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Christina Hoff Sommers dubbed it The War on Boys years ago. What began as a classroom crusade against rough-and-tumble play and ‘toxic masculinity’ has metastasised into a full-spectrum assault on men. Even when they’re at their most vulnerable. The latest front? Suicide prevention itself.
Last Christmas, a major Australian suicide prevention group took a call from a deeply distressed suicidal man. The counsellor did his best and promised follow-up. When calls went unanswered, duty of care kicked in and police were contacted. Their response was chilling:
“Is there a female partner who could be at risk? Is he likely to hurt her,” asked the police officer, whose immediate concern was not checking on the man in crisis but rather assessing the risk that the suicidal man could be violent.
Not ‘Is this man about to kill himself?’ Not ‘How do we get him help?’ No, the first instinct was to treat the suicidal man as a potential woman-beater. Welcome to feminist policy innovation, where the group dying by suicide at three times the rate of women is viewed primarily as a threat to women.
This isn’t some rogue cop. It flows straight from Victoria’s 2021 MARAM Framework, now imposed on over 6,000 organisations and 392,000 professionals. The document assumes significant numbers of male suicides involve a history of family violence. Mental health workers are instructed to screen suicidal men for perpetration, ‘keep perpetrators in view’ (which sounds an awful lot like the misandrist assumption that all men are ‘perpetrators’), share their confidential information without consent and prioritise protecting hypothetical victims over saving the man in front of them.
Even when the ‘victim’ is the actual perpetrator.
I talked last week to a man who sought help from a mental health service in Dandenong Victoria. The suicidal man had lost contact with his children despite the Victorian police having charged his partner with two counts of assault against him.
So, how did these man-hating femcels respond?
One of the health workers kept pushing me asking if I’d ever hit a woman, saying ‘You must have done something, you must have hit her.’ She went on and on, informing me that this was the first step to getting better by acknowledging the truth, even after I had shown them the mother’s charge sheet from Victorian Police.
The health worker pushed so hard it turned into a loud verbal argument lasting over 15 minutes. “I ended up walking away in tears. This left me more suicidal than when I had started using their services almost a year earlier,” the shattered man explained.
Which only a conspiracy theorist incel would say was probably the plan.
This is institutional gaslighting on an industrial scale. The entire edifice rests on dodgy research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies’ ‘Ten to Men’ study. They trumpeted that suicidal men are 47 per cent more likely to be violent toward partners – mostly ‘emotional abuse’ like making someone feel ‘frightened or anxious’. This is a classic motte-and-bailey gambit: taking the most common and least problematic example and deliberately conflating it with the vanishingly rarest and worst.
Also conveniently buried is the fact that almost a third of the men surveyed were themselves victims of violence and 25 per cent experienced bidirectional abuse. Those numbers never saw the light of day.
The War on Boys never stops at the schoolyard or a shitty, lying Netflix garbagefest. Men’s Sheds, those humble, male-only refuges for camaraderie, practical skills and mental health, are under siege from women demanding entry. Movember, once a straightforward men’s health charity focused on prostate cancer and testicular cancer, has seen its board colonised by women who quietly redirected funds toward ‘mental health research’ that conveniently and overwhelmingly deals with female priorities. And while feminists bay for a royal commission into violence against women, they remain strangely silent on the fact that men are three times more likely to be murdered than women.
Everywhere, the pattern is the same: men’s spaces, men’s issues and men’s pain, all colonised and usurped, or dismissed unless it can be framed as a threat to women.
The suicide stats are brutal. Men account for three-quarters of suicides in Australia. Yet policy treats them as presumptive villains. The Australian Institute of Criminology pushes screening for domestic violence perpetration in exactly the services suicidal men use. The result is as predictable as it is shocking: vulnerable men, already at rock bottom, are interrogated, monitored and alienated instead of helped.
This isn’t compassion. It’s ideology dressed as care. A system that looks at a man standing on the abyss and asks first whether he might hurt a woman is not merely broken: it’s morally twisted and inverted. The data doesn’t even support the panic. Most domestic violence is bidirectional. Men are the majority of victims of homicide by strangers and the overwhelming majority of suicide deaths. Yet the policy response remains laser-focused on women.
If we actually cared about suicide prevention, we’d scrap the ideological overlay, treat men as individuals rather than suspects and stop presuming the worst of the group dying at triple the female rate. Instead, we’ve built a system that kicks them while they’re down.
The MARAM framework and its imitators aren’t saving lives. They’re sacrificing men’s live on the altar of feminist misandry. And Australian men are paying with their lives.
