If men were harming and killing green tiger beetles at the rate they are attacking women, road construction would be halted, an Oireachtas committee would announce an investigation and readers would be writing incandescent letters to newspapers.
When the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 was a public health pandemic, the world shut down. When the same organisation declared violence against women was a public health pandemic, the world kept going on its merry old way. Nobody needs to have been born with a womb to recognise society’s ennui about the ubiquitous brutality against the female of the human species.
Take last Monday. On the day Trinity College Dublin was reaping acres of congratulations for endowing one of its buildings with a woman’s name instead of a man’s for the first time in its 433-year history, the following were some of the horrors coming to light in the criminal courts:
“Woman raped by three ‘complete strangers’ says they robbed her of her love of life”;
Hyrox, the soaring fitness trend: ‘You meet so many different people, all shapes, all sizes’
‘I had all the symptoms of bowel cancer but it wasn’t on their radar because of my age’
Heart attacks in women: ‘I really had no idea I was having one’
Give me wartime food advice over the maddening dietary diktats of today
“Sisters lost half their family after reporting sexual abuse by older cousins, court hears”;
“We lost our mam to someone we thought we could trust”.
While the newly-named Eavan Boland Library was being celebrated by several other brilliant women grown grey in the long wait, horrendous details were emanating from the criminal courts. A mother had been strangled with the cord of a window blind and stabbed 11 times in her home by a man she had intimately known. Two sisters told of being sexually assaulted and, in the case of one sister, repeatedly raped by their male cousins in their grandparents’ home. In yet another case, a mother told three men who raped her and videoed it that they had given her a life sentence “all for the sake of a laugh [and] because boys will be boys”.
On Tuesday morning, none of these court cases featured in The Irish Times “most read” list of 20 articles. They simply were not gruesomely juicy enough. As the incumbent in the Oval Office goes to show, if you want to get attention you must keep raising the bar of degeneracy. In his words, it makes “great television”.
Donald Trump is not known for campaigning in poetry, unlike Boland. In the title poem of her collection called Domestic Violence, she wrote:
“And there was a couple who quarrelled into the night,
Their voices high, sharp".
Six women died at men’s hands in Ireland in the first eight weeks of this year.
They were daughters, mothers, sisters, aunts, women with histories and plans for the lives they had yet to live.
Gardaí responded to more than 65,000 so-called “domestic abuse” incidents last year. If 65,000 ATM cards had been stolen or 65,000 vehicles were roaming Ireland’s roads without insurance, there would be uproar. But, sure, 65,000 “domestics” is just another way of saying there’s a lot of “quarrelling” going on. Beware, euphemism can kill.
Sometimes a cause celebre comes along that catapults man’s inhumanity to woman into the headlines. The trial of Dominique Pelicot in France was global news but, as much as we may like to think it was due to the dignified courage of his victim, Gisèle Pelicot, it was the utter depravity of her husband in drugging her and inviting more than 50 other men to rape his wife that made it newsworthy. The civil trial of Conor McGregor was a box-office draw due to the UFC fighter’s fame/notoriety rather than the indomitable spirit of Nikita Hand, the woman a jury determined he had raped. McGregor has appealed the outcome of the civil trial to the Court of Appeal.
When Trump named McGregor as a “great” Irishman in the Oval Office on Wednesday, nobody demurred. One can only hope Hand was not watching.
Women and girls are being warriors every day of the week by reporting their attackers to gardaí and refusing to be bullied or shamed into silence in courtrooms. The sad reality is that they will have to keep fighting their individual battles for as long as society ordains that “boys will be boys”, a disposition as demeaning of males as it is threatening to females. Misogyny is killing women but it is sexism that facilitates it.
The tacit assumption that women are the weak sex is what leads to the Taliban’s Afghanistan, where the law prohibits female voices to be heard in public, thus treating half the human population as inferior to barking dogs. The same attitude underlies the explosion of online pornography implicitly instructing boys that girls are their throwaway playthings. When Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum that the world needs more muscle-flexing masculinity is allowed to thrive, the world gets Andrew Tate, a kick boxer-turned-influencer facing charges of rape, human trafficking and sexual exploitation. These are the viruses that turn into a full-blown pandemic. Unsurprisingly, the night before he murdered Carol Hunt and her daughters Louise and Hannah with a crossbow at their home in England, Kyle Clifford searched for Tate’s podcast.
Changing laws relating to sexual and violent crimes will not cure this pandemic as long as casual everyday sexism is socially acceptable. It needs to be challenged every time it happens, as new Social Democrats TD Sinéad Gibney did in a recent Dáil debate. “I have been in the Dáil three months and have been called a girl multiple times by colleagues. That is not okay,” said the former director of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.
Jim O’Callaghan, the Minister for Justice, has promised to establish a “domestic violence register” similar to the published lists of tax offenders. That would help but, if sexism has any hope of being eradicated, the Oireachtas itself should set a zero-tolerance example. There have been numerous times when women have been judged by their gender and even their looks in the Dáil chamber, while men with dodgy attitudes are given a pass for life. Why not, for instance, make it compulsory for TDs and Senators to declare any safety or barring orders issued against them? Can it be that, of all the men who have trooped through Leinster House during a gender violence pandemic, none ever threatened a woman?
As Boland’s Domestic Violence poem continues to its conclusion:
“As for that couple did we ever
Find out who they were
And did we want to?
I think we know. I think we always knew.”
