Women’s whispers

Firstly and importantly, I want to make clear that nothing I have to say today is intended to detract from any of our wonderful women speaking today. They have all worked tirelessly in the field of wrongful convictions and false allegations one way or another and deserve every bit of recognition and praise that comes their way. Please make no mistake about that. Women up and down the country are tirelessly supporting their falsely accused and wrongfully convicted loved ones.

However, I have to say, that when Dr Naughton invited me to speak at this conference and told me that the theme was ‘Women’s Voices in Wrongful Allegations and False Accusations’ my heart sank. You might think that as a woman I would be pleased that women were front and centre for such an important topic, and I was, yet I wasn’t. Women again? Really? Aren’t we everywhere already? And then I thought about it and realised that yes, we need to talk about women and the role they play in wrongful conviction and false allegations, but we need to start talking about how they cause them and how they are by far the greatest factor in the whole sorry industry. People have been talking about wrongful convictions and false allegations for decades, despondent at the fact that little is changing for the better; in fact things have got worse. We think we have to do more. But do we? I’d like to suggest that we need to do the same wonderful work that’s been being done, but we need to do different as well.

Tempting as it is, I’m not going to give you lots of reports or statistics today. (Well, maybe a few later.) I’m really just talking to you as a Mum of several falsely accused adult children and the wife of a falsely accused man. Far from being ‘vanishingly rare’, false accusations are rife.

Wrongful convictions are absolutely appalling and soul destroying, for the wrongfully convicted and their families, and while I don’t want to detract from the horror, I think we have to recognise that they are the apex of a very large mountain, the tip of a very large iceberg and the exception, not the rule. False allegations are the basis of all of them and ‘the rule’ but few are recognised as such. I want to suggest today that false allegations are actually all around us, happening every day, and by and large, ignored. We ignore them by calling them rumour and gossip and because women are the main culprits and of course, in our modern society there seems to be this ridiculous idea that nothing that women do is wrong; it can all be explained away. In actual fact, a false accusation likely started because a woman whispered a lie. She didn’t need to shout it, because when it’s a lie accusing a man, society does the shouting for her. We make excuse after excuse for women’s bad behaviour and it needs to stop. To try to put it in some sort of perspective, based on the lowest agreed figures regarding sexual offences, let’s remember that this morning, this very morning and every morning, someone – more likely dozens of ‘someones’ – woke up to find themselves at the sharp end of an official complaint about their behaviour; behaviour that in fact often never even happened. There are many more ‘someones’ who became aware today that someone, most likely a woman, is whispering behind their back, planting little seeds of doubt in the minds of others. Seeds that could at any time become another one of those official complaints based on nothing. This is where all false allegations and ultimately wrongful convictions come from. Let’s call spades spades – from lies - and it’s not only sexual matters that get lied about.

Let me go back a little in time and explain how I think how we got to where we are today – I was born in the early 1950’s and my mother was one of the last generation of women who often expected to give up work when she married. Modern women will tell you that that is a sign of oppression but my mother couldn’t wait. She made no secret of the fact that she considered it her right to stay at home and my father’s duty to provide for her. Interestingly, she made my father take me to work with him when I was very small, so even then women were insisting that men took on domestic chores and child care duties. Many of my friend’s mothers took exactly the same stance. She wasn’t unique by any means.

Over the last 70 years or so, the world for women has changed out of all recognition. The post-war years saw to that. They occupy much more of the workforce than they did in the 1950’s and I’ve spoken before how women dominate much of the world of work and caring for children. Many insisted that men just weren’t capable of child care and domestic chores, so they had to do it all and make martyrs of themselves in the process. This gave and continues to give them a lot of control and I’ve noticed that they don’t push to have a presence in the more physical jobs or the ones that are downright drudgery. No, they don’t want to be plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, construction or sewage workers. They want the high-paying STEM jobs, complain when there are not enough female CEOs and dominate the industries where they have control of individuals. As a quick recap, 75%+ of teachers are women, almost 90% of nurses are women, 47% of doctors are women and 80% of all residential care jobs, (85%+ of direct care jobs) are done by women. Even HR, Social work and CAFCASS jobs are 70-80%+ held by women. The influence they can exercise is substantial. Furthermore, they outnumber boys in higher education at 56%, there are affirmative action programmes for women and there are single sex professional spaces for women. Women continue to infiltrate men’s single sex spaces by, for example, forcing the Garrick Club, in 2024, to admit them and in 2025 women are putting pressure on men to allow them to join local Men’s Sheds, an organisation intended to give men a male space for companionship and mental health support but which now is admitting women across the country. What next? They’ll want to join Andy’s Man Club, intended to offer men support with their mental health? They are relentless! Far from being oppressed, women have more influence and control than ever.

More than that, I have noticed in recent years that advertising is heavily weighted in women’s favour, with women being front and centre in the vast majority of TV advertising, often making men the subject of ridicule and incapability. ‘My dad – distracted by shiny things’ was a holiday advert slogan that particularly rankled me, but then I was made aware that women are responsible for over 80% of consumer spending, so of course, the adverts are going to be aimed at them. So, one way or another, women have a great deal of control and their influence is everywhere.

When you add into that mix the fact that vast majority of single parent households are headed by mothers – roughly 85% - and only 15% by fathers, you can see that the overriding influence of women is present from infancy to adulthood.

It’s also important to recognise that abuse generally attributed to men in the public consciousness actually has many woman involved. 38% of sex traffickers are women and 30% of those trafficked are boys though the public perception is that all traffickers are men and all those trafficked are women and girls. 50% of misogynistic tweets are sent by women and 50% of bidirectional and heterosexual domestic abuse is initiated by women. 70% of all unidirectional abuse is initiated by women. Women retaliate with abuse more often than men but they also initiate abuse more often than men.

UK child abuse statistics fail to address the gender of child abusers adequately, but US statistics identify women as the majority of abusers of children and there in no reason to suppose that the UK doesn’t follow that trend. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why the UK is so reluctant to draw gender distinctions in cases of the abuse of children but shout them from the roof tops when it comes to the abuse of women and why society is so very quiet on the fact that most murdered children are killed by their mothers.

But enough of the figures I said I wouldn’t give you. What can we make of them all and the role that women actually play in the perpetration of abuse, domestic violence and false allegations? What do they mean? Let’s make no mistake; false allegations are another form of interpersonal abuse and wrongful convictions are institutional abuse.

I have started collecting data on false allegations, its frequency and consequences, and it’s all quite frankly shocking. It’s a long slow task, but already I can see that the vast majority of prosecuted false accusers are women and the vast majority of them get no further than the local news. Many more undoubtedly don’t even get that far. I focus here on ‘prosecuted’ false accusers because there are so many more false accusations that are invisible to the general public but no less devastating to the falsely accused.

Add to that the fact that the majority of parents who weaponise their children by making false allegations against the other parent in order to keep that parent away from the children are mothers, (a process commonly known as Parental Alienation), and we have a growing social disaster on our hands; dare I say it, almost entirely perpetrated by women.

Now, it is important to note that domestic violence and parental alienation are not gendered. Men and fathers are as capable of these forms of abuse, but for the purpose of today, the focus is on women, and I have no hesitation in saying that women are much more likely to abuse in subtle and unreported ways, so creating the huge iceberg I was talking about earlier. In fact they go much further than that, and I want to use a personal example to illustrate it.

My son - who is here today, and I speak of this with his permission - separated from the mother of his children 4 years ago. He was accused of assault, for which he was tried and acquitted, had an anti-harassment order against him, was coerced into breaking his bail conditions because ‘I need help’ and prosecuted for that. He has seen his children twice in all that time and been accused of everything else you could imagine, including rape and murder, (though nothing of that has been brought of the attention of the police), to keep him away from the children. The Family Court has ‘erred on the side of caution’ though there is no court order banning him from having contact with the children, contact has been impossible to make. Thousands of pounds have been spent on court hearings that his ex-partner has just ignored but there have been no consequences for her. He was quoted £40-50,000 or more for a ‘Proof’ hearing that he could not afford, (who could?), and his ex-partner tells anyone who will listen that he and his family are not allowed to see the children, which is not true, and that they are scared of us all, which is a mystery to us as they never were before. This is where it gets even more interesting.

They are at primary school and the head teacher has told him and me that it is not appropriate for either of us to go to the school for parent’s evenings or school events for fear of upsetting the children. School, she tells me, is their ‘safe place’. Of course, she only has their mother’s version of events and is clearly not interested in upsetting that applecart or taking steps to find the true root of any trauma that the children may have suffered. (I’m inclined to think that their father disappearing from their lives at a moment’s notice may have something to do with it, at the very least.)

His ex-partner has blocked all forms of communication, so in an effort to know something of his children’s welfare, my son asked for access to the Parental Portal at school, attendance at parent’s evenings and their medical records. The school authority have refused anything but an emailed school report at the end of the year and a telephone call each term, with no opportunity to attend school in person to see the children’s school work, contrary to their stated ‘open door’ policy. The NHS Trust have refused any information on the basis that the children must be asked for permission though the law only states that they CAN be asked after the age of 12, not that they MUST be asked, and they were both under 12 in any event.

My point here is that all these people exercising this control, keeping a father from information about his children, even in defiance of the law, are all women – the head teacher and the representatives of both the education authority and the NHS trust. Everyone who has been in contact with him about any of this, with the exception of one person who claimed to be acting on the instructions of the head teacher, has been female.

Feminists keep telling us that they speak for all women and telling men that masculinity is toxic and that men are responsible for halting the tide of violence against women. Well, I suggest it’s time to play the women at their own game.

My message today is that men have suffered enough. It’s time that women stepped up to the plate and practiced what they preached. If men are required to ‘call out’ other men on their bad behaviour towards women, real or imagined, women need to ‘call out’ other women when it comes to false allegations, often starting as rumour and gossip, and always with devastating consequences.

Women (and girls) whisper in the school playground as pupils and parents. They do it on their girl’s nights out, in the break rooms at work, at their coffee mornings, in their sports locker rooms and everywhere else they gather. Those whispers are often insensitive mischief making but can be rooted in anger and jealousy. Too often they morph into full-blown vendettas against wholly innocent men, ruining their lives and damaging the lives of their children beyond repair. I go so far as to say for many, if not most, give no thought to anyone but their own sense of importance and wish to be the centre of attention and a ‘victim’. Feminism has become performance, from the playground to the publishing houses. Feminist language describing men is terrifying, but that’s a conversation for another day.

It’s only by stemming the tide of gossip, rumour and false allegations that we can hope to halt or even slow the number of wrongful convictions.

Ava has given us a wonderful example of bravery and what needs to be done in the face of a false accusation. She is a prime example of how and why ‘start by believing’ must become ‘start by questioning and continue by countering where necessary’.

While we women give our lives, in many cases, to righting wrongs and standing up against falsehoods, we need to also stop whispering and raise our voices in defence of our boys and men, as a group and in defiance of the women who think that ruining lives is, as the girls who accused Stefan Kitzko did, ‘just a bit of fun’.

Men and boys deserve so much better, and I hope that we women can all start to do our part in this. Ava has shown us the way, so we have no excuse.

By Felicity Stryjak

This article was a presentation given by Felicity at the Empowering the Innocent (ETI) conference, "Women on false allegations and wrongful convictions", 17 May 2025, University of Bristol.