SOME 60 per cent of clients seeking help at one of the west’s busiest rape crisis centres were abused under the age of 17, according to a new report.
The number of male survivors of sexual abuse seeking help has also doubled in the past three years, the Galway Rape Crisis Centre’s (GRCC) report for 2009 says.
In about 80 per cent of cases last year, the perpetrator was someone “known to the survivor”, while 10 per cent of offenders were members of security forces at home or abroad, the report records.
Asylum seekers often identified security forces as perpetrators and many of these clients had suffered “horrendous ordeals in their home countries before fleeing to Ireland”, the report says.
Asylum seekers constituted 16 per cent of all clients at the centre last year, but the majority of clients, at 74 per cent, were Irish citizens. There was an 8 per cent increase in clients calling to the centre in 2009, with 2,609 face-to-face counselling sessions provided. Twelve per cent of all clients were male – three times the percentage in 2007.
The centre employs one male part-time counsellor for male clients, but female counsellors also see men. A male survivors’ abuse centre in Galway was forced to close due to lack of funding, but this service has been integrated with the rape crisis centre.
The centre recorded a 7 per cent decrease in funding and has been forced to intensify its fundraising efforts – with a function in memory of the murdered Swiss teenager Manuela Riedo planned for early next month.
Fine Gael senator Fidelma Healy-Eames, who spoke at the report’s publication in Galway, expressed serious concern about the funding issue. The major proportion of the centre’s financial support was provided by HSE West and it would be “naïve” to think that this would not be “under attack” next year due to health cutbacks, she said.
Rape was a “worse crime than murder”, Senator Healy-Eames said, as the victim had to “live with a self that has been violated”. She also drew attention to the number of young people who were clients of the centre.
Mandatory reporting of childhood abuse was imperative, Ms Healy-Eames added, and there was a need to put child protection guidelines on a statutory footing.
Commenting after the report’s publication, Independent Galway city councillor Catherine Connolly said she believed such centres should not have to rely on voluntary fundraising at all and should not be pressurised into channelling energies into raising funds.
She also said that the location of the new sexual assault treatment unit in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city was not ideal.
The new unit was opened at Parkmore industrial estate in August 2009 after delays. The GRCC has said the location is temporary until a permanent unit is established in Merlin Park Hospital.