Why don't we care about male victims of abuse???

Kudos to Barbara Kay for writing this terrific op-ed in the National Post today.

In 2000, Marion Boyd, a former attorney-general in Bob Rae's Ontario NDP government, convened a publicly funded task force on the health effects of woman abuse for the Middlesex-London Health Unit. Its advisory panel included representatives from London's hospitals, community agencies, the judicial system, the police force, psychologists and the then-director of London's Children's Aid Society. Everyone on Boyd's panel was intimately familiar with the 1980s-era abuse scandals, and some would later testify at the Cornwall Inquiry, almost entirely about boy victims. Yet astonishingly, all signed off on Boyd's final report, which recommended a health unit protocol for screening only "women" 12 years and older for present or past abuse.

After five years of development and training, in 2006 the protocol -- called the Routine Universal Comprehensive Screening (RUCS), even though it is neither "universal" nor "comprehensive" -- became operative in 25 Ontario public health units. Why only girls and not boys? In Boyd's words, because "there is little point in screening for a health condition when no referral resources are available to serve the needs of those identified."

I leave it to readers to reflect on the irony of this statement and supply their own bizarre medical analogies -- an irony to be compounded when RUCS produces data useful for enhancing already prolific women's resources. By data omission, on the other hand, the project forecloses on funding for male survivors of sexual abuse. (There is exactly one funded referral centre in Ontario for the thousands of Frank O'Deas of Ontario.)