insideMAN

Why did the BBC erase the 88% of rough sleepers who are men? And what can we do about it?

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On Wednesday, the BBC reported there had been a 16% rise in the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of England in the last year and that since 2010, the number of rough sleepers had more than doubled.

The report went on to outline a range of issues impacting on these more than 4,000 people who are the “most vulnerable” members of society, and to separate the numbers in terms of region, age and nationality.

But what stood out, was that when it came to breaking the numbers down in terms of gender, at no point did the BBC mention that fully 88% of rough sleepers are male – a “rough sleeping gap” that has increased from 85%.

Not only this, but the report in fact went on to highlight the 12% minority who are female.

But… why??

insideMAN tweeted at the BBC calling on them to explain why they had chosen to erase this glaring male gender disadvantage, while at the same time drawing attention to the minority of women who sleep rough.

The BBC did not reply, but our tweet was retweeted scores of times and triggered a passionate discussion online.

The big question was: how could a broadcaster that is dedicated to highlighting gendered disadvantage when faced by women, seemingly deliberately erase gender disadvantage faced by some of the “most vulnerable” men in society?

Here, insideMAN news editor, Glen Poole, gives his insight into the deep and complicated reasons why, and offers a radical way forward in thinking about gender that includes issues facing both men and women.

***

Why does the BBC ignore male rough sleepers? Well, first we’re going to need to do some gender theory.

The issue of society being blind to homelessness as a gender issue that affects men is a combination of male privilege/burden and female privilege/burden. In simple terms it’s “the masculine realm” and “the feminine realm” at play.

The masculine realm is built around the public citizen who was historically male. Men had rights (“privilege”) and responsibilities (“burdens”) that women didn’t – such as the right to a career, the right to vote versus the responsibility to provide for (earn) and protect others (e.g. conscription).

The feminine realm is built around the private world of nurture and care, which was historically female. Women had the privilege of being protected and taken care of (women and children first) but also the duty (or burden) of domesticity/childcare and a lack of rights to participate as public citizens.

This was just the “natural order” of things, we were largely blind to it until feminism (in its broadest sense) began making gender visible and asking awkward questions like why can’t women vote, have an education, have careers, be free from the burdens of the motherhood and domesticity?

What we still haven’t had is an opposite and equal push from men to say why can’t men be stay-at-home-dads, win custody of their kids when they separate, be protected and taken care of, and also be free from the burdens of the protector and provider role?

So, we have two forces at play:

  1. Traditional and conservative views of gender that remain blind to men’s gender issues and either reject women’s gender issues as “political correctness gone mad”, or accept them from the traditional viewpoint that women are the weaker sex and should be protected and taken care of.
  2. Progressive views of gender that seek to make gender visible, but only highlight the “privilege” of the male experience and the “burden” of the female experience. Or as we say in populist terms, the view that “Men ARE problems and Women HAVE problems”.

(As an aside, feminist masculinity studies, in particular, explicitly set out to make men visible — to name and problematise men and masculinity as things that should be the object of study, criticism and public policy, but with the intention of addressing the “problem” of men.)

Anyway, so yes, our failure to see homelessness as a gendered issue that mostly impacts men is shaped by traditional/conservative views (which some call patriarchy) because the failure to see homeless male citizens as gendered individuals is built on top of deep, historic social structures that established the default public citizen as male (which some people see as male privilege and the female burden in action).

But, our failure to see homelessness as a gendered issue that mostly impacts men is not just a problem of patriarchal thinking, it’s also shaped by progressive thinking too (or what some would simply call feminism). Because what progressive thinking is blind to is the way it preserves the privilege of victimhood/vulnerability — particularly the female privilege of being taken care of and protected, which it preserves by fiercely defending the position that “it’s a man’s world and only women can be gendered victims” (for example, some of those in the women’s refuge movement don’t just advocate for female victims but also advocate against male victims).

Then we need to throw into the mix the view that men have agency and women don’t, that men are agents of shaping this gendered world we live in and women are objects of it, that men act and women are acted upon and from this universally held view you get the unspoken belief (what some call unconscious bias) that:

Homeless men are failures and homeless women are victims (another version of men ARE problems, women HAVE problems).

Why is this?

First, because of the view that men have agency and are privileged in the public, masculine realm of work and are expected (first and foremost) to protect and provide, homeless men have failed in their duty to fulfil the privileged role of being a male citizen — they are failures and because they are male they are assumed to be independent and have agency and therefore are seen to be the cause of their own problems.

I read a newspaper leader in Australia last year, in the “progressive” Sydney Morning Herald, that was about men’s health and it used this phrase: “Man, an Aussie bloke is his own worst enemy” — which is a great example of the belief that because men are privileged and have agency (unlike women) that when men have problems they have no-one to blame but themselves. (Like those pesky, suicidal men, for example, if only they’d stop being so macho and talk about their feelings…).

Second, because of the belief that men have agency corresponds with a view that women don’t have agency and should be protected and taken care of and provided a “safe space” in the private feminine realm of the home, when women are homeless it’s seen more as society’s collective failure and leads to calls for specialist, gendered interventions.

Yes, these ways of thinking have deeply structured roots (that Evolutionary Psychologists would argue are grounded in biology and psychology) but they are not just locked in place by conservative/traditionalist thinkers (“women and children first”) but also by progressive thinkers (“women and girls first”).

Pretty much all charities working in homelessness and prison reform are run by progressive thinkers and they are pretty much blind to the view that men have gendered problems (and so see male prisoners and homeless men as victims of class, poverty and race… but not gender).

Neutrality, attack, or inclusivity?

I wrote about the failure of homeless charities to see homelessness as a gendered issue here in 2015.

So it’s not just the Government’s fault or the BBC’s fault or the homelessness sector’s fault — it’s a symptom of the “public story” about gender that’s shaped both by traditional (“patriarchal”) and progressive (“feminist”) thinking.

So our challenge is how do we challenge those deeply structured ways of thinking in a way that he vast majority of people can hear it?

There are basically three ways to response to this:

  1. Call for GENDER NEUTRALITY: we should help ALL homeless people, ALL prisoners, ALL kids not getting to university, ALL victims of violence, ALL suicidal people etc. etc. etc. etc., regardless of gender – “let us talk no more of women’s problems and men’s problems, let us just deal with human problems…”
  2. React against the one-eyed view of gender: attack the BBC, attack Government, attack biased policy makers… attack, attack, attack, declaring “what about the men?” Which is a valid response and certainly one of the ways I respond to a lot of issues… in a way this approach is fighting against gender exclusive ways of thinking, but it can also be hard to differentiate from other voices who react to every gendered initiative as another example of “political correctness gone mad”.
  3. Take the visionary, moral high ground and be role models in our willingness to champion highly effective GENDER INCLUSIVE approaches to social issues that take into account the fact that men and women may face the same problems (homeless, domestic violence, suicidality) but have different needs (both as a group AND as individuals).

Rather than saying it’s bad and wrong that the Government, the BBC, homeless charities etc. are highlighting the gendered issues facing homeless women, I think we should be more enthusiastic about this that anyone else on the planet.

More gendered thinking, please!

Because what we need, is not LESS gendered thinking we need MORE gendered thinking and we need MORE gendered thinking that is MORE THAN just focusing on the problems women have (and the problems men cause).

So let us enthusiastically embrace every single manifestation of gendered thinking we come across and demand MORE of it; let’s celebrate gendered thinking about social issues and be at the leading edge of getting people to think MORE deeply about gendered issues.

How does that look, in practical terms?

It starts with an enthusiastic response to every example of gendered thinking we encounter:

“It’s FANTASTIC that the BBC is highlighting that homelessness is a gendered issue for some women, what we’d love to see is the BBC also highlighting how homelessness is a gendered issue for the 88% of homeless people who are men.”

Take a breath… be visionary.

What this approach has the potential to do is bring BOTH supportive small-c conservatives AND open-minded progressives along with us.

Small-c conservatives are more likely to think “well I don’t really like all this gendered nonsense, but if we’re going to take a gendered approach to women’s issues then it only seems fair and right that we take a gendered approach to men’s issues too, and if it pisses off a few feminists in the process, then that’s a bonus!”

Progressives are more likely to think:

“I believe in gender equality and that ‘patriarchy is bad’ — this is proof that ‘patriarchy hurts men too’ so yes we should be taking a gendered approach to addressing this issue.”

So while a knee-jerk, gut reaction to stories that ignore or down-play glaring male disadvantage, is often (understandably) to think “fuck this, what about the men?” …if we can take a breath and respond from a visionary place, from our higher selves, and remember that whatever our individual views, then we can authentically say that we think:

“It’s GREAT that people are taking a gendered approach to tackling women’s issues… and what we stand for is a world where we take a gender inclusive approach to social issues that tackles BOTH women’s issues AND men’s issues, fairly and equitably.”

It’s not the BBC or the Government or the homelessness sector that’s the issue here, it’s us, the men’s movement. We haven’t yet won the argument that men have gendered issues and that homelessness is a gendered issue that mostly impacts men. We have to win that argument by persuading enough people over enough time that is the most moral, ethical and effective way to think about the problem.

We won’t get there (I believe) by correcting and complaining. We will get there by championing gendered thinking and evolving it to the next logical stage of its evolution.

  • rtdave

    The problem with responding positively to gynocentrism is that you only get more of it. You will never get a balanced response, one that says, ‘Yes, we should include the way that this issue affects men.’ The BBC is perfectly aware of what they are doing, it is a one hundred percent deliberate act to accentuate the effects of homelessness on women and to downplay, ignore and censor the truth regarding men. Playing nice with liars will not improve anything.

    I have no happy suggestions to improve the situation, either with the BBC or society at large. I don’t see anything changing for the better until at least some women are seen to be suffering as a result of the neglect of men and boys. This is definitely a counsel of despair, but also realistic. No one will truly care until men walk away and women lose the use they have had out of us.

    • Groan

      I agree with you on “cultural output” I think we’re a huge way away from knocking the Victorian damsel off her pedestal. Not least because the feminists have been adding to her plinth with new forms of “sugar and spice” while adding whole new ranges of frogs and snails to boys pockets.
      However we do have the equality act and equality duty for all publicly funded activities and this may be (and has been in my experience) a means of getting some change.

      • paul parmenter

        Thankyou Groan, you never cease to give us helpful input. You seem to have more faith in the equality legislation than I have, and I am pleased to hear that you have found it having some positive effect. Maybe I am just more cynical than you, because I live largely outside the sphere of public activities; and from where I am standing, I see very little that gives me any optimism. But I guess the last thing left in Pandora’s box is hope.

        • Groan

          You are most gracious. I’m afraid it is not the case that I have faith in the legislation as such. Our statute books are full of laws that rarely if ever get used. Those that do tend to reflect particular interests at particular times. No the EA is a reasonable vehicle to highlight inequities. But the important thing is that people use it, or rather the threat of it.
          The truth is that there is no way on earth that the public services could ever enact all the provisions of all the legislation it is supposed to. So inevitably those services focus on those things that are “priorities”. These can be influenced by the threat of law or adverse publicity, something that many pressure groups are adept at. Both in the NHS and Local Government a good deal of time is spent on avoiding both, I have always been fascinated at how conscious services are of “challenge” as they put it even though in fact in this country the number of actual legal cases or tribunals and the like are very small. So a small number of cases have a huge effect as public services act to reduce the “risk”. Of a similar adverse event in their neck of the woods. Hence my interest in the remarkably few cases under the EA.
          The Equality Duty requires such agencies to collect data on the EA strands. Most do collect though many still don’t due to the expense. Very few indeed invest anything in any form of analysis at all. In fact if you look closely you will notice agencies will reference old published reports or even media reports in Equality documents, when in fact they actually have up to date data sets that would give them really good baseline data. I know many believe this is conspiracy, and occasionally this may be so from big Gov Depts or one or two of the biggest Councils. However if one asks in an FOI for te gender breakdown or proportion of men on a particular topic it is often the first time anyone has ever asked this of the agencies data. It is worth asking such questions for that reason alone.
          I am a behaviourist so I like to think I’m not cynical merely an observer of actual behaviours. Decade’s ago myself and a colleague were bumptiously arguing for the implementation of the recently passed Community Care Act “my dear, if the Council tried to do everything the Gov. told it, it would be bankrupt in days” . Wise words from the director of Finance that stuck with me.

  • Groan

    “Rough sleeping” is particularly clearly the result of public policy. Whatever system of “points”, “risk” assessment, vulnerability and so on, the sure point is that a working age male the very last and usually has “nul points”. A commenter on the story wrote he’d been homeless for years due to mental health problems. He’d time and again seen females fast tracked to services as he bumped along in a string of charitable and night shelters. He wasn’t arguing that women should et help just it be noticed the effect of repeatedly “bounced” away from the more permanent forms of accommodation that might stabilise his life. Though no one will have the inclination or resources to mount a case the state institutions clearly operate a discriminatory system under the Equality act and other legislation. (In the same way the insurance industry was forced to alter premiums).
    So one point is that there is a space for pointing out that a lot of the ignoring is in fact unlawful but only becomes illegal if people resist and use the courts. I think there is a real role for any organisation or group involved at least trying to publicise that many laws apply to men.
    As a similar point to encouraging “gender” to be an issue is the importance of prodding public institutions about data. Understandably those outside gov. and its agencies believe they use the vast amount of data they collect. However the “Equality” data, in common with most data held, is rarely interrogated in any systematic manner. So well placed FOI requests about gender splits can be very helpful as the FOI could well be the first time anybody has actually generated the figures let alone considered any patterns. The NHS is probably one of the most numerate branches of the Civil services and its probably connected that health is one of the few areas there is a growing discussion of men’s health in the widest sense.
    On the idea of agency the history is interesting. One measure might be the proportions of the imprisoned population, people held morally responsible and punished. Here we see a dramatic fall in the proportion of females (and children) over the past 200 years. Very clearly regency England held people responsible and agents of their own misfortune. The first dramatic shifts occurred following the influence of writers such as Dickens as in the growing middle classes there grew disquiet and then protest at women and children being incarcerated(and working in mines etc.) This spurred on a parade of legislation that protected women by making male relatives responsible for debts and other financial affairs, (meaning that any imprisonment for debt for instance was going to be male) and removing responsibilities from women. Thus legislation repealed in the sixties and seventies was frequently not a century old. There was a further shift in the late Edwardian era and a dramatic shift again in the 1950s. The latter appearing to be linked to the growth of “psychological” theory and the notion that women were “mad” not bad. Of course most recently the Corston report advancing the view that women are unable to face the rigours of a prison regime. Hence now we have the lowest proportion of female prisoners. Perhaps women have become better or perhaps it is a rough and ready chart of the decline of responsibility. Clearly its the case for children where now we don’t see children as having moral agency.
    It is a paradox. Mary Wolstencraft wanted women to match “the virtues men” not become more “gilded things”

  • Anthony Zarat

    The appropriate response is to hit them hard, with everything that you have. We tried asking nicely for decades, it does not work. Destroy their credibility, impeach their character, and ultimately attempt to undermine their funding. There is no reason for public funding to support a bigoted organization that is founded on hatred and hypocrisy.

  • Paul Reilly

    All men have only had the right to vote for 10 years longer than all women in the UK. So it’s inaccurate to say…

    “Men had rights (“privilege”) and responsibilities (“burdens”) that women didn’t – such as the right to a career, the right to vote versus the responsibility to provide for (earn) and protect others (e.g. conscription).”

    Conscription in the UK happened in WWI and WWII. The majority of men who died in WWI could not vote, conscripted or otherwise. When conscription for WII came around, all men and women could vote but only men were obligated.

    It’s coming up to the 100th anniversary of all men being allowed to vote in the UK. I think it’s important to acknowledge this at every given opportunity. The BBC is going to have 365 days of special coverage in 2028 for the 100th of all women being allowed to vote after all.

  • disqus_ArQv6e31it

    Like the CBC in Canada, the BBC is nothing but the mouthpiece of the extreme left and feminism.

  • Peter L

    The approach: “Come along now, what about the men…” has been tried and will be as usual put to one side quickly. Litmus test: see how long they talk about men before talking again about women.
    The best approach is to use the stats, bypass the radfems and get going with a sympathetic government group.

  • paul parmenter

    Thanks Glen for a carefully thought out article. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but there is much to get us all thinking. I also see that this is in some ways a follow up to your excellent piece in the Telegraph of August 2015 that you reference in the article.

    I don’t set any store by what the BBC says or does, because I have long since given up expecting any fair treatment from them. I get all my news from elsewhere, and that leaves me far better informed, and more quickly, than I would ever be if I relied on the tired old Beeb with its predictable biases and suppression of what it doesn’t want us to know. Fortunately we now live in a world where we can bypass such poor outlets that continuously fail to meet our needs.

    Which brings me to the main point here: bypassing that which fails to meet our needs. Because that has for some time now been my best answer to a number of these problems. People continuously go cap in hand to government bodies, pleading for better treatment, only to be just as continuously ignored, fobbed off or fed empty promises. Nothing changes. There is so much failure on the part of officialdom, in all its forms and guises, to meet the needs of men and boys, as we are all well aware. So is the solution to keep on banging away at them in an effort to bring about change? I have watched many people try to do so, and consistently get nowhere. The Coalition for Men and Boys has lodged an official complaint about the bias in the Government’s report on rough sleepers to the UK Statistics Authority. But who seriously thinks that such a complaint will get anywhere? The Authority is just another quango, ostensibly independent of government but in reality dependent on the state for its funding.

    Well, sincerely good luck with that complaint; I would not try to stop anyone ramming their head against a brick wall, if they believe that by doing so they might perhaps one day get to loosen one tiny brick before they get carted off with a broken skull.

    Glen has constructively offered possible solutions for trying to shift the huge monolith that is institutionalised misandry, so again credit for that. But even if any of these solutions get to work, it will be many years and most probably many decades before any serious change will happen – if at all. Forgive me, but I personally do not have enough time to wait that long. So I now find the only solution that will work right now at a personal level is to find alternative ways of getting where you need to go, that completely bypass all those forces that are trying to obstruct you. My philosophy is why try to break down a wall when there is the possibility of walking round it? In practice, this means not devoting all your time and energy trying to get government or other establishment machines to recognise you and change themselves in your favour. You can continue to try, but don’t expect any positive results before hell freezes over. The machine will not change because it is simply not set up that way, and has other priorities that are far more important in its own terms. The state is not the friend of men, and never has been. Learn from its history. So what do you do instead? Just go your own way (yes, this is MGTOW thinking) in your own life.

    Of course I am very well aware that this is purely an individual solution, and it won’t solve everyone’s problem. If you recognise that boys cannot fulfil their true potential in the state education sector, then the best solution for you is to move heaven and earth to get your son educated privately. I know that for many parents that is close to impossible, and most boys will inevitably just be fed into the machine, chewed up and spat out. But at least try to rescue your own son, and don’t give up without a fight.

    The same with male rough sleepers. I simply cannot see how any help will ever come their way by pleading with government or government funded agencies to solve the problem, because as you have already discovered, those machines have no interest in doing so; they don’t even want to recognise that the problem exists. I have had a good look at the Homeless Link website, and it fills me with dismay. It represents some 500 charities and other organisations ostensibly dealing with homelessness (and I am well aware that rough sleepers are only a fraction of the “homeless”) but it shows the all too familiar pattern of a hierarchical industry which is more interested in perpetuating itself and the myriads of people earning a good living within it, than in actually solving the problem it is supposed to be tackling. I feel quite nauseated at the sight of the mad scramble among competing bodies for hopelessly inadequate amounts of government funding, that in any case will be mainly spent on salaries for officials, networking conferences and endless meetings. The Homeless Link website has a section on jobs on offer in the industry, and it reads like any recruitment agency: lucrative careers on offer for applicants who tick the right boxes, with salaries that could surely solve the problem of 4,000 rough sleepers if the money was put in the right place.

    So why do you think they will ever change? Batter away at their brick wall all you want, but I predict that you will get nowhere. For me, the best solution is to bypass these official agencies and aim your support and positive energies at those people and organisations that have proved they care, and that can and will offer direct and effective help to those in need: that is, those charities already working in the field that have shown they can get results at ground level (which is not all of them). They will do more for the homeless than any government agency or quango ever will, and a donation or offer of voluntary work made direct to them is the best investment. At least until hell does actually freeze over, if that ever happens.