They wrote it down in 2004

What happened, and why a week of Norwegian politics is where this starts.

Arendalsuka is where Norwegian politics goes for a week in August to talk to itself. I went on Monday the tenth with six questions and a box of equipment.

The questions are an audit. Under Article 8 of the European Convention, a state does not discharge its duty to family life by staying out of the way. It carries what Strasbourg calls positive obligations: it has to take real steps so that contact it has ordered actually happens. The handbook I co-edit puts it in one line. The state has a duty to make sure contact actually takes place, not only to decide it on paper.

Yes. Uncertain. No. Anyone can run it on their own case in five minutes, which is the point.

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On the first day my bag was stolen, with the equipment in it. The car keys were in the bag, so the car is still in Arendal and I went home on the bus. The insurance does not cover it. We were not the only ones. Agderposten put the total taken from the tents at 100,000 kroner, and other stands were hit the same week. I have no idea who did it and no basis for saying why, so I am not going to guess at a reason. The relevant fact is narrower than a motive and harder to argue with: the equipment was gone, and what happened next is the part this article is about.

I can see where the AirPods are. I could see them a few minutes ago. The police told me that too many people live in that building for them to do anything, and that I should go and knock on the doors myself.

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I am aware of how that reads next to six questions about whether the state takes its own initiative or waits for someone else to act. I am not going to make the comparison for you.

The document that decides these cases, searched term by term.

When a Norwegian court needs a case assessed, it appoints an expert. How that expert works is governed by the Veileder for sakkyndig utredningsarbeid i foreldretvistsaker etter barneloven, issued on 22 September 2022 by Bufdir on commission from the Ministry of Children and Families, with input from a district court judge.

I read it in full and searched it.

It does reach for human rights once, at Grunnloven section 104 and article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on a child's right to be heard. That is a real obligation and it belongs there. But the convention Norway is actually judged under when contact is ordered and never happens is not in the document that tells the expert what to look at.

Someone will say the enforcement standard belongs in guidance to courts rather than to experts, and that is a fair argument. I am not claiming anyone removed it. I am saying that the duty exists, that it has been spelled out by the Court in thirty-five rulings, and that the working document for these cases does not contain the words.

What I built when I got home, and what it is for.

I came home from Arendal with no equipment and a question I could not put down. If the national guideline does not carry the duty, does anything above it?

I started digging on the Thursday evening, the thirteenth.

What I built over the following days is a register. Every claim men's advocates make, chased back to a primary document. Not a news article about a study, the study. Not a campaign infographic, the dataset. Most of it did not survive. I kept what I threw away and published that too, because the discarded pile is the only proof the surviving pile was checked.

1. Monday 10 AugustArendalsuka. Six questions, a box of equipment, and by the evening no bag.
2. Thursday 13 AugustStarted digging. If the national guideline does not carry the duty, does anything above it?
3. Friday 14 AugustThe register goes up: every claim chased to a primary document, with the discarded pile published beside it.
4. Friday to SaturdayTaken to r/AskFeminists and r/NeutralPolitics. Two other subreddits remove it for stated procedural reasons.
5. Sunday 16 AugustA chatbot handed the page mentions a document from 2004 I had never seen.

There is also a song. It comes from the same place all of this does: watching what men around me were carrying and finding no language for it, plus a lifelong interest in music and nowhere else to put the two together. I wrote the lyric a while back about the double standards men live inside, and turned it into a video when I started posting about this. It is the least evidential thing on the site, and the reason the rest of it exists.

Taking the argument to the rooms most likely to take it apart, including one that judged it without opening it.

A number is not an argument. An argument has to survive people who want it to fail.

So I took it to r/AskFeminists and to r/NeutralPolitics, and tried r/changemyview and r/geopolitics. The last two removed the post: changemyview on a Fresh Topic Friday timing filter, with an apology and an invitation to repost, and geopolitics because text posts are normally disabled there. Neither was censorship and I am not going to pretend it was.

My answer was that the World Health Organization runs global suicide prevention, the ILO exists for workplace deaths and UN-Habitat for homelessness, so not what the UN does is simply wrong. Countries do count male deaths. No body anywhere is mandated to act on the pattern.

And the same argument had already told me that male suicide is driven by masculine norms, then that those norms will not change. That cannot be right in both directions. The entire framework of institutions pushing norms is built on norms moving when institutions push them.

Honestly? Nothing came back that changed the argument. What came back, more than once, was an instruction: stop complaining, go and be political, do what women did. That instruction is correct, and it is the only reason this article exists.

The reply I am proudest of was to that one. Go be political is the instruction I had already followed. Norway ran a government commission on men's equality because people organised for it. The UN pathway is mapped: one member state, one resolution, the same route Canada took for the Day of the Girl Child in 2011. You are not watching whining. You are watching step two.

Then I ran the test myself, and made it as unfair as I could. Late on the night this was published I handed the article to Google's Gemini behind a prompt written to fail it, and watched what came back before it had read a word. Nobody stumbled onto this and nobody independent ran it. I built the least friendly reader I could reach and pointed it at my own work.

The United Nations adopted twenty-eight words about men and boys in 2004, and gave them to nobody. Everything on this site follows from that sentence having no owner.

Then, while testing whether a chatbot handed my own page could argue the case better than I can, it mentioned a document I had never seen.

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New York, 12 March 2004. The Commission on the Status of Women, forty-eighth session. Endorsed by the Economic and Social Council as agreed conclusions 2004/11.

It is not a charter for men. Paragraph 6 is a long list of what governments should do to involve men in equality for women. Paragraph 5 insists that resources for men and boys must not compromise resources for women and girls. The acknowledgement sits in a subordinate clause inside a sentence about what men can do for women. Paragraph 7 told every entity in the UN system to act on it.

Nobody was told to own it.

Three years later the Commission looked in once, on 2 March 2007, and its own participants said adequate resources should go to "all gender equality programmes, those specifically targeting men and boys as well as those targeted to women and girls". Not instead of. As well as. I have looked for a later review and cannot find one.

Meanwhile the other column got built, and for reasons that hold. UN Women reported 594.4 million dollars in contributions for 2024. The calendar carries around thirteen days a year for women and girls. About one in three women alive has experienced sexual violence, roughly 50,000 women and girls a year are killed by a partner or relative, and 56 per cent of murdered women died at the hands of a partner or family member against 11 per cent of murdered men. That last figure cuts against things I have said myself. It is true.

I am not asking for a krone of it.

What the 2004 clause got instead is visible in what gets counted. Father and paternity appear zero times across the 234 SDG indicators. I want to be exact about what that does and does not show: mother and maternity are zero too. The framework has no vocabulary for parents at all. Maternal appears twice and both are maternal mortality, which is a woman in childbirth rather than a mother raising a child. The asymmetry that is actually there is in who gets named as a group: 37 women to 8 men, every one of the eight inside a pair, and 11 girls to 2 boys. Indicator 16.2.3 covers sexual violence in childhood for both sexes on paper, and about 68 low- and middle-income countries for girls against about 12 for boys in practice. In 2021 81 per cent of everyone murdered was male, and 493,456 men killed themselves, about 56 an hour, which outruns every murder on the planet combined at 52. A newly separated man's odds of suicide are 4.82 times a married man's, highest in the weeks right after.

The indicator excluded nobody. The measuring did.