Professional Victims: Laurence Fox, Fathers' Rights and the Intellectual Dark Web - Part 1

It has been many months now since Laurence Fox appeared on Question Time and nobly declared that discussing racism was "starting to get boring." His point of view (and latest album) has not stopped being silenced since. That is, if by "silenced" you mean "invited onto Good Morning Britain, Jeremy Vine, and Talk Radio, lauded by columnists, seen the Equity Union's Minority Ethnic Members committee shut out of their twitter account and disciplined in your defence, asked to pen a travel piece for a national newspaper, and - most recently - put on the cover of the Sunday Times magazine". A humble dynasty-scion with only a whole Times profile to promote an album that failed to chart, his determination to continue to speak up in the face of such repression is, as he would put it, truly #stunningandbrave.

I'm loathe to "silence" him further with my attention but he is of interest as a case study. To the uninitiated, Fox's cocktail of political science jargon ("institutionally racist", "authoritarian, totalitarian ideologues", "immutable characteristic"), bastardised social justice terms ("woke", "ally", "coming out as a broccoli") and ominous catchphrases ("the tide is turning") seem either insightful or baffling, depending on your perspective. To those of us who probably spend too much time on the internet, they instantly ring a tedious and ominous bell: these are the buzzwords of the "Intellectual Dark Web".

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A group of self-anointed "thinkers" who fetishise a brand of rational argument that they see as being in opposition to social justice movements, the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) initially rose to prominence with the moral panic around the threat posed to free speech on university campuses, not by corporate money or government interference, but by left-wing students. A myth indulged by many supposedly left-leaning outlets, its preferred targets were attempts to no-platform speakers with transphobic views, shrewdly choosing one of the most ridiculed and only recently visible groups as the foil for a "non-ideological argument" about free speech. With the platform this campaign gave them, their anti-woke attacks have spread to women, people of colour and all LGBT people. Scratch the surface and they are the same old reactionaries that have opposed progress for decades, only with "woke" or "SJW" replacing "PC gone mad." Predictably, these brave dissenters are in fact covertly funded by billionaires as part of their campaign to marginalise and silence all opposition.

The IDW have their biggest following on Youtube, where they mutually self-publicise in a never-ending circle-jerk of interviews with each other, forming a dangerous ideological whirlpool that sucks viewers gradually down from "free speech advocates" to outright white nationalists and deranged conspiracy theorists. This descent is aided and abetted by YouTube itself, which maximises "watch-time" (read: $$$$) by recommending increasingly more extreme content. On a platform whose recommendation algorithms led from a search for "bikini haul" to sexualised videos of children, its tendency to promote extremist political content has only recently begun to be reviewed.

Sure enough, Laurence Fox says in his Times profile that he was "radicalised" by watching Youtube videos - an apt choice of word for a transformation that saw him go from voting for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 to considering Boris Johnson's Conservative Party not conservative enough just two years later.

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In an article on YouTube radicalisation for the Daily Beast, Kelly Weil interviews former alt-right extremists on how antifeminism, borne out of the #GamerGate campaign against feminist analysis of video games, acted as a gateway to other far-right causes. Tapping into feelings of loss and rejection, the movement convinced thousands of gamers that feminists were out to destroy something that they loved:

'“The false idea that social justice causes have some sort of nefarious ulterior motive, that they're distorting the truth somehow” can help open viewers to more extreme causes, he said. “Once you've gotten someone to believe that, you can actually go all the way to white supremacy fairly quickly.”'

Indeed, there is an alarming misogyny in Fox's behaviour and beliefs that has gone relatively unremarked - it is no coincidence that the audience member he decided to interrupt and berate on national television was a woman. On Dead in the Eye, a song from his latest album that he intended to call #MeToo before his record label intervened, he laments the "hypocrisy" of that movement:

Look at you in your plunging neckline

.... is it your righteous calling to teach me how to hold my tongue?

The song was inspired by the decision of actresses, including many of Harvey Weinstein's victims, to wear black to the 2018 Golden Globes in protest at the way Hollywood had enabled the serial rapist for decades. Apparently, this message was undercut, so to speak, by the fact that these women dared to show their cleavage in the process - "These people are very aware of the erotic nature of their costume yet totally unaware of the hypocrisy of their message." The idea that it is impossible for a woman to object to being sexually harassed because her clothes are too revealing, or that a free-speech advocate could argue that making political statements be restricted to women who cover their breasts, would be laughable if it wasn't so deeply offensive.

However, unlike Weil's interviewees, Laurence Fox is not an alienated teenager. Nor is he a misfit seeking refuge in an online gaming community. How, then, did his radicalisation begin? The answer, it seems, lies with the only subject on which he has spoken more than his newfound right-wing radicalism: his divorce from actress Billie Piper and the subsequent custody battle.

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Disclaimer: I know nothing of the reality Piper and Fox's relationship and make no claims about Fox's behaviour during or after their marriage. I can only report what I have read in the media.

After marrying Fox in 2007 and having two children with him, Piper filed for and was granted a divorce in 2016 citing his "unreasonable behaviour". She clarified that this is the closest the UK courts offer to "no fault" divorce and that they would "continue to co parent their children with the utmost mutual respect for each other." However, the couple were subsequently involved in a drawn-out custody battle in the family courts, the details of which remain private.

Since the separation, Piper has made no comment on the divorce or custody dispute. Fox has commented almost ceaselessly. He seems to have mentioned it in every single interview since - including a Daily Mail interview dedicated solely to the subject - claiming that there are no hard feelings whilst singing about an actress with "an emptiness inside", dedicating the song 'So Be Damned' to Piper's mother (his children's grandmother) at a live show, and talking extensively about the toll taken on his mental health and bank account by the custody battle. He has become a campaigner for the reform of a system that, according him, victimises fathers on a scale "equivalent to the #MeToo movement".

Though he maintains that his anger is aimed at the family courts system and the lawyers that benefit, his objections to it include that the lack of 'no-fault' divorce allows "someone to feel like the victim" and that "anonymity means there's no accountability for what they're saying, which doesn't encourage them to be sensible or truthful... allegations of abuse can be thrown around without being backed up by the evidence." Whatever his intention with these comments, Fathers4Justice - a fathers' rights campaign famous for staging protests dressed as superheroes - have certainly interpreted them in Piper's disfavour:

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Like the IDW, the fathers' rights movement has certain buzzwords, key phrases and ideas that its followers repeat. One of them, the "abuse" that Piper is accused of above, is contact denial. To use Fox's words, "malevolent" women are apparently using the courts to deny children contact with their fathers, a despicable practice he describes as "real abuse". Lurking unsaid is the "fake abuse" that mothers are presumably alleging to achieve this. In the same interview he calls Mel Gibson a "lovely guy" so presumably telling your pregnant wife that "If you get raped by a pack of n*****s, it will be your own fault," does not qualify as "real abuse".

It is not only mothers' words that are not to be trusted. Their children's claims are also suspect as they are being turned against their fathers by "parental alienation", another buzzword that Fox references: "I've heard of situations where children are being coached, and deliberately alienated from their fathers, which should be a crime." Thus, according to Fathers4Justice, Angelina Jolie is the real villain masterminding the rift between Brad Pitt and their adopted son Maddox; the fact that the estrangement followed Pitt's physical abuse of their child in a drunken rage is not to be believed.

Custody battles are not the movement's only focus: any child brought up without a father is abused and, according to Fathers4Justice, "fatherlessness is an obscenity". Women who use sperm donors, including Cheryl Cole, are "sperm bandits". Though they tend to avoid explicit homophobia these days, the movement has a history of opposing IVF for LGBT couples and claiming "kids need real dads not... lesbo dads." Widows are seemingly allowed - the implication that their children would be damaged by their failure to remarry sharpish has is not yet been explored.

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The reality of the family courts system is somewhat different to the anti-father "rigged legal cartel" that Fathers4Justice and their supporters describe. Unlike many countries, the UK family court does presuppose that custody of children should be given to either mother or father or 50/50, as Fathers4Justice would favour. Instead, the governing principle is that custody and access arrangements should be whatever is in the best interests of the child. It is true that mothers are given sole custody in a majority of cases, a fact used by fathers' rights campaigners to prove that the courts are biased.

However, they fail to note that this happens in a society where women perform over twice as much household labour as men per week, undertake the majority of childcare and where four times as many fathers as mothers refer to taking care of their own children as "babysitting". There will undoubtedly be miscarriages of justice against fathers on occasion and there is a debate around whether the courts perpetuate as well as reflect gender norms around parenting, as this refreshingly nuanced article explores. However the fact that most fathers' rights groups expend exponentially more effort railing against the family courts than they do arguing for paternity leave or flexible working hours for all parents (typically feminist causes), suggests there are other motives at play.

Lundy Bancroft, expert on domestic violence and author of the seminal book Why Does He Do That?, has written extensively on how abusive men use the family courts to further terrorise their former partners through their children. What the fathers' rights movement labels contact denial is in many cases women attempting to keep their children safe. While the UK family courts' prioritisation of the welfare of the child more effectively thwarts them than the US courts - much to their outrage - the evidence suggests that domestic abusers are still able to manipulate the courts to further harm their partners and children. Claims of "parental alienation" in particular are being used to undermine victims and discriminate against mothers, and are increasingly common as the result of advocacy by groups like Fathers4Justice. A study at Brunel University found that:

• "raising a PA [parental alienation] claim dominates family law cases to the exclusion of all else. Allegations of domestic abuse are often not properly investigated and could even be viewed by courts and professionals as ‘evidence’ of PA."

• "mothers had little to no success when claiming PA, despite evidence that the fathers were abusive and controlling, suggesting a one-sided dimension to PA."

The vast majority of judges in both family courts and the high court are men and, whilst efforts have been made to educate judges in criminal courts on the facts of sexual and domestic violence, this effort has not extended to the family courts. Just this year, a mother won her appeal against the ruling of Judge Robin Tolson, who found that she was not raped because she had taken "no physical steps" to resist, implying that women must physically fight their attackers to prove lack of consent. Fathers4Justice's response to the story, below, offers an insight into how the movement views violence against women.

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According to fathers for justice then, we have an epidemic not of rape and violence against women (despite the fact that two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner), but of "false rape claims". Similarly, attempting to protect mothers and children from domestic abusers or to house a child with the parent who has actually shown the inclination and ability to adequately care for them is in fact a plot to "make fathers obsolete". For men like Laurence Fox who find themselves in fathers' rights forums, this is where that seed of distrust of social justice causes - the idea that they "have some sort of nefarious ulterior motive, that they're distorting the truth somehow" - is planted; a seed that grows into the web of conspiracy theories and radicalism peddled by the far-right and the Intellectual Dark Web.

It is hard to imagine a group more ripe for radicalising than recently divorced fathers. On the more benevolent side, there are men who - like any person after a break-up - are riddled with shame and guilt and resentments, particularly if a court has found that their ex-wife is a more suitable carer for their children. What could be more inviting than a movement which tells you that none of it was your fault? It is hard to resist, at one of the lowest points in your life, the idea that you can lay down all the self-reproach, that all your least charitable views of your ex-partner are valid, that the people who found you less fit to raise your children are a "corrupt cabal" prejudiced against you.

Combined with the entitlement and sexism that all men unavoidably internalise to some degree, with straight men's comparative lack of emotional vocabulary or emotionally open and supportive friendships, and (as in Fox's case) with the added ingredient of white fragility, divorced fathers' pain can easily calcify into a victim-complex that sees feminism and anti-racism as persecution. This is fed and encouraged by the darker side of the group; the extremely manipulative, violent abusers who will stop at nothing to absolve themselves and smear their victims, seizing any ideology that serves them.

The father's rights movement, the Intellectual Dark Web, and the far-right beckon them all with open arms.

#IDW #IntellectualDarkWeb #altright #freespeech #farright #racism #censorship #domesticviolence #DV #familycourts