It was to do with the fact that there is a lot of sympathy and apologising for Mairead in this thread and not one for Mick.
And that is not Male Privilege, @Wheresmykimchi.
I can't think of an example where a man has committed something as serious as murdering his child or allowing his child to be murdered and been shown sympathy.
That is not male privilege either. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sympathy for child killers.
Male privilege is the pattern of discounting by the courts of the impact of male violence in families and relationships, the difficulty women face in custody disputes in the family courts convincing judges that abuse has occurred and is likely to occur in the future, the ease with which men can walk away from financial responsibility for children, throwing their former partners and children into poverty and requiring state support, the basic assumption that a father - any father, no matter how damaging - has a cast iron right of access to his children but not necessarily any financial responsibility.
Heather Kehoe had a long drawn out fight to gain custody of her sons from a man who had groomed her from age 14 and had already been convicted of a heinous crime against his first girlfriend. The basic advantage accorded to men in family courts and in cases of domestic violence in the criminal courts constitutes male privilege.
I am talking about the bedrock assumptions about the importance of a father to children regardless of the character and behaviour of the father, and the corresponding disparagement of the role of mothers, the refusal to join the dots in cases of abusive men and look in a clear-eyed way at patterns of abusive behaviour; the refusal to see a continuum and a wider pattern, the refusal to see that abuse is on a spectrum, and that all of it has a hugely negative impact on women and children, with resulting inability to deal with it either in the criminal courts or the family courts. Women have to fight the assumption that any father no matter how violent or inadequate is better for children than none and the corresponding implication that they are inadequate as lone parents just by dint of being women. The damaging impact of violence and abuse against a mother witnessed by a child in the home is ignored.
A women has to prove egregious violence against a child in order to prevent that child form being put in danger again from his own father in a visitation regime. It is incredibly hard to prove that sort of violence - it's not at all the given that most people might believe it is that an abusive man will be denied the chance to hurt his children or his ex partner again.
I do not know what it will take for society to change its mind about the impact of abusive men on their children. We are apparently willing to pay the huge price tag of male entitlement that is codified into the distinct legal advantage men enjoy over their partners and children. We pay for school disruption, crime both petty and major, the cost of underachievement in school, and prisons with revolving doors.