A piece published on the website of Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them), the political party of which I’m the chairman, in January 2016:

Our thanks to William for this. From the article:

A promising young female golfer was jailed last week for causing serious injuries to six people after weaving her car across the road as a joke. Shannon Ashcroft, 20, drove erratically and swerved into the wrong side of road at least twice as she took a group of friends in ‘high spirits’ to a party.

But her Volkswagen Polo crashed into a lorry and all five teens in the vehicle and two people from the lorry had to be cut from the wreckage and needed hospital treatment.

On Friday she pleaded guilty to dangerous driving at Truro Crown Court in Cornwall and was jailed for nine months.

The court heard Ashcroft took responsibility for the crash as she was driving dangerously and not paying attention, texting on her phone and veered around as a joke…

Joanna Martin, defending, said it was a significant error of driving and was the result of high spirits. She said: ‘This was a young girl who was clearly distracted by a lot of things going on in the car.’

Ask yourself this. If the driver had been a 20-year-old man, is it conceivable his defence counsel would describe him as ‘a young boy’? It’s a truly sickening example of not applying appropriate moral agency to an adult woman. The sentence itself is, needless to say, far too lenient. The accident led to life-changing injuries, and it was little short of a miracle that nobody was killed.

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