The Persecutory Delusions of Tin Foil Hat MRAs
Did the Swedish National Courts Administration break into private FTP servers owned by men’s rights activists (MRAs) and edit a 13-year-old report on the Women’s Safety Act to remove a problematic statement made by feminist Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny in order to cover their human right’s violations in the wake of the Julian Assange case?
Or did the MRAs just failed notice that the original quote from the report is a combination two different sentences from separate paragraphs and did not realize that the second sentence is still there, unaltered, on the next page?
In 2001, the Swedish National Courts Administration published a report called The New Women’s Safety Act. This report is an anthology and covers topics like recognizing violence in a health care setting, insufficient resources in social services and cooperation between voluntary organizations. In the chapter on securing evidence fast, MRAs allege that Marianne Ny (at the time a local prosecutor) makes the following statement:
“Only when the man is arrested and the woman are left in peace she have time to get some perspective on her life, she then get a chance to discover how she really have been treated.” “Marianne Ny says that the prosecution has a good effect to protect women, even in the cases where the offender is prosecuted but not convicted.”
The reason for why Ny’s claim is controversial among some MRAs is that prosecutors are not supposed to prosecute alleged criminals if they are not convinced that sufficient evidence exists for a conviction. Some MRAs think that this shows that Ny, now a Director of Public Prosecution, have no issue prosecuting men even those she is not convinced that enough evidence exists for a conviction. This issue comes to a head in the case of the Swedish arrest warrant against Julian Assange.
The MRAs at A Voice For Men (both the Swedish and US sites) thinks that the Swedish government have edited this 13-year-old report in secret and removed this section on Ny. Here is the section in the current document:
“Only when the man is arrested and the woman is left in peace she have time to get some perspective on her life, she then get a chance to discover how she really have been treated.” “Marianne Ny says, prosecutor at the office in Kristianstad. It is the prosecutors and police task to investigate and prosecute crimes. The law does state what is to be considered criminal.”
Not only that, they claim that the copy of the report that exists on a privately owned MRA FTP server also has been altered, allegedly by the Swedish government hacking it and editing or replacing it.
Sounds fantastically bizarre and inconceivable? Absolutely. In reality, had they read the rest of the chapter or even done a text search on the second half of the initial quote, they would have realized that the documents, both on the government website and that on the FTP server has not been altered at all:
Only when the man is arrested and the woman is left in peace she have time to get some perspective on her life, she then get a chance to discover how she really have been treated. Marianne Ny says, prosecutor at the office in Kristianstad. It is the prosecutors and police task to investigate and prosecute crimes. The law does state what is to be considered criminal.
If, during the investigation, the police and prosecutors find enough evidence, the case moves on to prosecution. By a prosecution, the criminal justice systems transfers the responsibility onto the person who uses violence. Marianne Ny argues that prosecution has a beneficial effect as protection against women, even in those cases where the perpetrator is prosecuted but not convinced.
That is right, the original quote that they allege is in the report is actually a combination of two different paragraphs in the report. The second one that contains the supposedly damaging statement by Ny, can be found on the page after the first one (page 9 and 8, respectively).
Men face unique challenges in society, from the criminal justice system to workplace deaths, but conspiracy-mongering is not a useful method in the struggle for equality. If only people could actually read the documents they cite before making arguments…
I thought this was gonna be pro-feminism at first, but was presently surprised. I’m not an MRA, I’m an egalitarian. I know that Sweden’s state feminism is sexist, but not in this way.
It now seems that the Swedish A Voice For Men removed their post (it gives a “Page not found” error), but it is still up on the U. S. site. The webcite caches in the blog post above still works, both for the U. S. and Swedish site.