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Advocacy Research - fooling you the public http://www.ukfathers.co.uk/Advocacy%20Research%20-%20fooling%20you%20the %20public%20April%202005.htm Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent, England.and a commentator on social policy made a very astute observation in 2004; "If you want to get a story circulating in the media, all you have to do is get some numbers, call it research and put out a press release." Advocacy groups who have perfected the strategy of promoting their cause over many years through advocacy research, include all the Political parties, diverse charities, non-governmental organisations, specialist lobby groups such as feminist pressure groups and, of course, the domestic violence industry. Invariably they are all well funded but represent only a tiny percent of the country's total population. But what specifically is so pernicious about advocacy research? Why should it be disparaged? The answer is simple. Advocacy research is the very opposite of scientific investigation which has been the bedrock of all academic achievement for more than a millennium. Sound science has always been devoted to the exploration of the unknown and the discovery of the truth. Advocacy organisations don't have to discover the truth - they already know it ! Their 'research' is designed to affirm what they already know. As Furedi puts it "Let's get some numbers to prove the cause seems to be the motif of such research." The plucking of figures almost out of the air and then combining them with other semi-related figures can give rise to bizarre results. The Americans have coined an appealing phrase for it, "Hen House Arithmetic". Sound science has always been valued because of its objectivity and reliability, never its subjectivity. Yet feminist research makes a virtue out of subjectivity, e.g. Prof. Audrey Mullender. The problem this poses is that a great deal of efforts has to be expended in tracking down these sources and analysing the methodology used. Prof Betsy Stanko's domestic violence research is a prime example. The singularly remarkable feature about men's and fathers' groups is their deliberate effort not to follow the same path. Unlike radical feminists, they do not make wild assertions and then use the intervening weeks before they are taken to task attempting to backfill the argument. Advocacy research provides one of the principal instruments for gaining publicity for a cause. By their very definition, causes need money and so publicity is what advocacy is all about. Take an example outside the domestic violence sphere - the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The NSPCC is one of the most successful advocacy organisations in the UK. In the past decades it has become a lobby group devoted to expensive TV campaigns publicising a peculiar brand of child protection in the form of anti-parent propaganda. Furedi notes: "With so much of its funds devoted to sophisticated propaganda campaigns, it is not surprising that providing real services for children no longer appears to be its main priority." And the published accounts underline this. In 2000 the annual expenditure of the NSPCC was £75m but it looked after a mere 8,912 children - at an averaged cost of £8,300 per child. And one wonders how a phone helpline can cost over one and a half million pounds a year (see Fig 1 below). The NSPCC's exact wording was that their child protection teams and services had received 8,912 requests that year, from a child population of around 20 million. So, at a cost of £29.2 million for their 'teams', the number of children actually cared for by their teams might be significantly less than 8,000. Fig 1. NSPCC annual report and accounts - year ended 31 Mar 2000 http://www.nspcc.org.uk/html/home/aboutus/annualreportaccounts.htm Local services £29.2m Child Protection Helpline £1.6m National Child Protection training £1.2m Campaigning £11.4m Public education £9.2m Support and admin £8.3m Sub-Total £61m Fundraising and publicity £14m Total expenditure £75m In Furedi's view (Spiked, 7 July 2004) the campaign against smacking is based on the poisonous notion that children need to be saved from their parents. It also helps to create a poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust. How true that is for other areas of male/female interaction. In an atmosphere of artificially created mistrust both sexes perceive each other with foreboding; one on account of a perceived assault and the other on account of the perceived asset stripping that will accompany any divorce. Critics have pointed out that with so much of its funds devoted to sophisticated propaganda campaigns; it is not surprising that in the case of the NSPCC, providing real services for children no longer appears to be its main priority. It is for Furedi to comment," It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the direct services that the NSPCC provides for children have become a mere adjunct for this publicity-hungry machine. According to the NSPCC's Annual Review, "At least one child is killed each week in the UK and they are far more likely to be killed at home by a parent or carer than by strangers in the street." But for all the money donated the number of child homicides fails to fall and the report fails to state that the homicides it refers to are overwhelmingly committed by mothers and non-biological fathers or her current boyfriend. Somehow, in the case of NSPCC zealots they have lost touch with the world of real children. The same can be said of multi-million pound industry that funds Refuge and Women's Aid - though their accounts are not so transparent. They long ago became irrelevant to ordinary women. But of what consequence is all this when there are wages to pay? When the continued existence of the charity and the people it employs have to be secured for another year the amount of funds raised become critical to the point of excluding all other considerations. It is at this point that pressure groups reach for advocacy research to save the situation. |