website can be found on my page about Families Need Fathers.

Jerry Karlin, the Chair of Families Need Fathers, has also commented several times on Karen Woodall’s blog. His contributions are more measured than Vincent McGovern’s, but I am suspicious of people who evidently feel at home among others expressing extremist opinions.

While Families Need Fathers position themselves as the rational, reasonable side of the fathers’ rights movement, Fathers 4 Justice are considered by the establishment to be extremist because of their tactics of law breaking. Prominent Fathers 4 Justice members commenting regularly on Karen Woodall’s blog include Paul Manning and Darryll Westell, who sometimes comments as “Walter White”.

Darryll Westell is an articulate graduate, and now a secondary school teacher. In 2003, aged 21, he spent several days on a crane above the offices of the children’s minister, Margaret Hodge, dressed as Santa and waving a banner that said “Save Father Christmas”. In February 2004 he was one of five protesters who blocked most of the main routes into London by scaling gantries and displaying Fathers 4 Justice banners. In November 2004 he and three other Fathers 4 Justice protesters closed the M4 motorway for several hours after scaling a gantry on the Severn Bridge and displaying a banner. In 2008 he was one of fifteen Fathers 4 Justice protesters who stormed the Celebrity Big Brother house.

Here is Darryll Westell, speaking to a BBC reporter in 2008, while his comrades, Mark Harris and Jonathan Stanesby demonstrated on top of the roof of the house of Harriet Harman MP, the deputy leader of the Labour Party.

For several years, Karen and Nick Woodall have been promoting themselves internationally as parental alienation experts. While their presentations usually seem to be offered free of charge, their purpose is to drum up business via Skype: the couple offer international Skype counselling and advice at £90 per hour.

One favoured promotional route is via men’s rights activist groups in English speaking countries, such as the Canadian Association for Equality (men’s rights groups often appropriate the word “equality” because they believe they are fighting for equality against feminist oppression).

On 29 November 2015 Karen Woodall blogged:

“This week I was on a late night panel (late for me anyway) via Skype to Toronto University Students for the Canadian Association for Equality. The subject was disappearing dads and parental alienation.”

She was referring to an event called “Disappearing Dads: How Children Suffer When We Demonize Fathers”. The video footage of the event is on youtube. The question and answer session begins at 01:09.04.

One of the other members of the panel was Sol Goldstein, an American parental alienation expert.

RateMDs is a doctor rating website with anonymous ratings. Sol Goldstein receives overwhelmingly negative ratings. Bad ratings from mothers who lost custody of their children are understandable, but, particularly worryingly, he has several reviews from children who have now grown up, who accuse him of causing them to suffer ongoing abuse by misdiagnosing parental alienation, including the following:

“I was one of the children Dr. Goldstein used to further his career and prove his idea of parental alienation. I don't disagree that parents try to alienate their children from each other, that isn't my complaint. My issue us that as a child, Dr. Goldstein had no intention of doing any sort of actual assessment and when he did ask questions and I would answer he would say I didn't know what I felt or that I wasn't being truthful. His report was instrumental in the custody arrangement that allowed myself and my siblings to continue to be abused by our father and stepmother. Abuse that he was aware of and chose to ignore and deny.”

“Dr Goldstein was instrumental in emotionally damaging my siblings and I, causing unnecessary turmoil, ruining the remainder of my childhood and allowing someone who was abusing us to continue to have shared custody (and yes he was claiming parental alienation and was also paying the bills). I was 10 I didn't need anyone to try to alienate me from my father he did that on his own by being physically and verbally/emotionally abusive. Dr Goldstein continuously told me I was lying and ill mannered if I got upset that no one would listen that we were being abused and seriously fucked me up. Talk about not being able to trust someone who you think is there to help you. I learned early on no one cared what happened to me. That takes a long time to repair.”

“I saw Dr. Goldstein approx. 15 years ago during my parents divorce case as did my two younger siblings. It was apparent that he was completely biased and did not have any intention of listening to what I actually had to say. He came into the meetings with an agenda and opinions of "parental alienation" which I understand is his specialty. He was not supportive or empathetic and was a horrible psychiatrist. I would not recommend to anyone, ever.”

On 1 November 2017 Karen Woodall was the keynote speaker, this time in the flesh, at another event held by the University of Toronto Men’s Issues Awareness Society in association with the Canadian Association for Equality, called “How the Traditional Approach to Domestic Abuse is Endangering Children”.

Karen Woodall is a contributor to anti-feminist website, Women For Men, alongside anti-feminists Stephen Baskerville, Erin Pizzey, Cristina Hoff Sommers, Suzanne Venker, Terry Brennan, Helen Smith, Lionel Tiger, and Michael Gurian.

In 2013 Dean Esmay of A Voice For Men hailed Women For Men and Honey Badger Brigade as evidence of a growing number of women joining the anti-feminist “men’s human rights movement”.

Stephen Baskerville

Stephen Baskerville gave presentations at World Congress of Families V in 2009 in Amsterdam and World Congress of Families XII in 2018 in Chisinau, Moldova. He has also written for “The Natural Family”, the online journal of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, which is the parent organization of the World Congress of Families, whose main writer is Bryce Christensen, an associate of Samantha Callan.

He became a men’s rights activist after he was “forcibly divorced” by his wife and obliged to pay child support for his two children. He is the author of “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family”. Patheos blogger, Libby Anne, wrote an excellent analysis of Stephen Baskerville’s toxic misogyny, identifying him as “a rape denialist, a domestic violence denialist, and a child abuse denialist”.

He asks “Dead Beat Dads or Plundered Pops?”, claiming that the American child support system “has the tendency to turn children into cash prizes” and complaining that, “Current enforcement practice overturns centuries of common law precedent that a father could not be forced to pay for the stealing of his own children.”

Suzanne Venker is an American anti-feminist author and pundit. She is the niece of Phyllis Schlafly, described in Jennifer Butler’s 2006 book, “Born Again: The Christian Right Revitalized”, as “a Catholic who spearheaded a successful national anti-Equal Rights Amendment campaign just before the amendment was poised to be ratified, worked alongside Mormons to ensure its defeat”. Phyllis Schlafly, who died in 2016, was “the matriarch of the conservative movement” and one of the anti-feminists who inspired Margaret Atwood’s Serena Joy character in The Handmaid’s Tale, and who inspired the name of the Schlafly Café in Atwood’s 2019 sequel, The Testaments.

Suzanne Venker is a contributing author to the British anti-feminist website, Conservative Woman, alongside Harry Benson.

Lionel Tiger is the Canadian author of “The Decline of Males”. He argues that male dominance is vital for social stability because when men are not disciplined to support a wife and children they become lost and confused and resort to violence, crime and pornography. He blames contraception for women’s ascendance and men’s obsolescence.

1998 debate with Barbara Ehrenreich

Helen Smith is an anti-feminist psychologist and author of “Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream - and Why It Matters”, profiled in a 2014 Mother Jones article, “The Men’s Rights Movement and the Women Who Love It”. In 2015 she recommended Paul Elam’s book, “Go Your Own Way”:

“If you are a man who wants to learn to go his own way and yearns to be free, then Peter Wright and Paul Elam’s book will help you to do so. The book cuts to the chase of what it is for a man to live on his own terms, free from the yoke of marriage, society and the state. Read it and give it to your sons, brothers or any other male who wants to better understand the dynamics of living in today’s female-centred culture.”

Erin Pizzey founded a women’s refuge in Chiswick in the 1970s, but quickly came to realise that the women she was ordered to call “sisters” were man-hating, money-grubbing radical feminists. In a 2007 piece for the Daily Mail, “How feminists tried to destroy the family”, she outlined how “the feminist movement hijacked the domestic violence movement” and “powerful women” like Labour ministers, Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt has insidiously created “a poisonous attitude” towards men, with the result that “Men can be accused of violence toward their partners and sexual abuse without evidence. Courts discriminate against fathers and refuse to allow them access to their children on the whims of vicious partners.”