An Albertan IT specialist has become a champion for father’s rights after hearing countless stories of their suffering.
Monique Dietvorst works as a technical writer in STEM fields, mostly in software. Her honest inquiry into men’s rights presented a much different picture than she had been led to believe.
“I just saw reality, working with men all the time, like, the stress of this. It drives men to suicide. About 75 or 80% of the suicides are male, right? And you can see these men break down. And [if] they do get through it, they just never want to think about it again, because it’s so traumatizing,” Dietvorst told Western Standard.
Dietvorst looked deeper into the issue and discovered the Canadian Association For Equality (CAFE). Through the organization, she sponsored a University of Calgary showing of The Red Pill documentary, in which feminist Cassie Jaye explored men’s grievances and found them legitimate.
A “huge blow up” and “uproar” of cancel culture scrapped the university booking. Instead, Father’s Rights Alberta sponsored a showing off-campus. Dietvorst said Jaye’s journey is much like her own.
“When I was in university, I was told that men’s rights activists are misogynists. They’re pro-rape and everything that you could think of to scare the hell out of me, right?” Dietvorst recalled.
“They want equal services for men as victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. There’s like a whole host of issues that I thought were and never one when it comes to these MRAs [men’s rights advocates] have they ever talked about entitlement or women’s bodies or anything like that…
“I’d been brainwashed, basically, to not see all these issues that were going on. And I realized that the men that were going through family court, they were so damaged that I decided that I was going to pick up this battle and fight because there’s nobody else to do it.”
Dietvorst said books like The Boy Crisis show that fathers need to be in their children’s lives.
“Fatherlessness is rooted in poverty, it leads to crime,” she said. “Alienation is part of it. All these boys grow up to be part of gangs. And all the ISIS recruits and all the school shooters, they’re all raised by single mothers, almost all of them.”
Dietvorst said some academic literature suggests parental alienation leads to identity confusion in children.
“When you’re telling a child, that part of their family, that half of their identity is garbage and damaged, then they have like a void and they feel traumatized. They don’t know how to make sense of themselves.”
“The reason why these kids are saying there is like a unicorn gender and a dragon gender…they’re traumatized kids and just trying to make up something, like fill up the pain…
“We probably shouldn’t be sterilizing kids when they don’t understand what that means…If you’re an adult, and you want to transition, that isn’t of my business, but if you’re a traumatized kid and you think you’re a unicorn gender you probably shouldn’t be giving them these drugs.”
Dietvorst started the non-profit Canadian Child Protection from Alienation Foundation to try to deal with the problem. She said documentaries like Erasing Family demonstrate how lawyers have an interest in keeping the family law system contentious. She believes parents who split should have shared custody by default, as is the case in Sweden.
“That’s actually what’s best for the kids, not financially, emotionally destroying parents–that doesn’t help,” she said.
Dietvorst says suffering fathers can turn to the Canadian Centre for Men and Families, an organization that opened a centre for battered men and kids in Toronto. Against men’s interest, the National Association for Women in Law, in partnership with 250 feminist organizations, is calling for any argument of parental alienation to be legally inadmissible in family court.
“I don’t think you should underestimate the power and the influence of the special interest groups because most people don’t know anything about this at all. And we have to start really pulling them in,” Dietvorst said.
Those interested in more information can watch Dietvorst’s June YouTube appearance on the Tammy Peterson podcast.
Lee Harding is Research Associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
