Even the internet blames the mother.

Screencap of google search engine. "Bad fathering" is typed in. Google's suggestion underneath says "did you mean bad mothering?"

Mothers: to blame for glass ceiling.

According to Eleanor Mills at TimesOnline, women have become greedy with maternity leave.

“I am absolutely livid,” fumed my friend. A headhunter, she had just been told that a woman she had placed with a top FTSE company had taken a year’s maternity leave, come back, begged for a promotion (telling the HR department threateningly that she didn’t want to be ruled out just because she had a small child), got the promotion and two months into her new job announced she was pregnant again and would be taking another year off. The HR department boss was unhappy but could do nothing. The woman was within her legal rights.

“It just takes the piss,” said my friend. “Behaving like that just makes it much more difficult for the rest of us.”

My friend is not a dinosaur, she is a mid-thirties working mother who recruits men and women into senior jobs all over industry: “Every time a woman does that, it makes it that much harder for me to put forward a female the next time. Women who abuse the system give all of us a bad name.”

So am I reading this right? Apparently women who dare to want to have children and take the maternity leave they’re legally entitled to, are to blame for the glass ceiling. You hear that, ladies? You’re not just to blame for the fall of society and the state of the youth of today, but for sexism within employment as well. Wonderful.

Learning to be a mother not possible for the learning-disabled

The Mirror tells us of a mother who is facing having her baby taken away from her after it is born.  Yes, that’s right, the mother isn’t even a proper mother yet and already social workers have decided that she is unable to properly care for the child.  Why?  Because she has learning disabilities.  You know what?  So do I.  Learning disabilities do not mean someone is unable to care for a child.  They mean that someone needs assistance with learning, not that they’re unable to learn.

The fact that social workers have pre-determined that a mother-to-be isn’t qualified to be a mother because of her disability smacks of the legacy of eugenics.  Eugenics was the late 19th, early 20th Century movement that was based on an interpretation of Darwinism to “improve the races”.  One of the things that resulted from this movement was the forced sterilisation of people, mostly women, who were regarded as “imbeciles” on the theory that imbeciles beget imbeciles.  Interestingly, imbeciles were only found among those that society had deemed as unworthy, such as working-class prostitutes or children in orphanages.  In the famous case of Buck v Bell, the US Supreme Court upheld the sterilisation of a woman who excelled in school on the grounds that she was an imbecile (and not at all because she was the daughter of a prostitute).  While eugenics lost favour thanks to the Nazis showing how eugenics could be carried out with murderous precision (It’s worth remembering that the first victims of Nazi extermination policies were in mental hospitals), its legacy lived on, especially in the US where sterilisations continued into the 1970s.

But now we’ve advanced so far!  No one is saying this woman should be sterilised, just that she shouldn’t be given a chance to be a mother.  Because clearly people with disabilities are incompetent mothers.   They can’t possibly have partners or family members to assist them if they do need assistance.  And, social workers can’t assist either.  They’re too busy taking away the child and blaming the mother.

Would the real real woman please stand up?

Cristina Odone would like you to know that “real women” don’t want to work full-time. “Real women” find primary fulfilment as mothers. But she’s “not having a pop at working mothers”. She’s just saying they’re not real women.

Now, there’s something to (the reports of) her conclusions: yes, parents should have more freedom to choose to work outside the home or not; we should value parenting; economic contributions are not the only kind of contributions. But the big fat mother-blaming fail comes in the fact that this is all about mothers, nary a mention of the possibility that men could be fulfilled as at-home parents, and her choice of the term “real women”. Fuck you, Cristina Odone, you anti-feminist, anti-secularist, ranting pillock.

Paedophiles – whose fault? Guess.

I’ve never come across Helen Rumbelow before. I hope to goodness I never do again. For apparently, paedophiles are all our fault as mothers.

According to Ms Rumbelow:

For a day I sat with the detectives — all male, bar one — at the headquarters of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in London, as they trawled through the hundreds of thousands of images, videos and transcripts of online chat …

The perpetrators are overwhelmingly Western white males, and the victims are mostly female. … But there is something else that catches your eye in the corner of the frame: the ignorance of women.

So there we have it. It’s our ignorance that gets our children abused online. It’s not, you know, the people that do it. Nope. Not them. I mean, they can’t help it, can they?

When one man, posing as a teenager on a social networking site, pressured a schoolgirl to lift her shirt for him, you saw her checking her back. While sitting at the family computer in the middle-class living room, her mother kept walking in and out, and the girl picked the moment when her mum’s back was, literally, turned.

Yes, mothers – don’t blink. Don’t look away. Don’t turn your back. And don’t blink.  Because, if you do, it will all be your fault when something terrible happens. Heaven forbid you, you know, walk in and out, you know, doing things.

And “middle class living room“? Hey, be careful mothers with a Volvo parked out front – it can happen to you, it’s not just the working classes! Quick! Step away from polishing the John Lewis mahogany table and go and watch your daughter immediately!

In another case the pink bedroom where a male relative filmed the abuse — police tracked thousands of images for six years before they saved this girl — could not have been decorated by anyone other than an indulgent mother, so feminine and fond was the provision of pink cushions and knick-knacks.

Pink cushions and knick-knacks!? You’re just asking for a paedo to abuse your girl with those furnishings! Don’t indulge your daughter! Go for regulation coral from Laura Ashley (to match your middle class living room) and she’ll be fine! You didn’t realise that decorating your daughter’s bedroom makes it your fault if she’s abused?

Another man, to prove to his online friends that he had access to a baby to abuse, posted online a family snap he took of his daughter’s first birthday. There is his baby in their shiny kitchen, her unwitting mother staring at the camera with a smile full of love.

It’s the mother’s fault she didn’t suspect her partner of abusing their child? It’s her fault for saying “cheese” when he took a snap for the family album? She should have been looking with eyes of suspicion, like we should all look at our partners, if they’re male, because it’s our duty to suspect them of being paedophiles? (And, what is with Ms R’s obsession with furnishings – “shiny kitchen”? Because abuse normally happens in drab, working class kitchens? What?)

Of course female paedophiles exist — in less than 5 per cent of cases. And yes, the internet’s special talent is to bring together people with rare predilections, horribly so for Vanessa George and Angela Allen. But don’t let the shock of the uncommon blind you to who is a more likely threat to your child. Don’t be the woman in the corner of the room, back turned.

Ah, but be careful, lest you spend too long suspecting the men in your life. Because then it’ll be your fault for being a man-hater, too.

The abusers, of course, don’t have any responsibility for what they’ve done. No, it’s the mothers.

They call this justice?

Story link here, linked to This Is Bristol because I refuse to link to The Sun.

A frightened Bristol mum who refused to give evidence against her partner was locked up while he was released.

Tina Connors is so scared of her partner that she was prepared to go to jail instead of giving evidence against him – and spent three hours in the cells for failing to testify.

Her partner Jerry faced trial for ramming her car as she fled to Bristol from him with their three children, threatening her, and later smashing up the car before torching it.

Yes friends, you read that correctly. This woman has already had to deal with the father of her children attempting to force her off the road while the children were in the car before he smashed up and set fire to the car and because she was too scared of him to testify in court, SHE was locked up while HE got to walk free from court. Because of course, it’s much better for the children to see Daddy let off with trying to kill them and Mummy locked up for being a victim. There’s a beautiful victim-blaming quote from the Judge (Judge Mark Horton)

You were more frightened of your husband than this court, which could send you to prison for two years. That tells me how frightened you were.

“If something now happens there’s only one person you can blame. The legal system of this country has tried to help you and you have spurned it.

FYI, the conviction rate for domestic violence last year was 6.4%. Not exactly inspiring for any woman who wants to live a life free from fear. This woman fought to protect her children, made a complaint to the police about her abusive, violent partner and followed it through only for her to be jailed because she should just get over being scared.

I blame the teenage mothers

Never a frown, is there Gordon Brown? Unless you’re frowning at teenage mothers that is.

(Thanks to Cath Elliott for the text from the speech.)

And I do think it’s time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken…

That’s right, Gord, it’s gone unspoken. Because nobody ever blamed teenage mothers before.

the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of sixteen, to get pregnant,

She just “gets pregnant”? What, by herself? What, teenage mothers have some kind of parthenogenesis going on?

be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.

Because why Gordon? Why can’t it be right? What are you so afraid the teenage mother will do?

And why all this talk of council flats anyway? Some teenage mothers rent privately, some live with their parents, some live with their partners (you didn’t say, Gordy, but are you talking about all teenage mums or just the wayward girls?) Surely you can’t be calling up that old trope “teenage mothers get themselves pregnant just to get a council flat” can you? To appeal to the Daily Mail reading contingent? No, can’t be that.

From now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer

So, that’s all of them then? I mean, child benefit isn’t means tested but it comes from the taxpayer. And note the change from “mother” to “parent”. Is it parents, Gord? Or just mothers? Can you make yourself clearer please?

will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads,

“Will be placed” Gordon? That doesn’t sound very consensual to me, do these wayward girls young welfare queens teenage mothers teenage parents get a say in the matter?

These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads

Roof over their heads – but wouldn’t a council flat, you know, the same council flat you talked about earlier, wouldn’t that come with an added roof?

but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly.

They can’t be responsible without your help, Gordy? Without government help? Ah, here we come to the crux of the matter. Teenage mothers are all clearly irresponsible. After all, they couldn’t have chosen to have babies, at least, not for the Right Reasons. They couldn’t possibly be capable of bringing them up by themselves.

They need Golden Brown’s help via his network of borstals care homes to learn how to be Good Citizens and bring their babies up the NuLabour way. Maybe Claire Verity, Supernanny or Gina Ford can get them to tame the little tyrants and have them singing D:Ream to them to help them sleep through the night by two weeks.

ETA: when your policy is sounding suspiciously like BNP policy? It might be time for a rethink, Gordylocks.

Girl’s Mother Caused Polanski to Rape

With Roman Polanski having been arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding US arrest warrant, the rape apologists have been coming out in droves.  However, we here at I Blame The Mother care about mother-blaming.  Luckily for us, the rape apologists have got that covered, too.  They figured out that Roman Polanski would not have raped a 13-year-old girl except for the girl’s mother!  Here’s Joan Z Shore, Co-founder of  Women Overseas for Equality (Belgium), over at the Huffington Post laying it out for us:

The 13-year old model “seduced” by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies.

As Amanda Hess, in her column over at the Washington City Paper, comments about Shore’s description:

So, Polanski is just a really special guy who was practically forced to have sex with that 13-year-old girl by her mother.

Brynn Caffey puts a slightly different spin on the mother-blaming in his comments on an article he wrote at the Bilerico Project.  He starts with this comnment:

Finally, her mother. What mother would let her 13-year-old daughter go on a photo shoot alone with a Hollywood director? And twice?! As a mother, I can tell you I would not, without a shadow of a doubt. This does lead one to question if her mother was knowingly looking to eventually profit from the encounter.

and follows it up later with this comment in case we missed that he was accusing the mother of deliberately sending her underaged daughter to get raped:

What is open to question is whether [the girl's] primary victimizer was Polanski, or her mother. If the latter, it would certainly not be the first time a parent deliberately coached their child on how to behave and what to say afterwards, then callously pushed her into an exploitative situation with a Hollywood celebrity hoping it would result in a sexual encounter from which she could profit—financially or in other ways.

(Note: For those confused by my referring to Caffey, a mother, as “he”, this is because he is a transgender man.  I’ve also edited out his use of the girl’s name in his second comment.  I see no reason to continue victimising her more than has been and continues to be done.)

I prefer Caffey’s mother-blaming rape apologism to Shore’s not only because it’s more direct in the blaming, but because it always gives me an extra warm feeling when it’s a mother invoking motherhood to blame another mother.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-z-shore/polanskis-arrest-shame-on_b_301134.html

Mothers who work have unhealthy, unfit children

Clicky clicky!

Back to this old argument again. A new study has discovered that children who have working mothers *shock horror* consume sweetened drinks between meals and even worse use their computers or watched television for at least two hours a day compared to the children of “stay at home” mothers who spend less than two hours on these activities. Wow! Who’d have thunk it, HOLD THE FRONT PAGES IT’S BREAKING NEWS. Kids like fizzy juice and tv.

This story has of course been picked up by the mainstream media and various talking heads have lamented the loss of the good old days when Dad would be the breadwinner and Mum wore an apron and had dinner ready for 5pm. How is this news?! And more to the point, when this country’s abysmal financial state has us with a budget deficit of 12% of GDP in the current financial year what more is expected of us because as we all know, as far as this Government are concerned we should all be working outside the home and spending money to fill the massive hole we’ve been dug into thanks to the credit crunch.

Of course another facet to this argument is that the report also asked about exercise versus sedentary activities. Could it be that years of media coverage of PEEDOS EVERYWHERE may well have resulted in parents being afraid to let their children have the freedom to play outside of the home without constant monitoring? No, of course not. It’s the Mothers’ fault for going to work. Bad Mothers.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

It’s only equality if the government can’t exploit it

When I was linked to this story on the Daily Fail yesterday, I assumed that it had been exaggerated because after all it was in the Daily Fail. Right..? Sadly not, as the same story was also published by the BBC:

…the case of two police officers told they had broken the law by caring for each other’s children.

Ofsted said the arrangement contravened the Childcare Act because it lasted for longer than two hours a day, and constituted receiving “a reward”.

It said the women would have to be registered as childminders.

Now let’s just clarify this here. Two women working in LAW ENFORCEMENT – where I’m fairly sure you have to be CRB-checked and be generally sensible people – have been told that babysitting for one another in their own homes so that they can go to work without being crippled by childcare costs is a REWARD and therefore contravenes the Childcare act.

Let’s just run that one again. A mutual agreement – which sees two young children cared for by someone who they are close to, who is both a parent of a similarly-aged child AND who is CRB-checked & trained to respond to emergency situations – is a reward and they have now been told to cease this arrangement unless they register as childminders and succumb to inspection by Ofsted.

I… I don’t even know where to start on this one so we’ll go for ye olde favourite, responsibility.

What has encouraged me over the last 24 hours has been the anger displayed by other mothers, fathers and grandparents responding to this. I have personally been long concerned that this Government does not trust parents to make decisions for their own children, that laws are enacted with scant consideration to those it covers. Ludicrous rules enforced in the name of “Health & Safety” have left our children incapable of assessing risk for themselves or – for the most part – able to play naturally without inhibition or worry about breaking the rules. But – and it is a big but – what gives Ofsted the right to intervene in a situation that is common practice the length and breadth of the nation? Ironically, it turns out that if Mother A had taken Child A to Mother B’s house to care for the children there (and vice versa) it would have been a non sequitur because the role of the carer changes from childminder to childcarer

Of course, if those women had accepted their subservient roles and stayed at home with their children instead of working then there would be no issue. I mean, how very dare they desire to leave their children to go out to the workplace? The government provides tax credits to contribute towards the costs of childcare, isn’t that good enough for these Mothers? So I throw it open to you – do you think this action is fair and equitable? Or absolutely ridiculous?

I think I’ve made my feelings quite clear on the matter but just in case – Mr Brown, stop blaming the Mothers.