Jennifer (not her real name) was “about six” when her brother, then about 19, first sexually assaulted her “under a tree at the top of the road” near their Traveller encampment in rural Ireland.
Five or six years later, around 2000, he assaulted her as she babysat his infant son. She was “about 12″ and he about 25.
That “was in his caravan down at the back of the house. He was married with three children. The baby was in a Moses basket. I was asked to watch the kids when he came in and sexually assaulted me from behind me, started rubbing himself up and down me.
“I was terrified, absolutely terrified. My whole body was shaking, my brain was going 1,000 miles an hour. I didn’t know why did he just do this. What was going on? I started crying and asked him to stop. He went out of the caravan but I couldn’t get it out of my head. Why was he doing this? He’s my brother. What was he thinking?”
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By then her brother had been sexually assaulting, including raping, five of his sisters for 15 years. He first sexually assaulted a younger sister when he was about 10 or 11.
At the Central Criminal Court on Monday, sentencing the man to 11 years for the rape, indecent assault and sexual assault of five of his sisters, Justice Paul Burns said he had been “raised in a home environment where sexual abuse was perpetrated by the father on his daughters and where cruelty and neglect was the norm”.
Three of his victims spoke to The Irish Times after the sentencing. A fourth was not there and a fifth did not want to be named. Their eldest sister, who was raped by their father but was not abused by her brother, was with them for support
They describe childhoods of sexual abuse, starvation, constant beatings and of not having clean clothes, underwear or sanitary towels.
“We were handed stockings or a bit of the end of a T-shirt,” says Martha (not her real name).
Mary (not her real name) recalls telling her mother her brother had raped her. “She gave me a beating you wouldn’t give a dog, and told me, ‘You’re going to get trouble caused’. ‘You’ll get arguments caused’.”
Jennifer, the youngest of the five, did not know her brother was abusing her sisters.
“I thought it didn’t happen to anyone else and they wouldn’t understand if I told them. ‘They won’t believe it,’ I thought, ‘because he’s after telling me, “no one will believe you”.’ And then I’d start a lot of trouble and get beaten again.”
Asked if she ever had happy days, she recalls her First Communion. “I felt pretty. I felt happy. I was dancing around, in my dress, feeling nice and good. Not being embarrassed the way we did going to school because usually we were dirty. No one wanted to play with us. We were the smelly kids.”
They say they have “never felt such relief” now their brother has been convicted.
“The anxiety has been unreal.” They feared they would not be believed and faced “intimidation” from their brother before and during his trial, they say. “We used to have to travel on the same train as him. He’d spit on the ground in front of us, and say, ‘Keep laughing while you can’.”
“I feel relieved and we can move forward with our lives,” says Mary. “It’s closure but it’s never going to give back what was taken away — our childhoods, our dignity, our self-respect.
“The one thing we never got an answer to is why: why did they do this to us?”
