Archive for category: Blog

In the wake of the ‘rate my rape’ list on a school wall, Dr Cliona Saidlear says we have to talk about rape culture in Ireland.

I’M ANGRY. I’VE been a professional working on sexual violence almost continuously since I graduated with a PhD on war. I have learned not to get angry.

Instead, I have learned to breathe. One breath, another, until my reactions to yet another instance of misogyny, abuse and violence are fanned into a quiet, infinitesimally slow burning rage. A rage so still that unless you look very closely you won’t even notice.

I pass for reasonable, most of the time – but today I’m angry.

A list of names

We’ve discovered that a boy, maybe more than one, wrote a list of girls’ names on the wall of a toilet cubicle in the boys’ bathrooms in their school and asked other boys which girl they were going to rape. That boy or other boys (how many?), laid a neat row of ticks beside the chosen girls’ names.

One boy, as the list of ticks grew, it is said informed the girl at the top of the list that she should be pleased she had the most ‘likes’. As teenage popularity contests go this seems like a dystopia that is hard to beat.

Why? Some will ask what we should do to fix it? Some will shrug because this is just the way it is. Boys will be boys.

Silliness?

The day before an elder statesman of rugby had gone on publicly funded radio to tell us that what the lads, the ones in the Belfast trial, said on Whatsapp and what they got up to that now infamous night was just ‘silliness’.

For many of us listening it was a startling insight into a world of entitlement we had almost forgotten existed.

The school has responded immediately and they appear to have done a good job. They have engaged the whole of the school, including the parents, mobilised in supporting all the children involved and addressing the unacceptability of this attitude and behaviour.

But this was after the fact and they had no blueprint for dealing with this normalising of misogynist violence.

I’m angry, but not with those boys. I’m angry at all the messages boys receive all their lives, through our culture and the words, omissions, silence or examples set for them, the stories they hear, the men they watch on television, the pornography they consume that tells them that how to be men is by hurting women.

Silence of good men

I’m also angry at the relative silence (with a few exceptions) of the famous, great and good men of Ireland. It’s hard to understand this silence. Why isn’t this their business?

We can change this. We must. We can choose to look critically at how we are as men and women and other, at what we expect of ourselves and each other. We can transform to create a kinder, more respectful society for all, but only if we engage honestly and compassionately and not retreat into our rage and defensive indignation.

It’s time to acknowledge rape culture so that we can deal with it proactively. Rape is everyone’s business. Our silence won’t change this culture. But our engagement and our actions will.

We owe it to our boys and our girls.

Dr Cliona Saidlear is Executive Director of the Rape Crisis Network Ireland.

https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/rate-my-rape-list-im-angry-at-the-silence-of-the-men-of-ireland-3959797-Apr2018/

 

Dear Sir,

Many female survivors of sexual violence talk to us about how difficult all matter to do with their fertility, sexual and reproductive health are for them because of their experience of rape. This can be a lifelong struggle for women following the trauma of sexual violence. Making this bearable for survivor’s starts by ensuring that everything that happens to their bodies is with their informed and full consent.

In Rape Crisis we believe everyone has a role in supporting survivors to restore their sense that they matter and that their yes matters. But the 8th amendment says the opposite. It says that a woman’s consent about what happens to her body is conditional.

The hard cases of the approximately 5% of fertile aged girls and women who are pregnant after rape are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the impact of the 8th on survivors and all women and girls.

The truth is the 8th amendment, whether a survivor of rape is pregnant or not, whether they choose to terminate or continue with the pregnancy, codifies a culture of disregarding women’s consent over their bodies. Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI) are calling for a Yes vote, not only to ensure those pregnant after rape can be supported at home and without stigma, but also so that our Constitution unambiguously upholds the dignity and rights of women, many of whom will be survivors of sexual violence.

Dr Clíona Saidléar
RCNI Executive Director

Resources

The scale of intervention needed to address gender based violence in Ireland is not reflected in resourcing. Domestic Violence alone (not including sexual violence) has been estimated to cost the Irish state €2.2bn annually or 1.16% of 2014 GDP. In 2014 the government provided €20m of funding to domestic and sexual violence services which is only 0.3% of the annual government expenditure.

Eight years of austerity has seen an average of 20% and 13% cuts, to existing funding across sexual and domestic violence NGOs respectively against a background of increased demand. The sexual and domestic coalition bodies, RCNI and SAFE Ireland, were cut by 70% and 49% in the same period.

In 2009 7,512 women received support from a DV service, this figure grew to 9,500 in 2014. Waiting lists for rape crisis counselling are between 2 and 12 months and by our calculations and according to the requirements set forth by the Istanbul Convention and the Council of Europe Ireland’s has only 31% of the recommended minimum shelter provision. (See note 1). In 2015 there were 4,796 unmet requests for emergency accommodation1, women and children were turned away from refuges because there simply was no space.

In 2016 the budget increased by just €200,000. The 2017 additional budget for the national planning agency Tusla of €37m has not been allocated yet and there is no information yet available about how much of that increase will find its way to DSGBV services which currently are allocated just 3% of the Tusla overall budget.

We recommend:

1. Allocate an additional €31 million annually (from 2017) to address immediate gaps in our struggling services, from the Gardaí to specialist domestic and sexual violence services to the provision of safe housing.
2. Increase the emergency accommodation capacity of domestic violence services by 10% or by 14 family units every year for the next five years.
3. The allocation of budgeting must become transparent through a national development plan by Tusla which is public and transparent to ensure accountable and equitable access to services.

However, the underfunding of services deals only with a symptom and not the cause.

1. SAFE Ireland National Domestic Violence Service Statistics Report 2015 is yet to be published.

Consent Education to prevent sexual violence

We welcome Trinity College Student Union’s initiative to propose mandatory consent classes to first year students. There is well developed evidence behind this initiative which recognises that consent education is critical to preventing sexual violence.

Working with the Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI), USI first made the inclusion of consent mainstream across it sexual health activities in 2013. That same year USI with the support of Cosc developed and undertook the first quantitative research of sexual violence experiences on campus (the ‘Say it’ report ) while RCNI commissioned the School of Psychology NUIG to undertake qualitative research of 3rd level students resulting in a report entitled, ‘Young People, Alcohol and Sex: What’s consent got to do with it?’.

Dr Padraig MacNeela at NUIG extended this work to include large surveys on student experiences of unwanted sexual contact and consent. Based on the research findings he and his team developed the Smart Consent initiative in 2015 – consisting of theory- and evidence-driven workshops and other engagement strategies. Working in collaboration with USI, Student Unions, Student Services, RCNI and a number of the third level institutions, notably UCC, this group have recently received a Research for Policy and Society grant from the Irish Research Council and the HSE Sexual Health and Crisis Pregnancy Programme to study the implementation of the Smart Consent workshop approach.

Meanwhile an RCNI collaboration of Rape Crisis Centres reviewed long standing education practice. One of those leading centres, Kerry Rape and Sexual Abuse centre went on to work with the HSE and the local 3rd level Tralee IT and the Students Union to set up an interagency partnership.  Under that initiative the KRSAC delivered training to three of the IT’s schools, nursing, social studies and health promotion, who in turn trained up students who then delivered peer led workshops to all incoming students in those schools last year.

Influenced by these activities a range of doctoral and post-doctoral research projects on sexual activity, culture and consent are now underway across a number of universities. The various consent workshops continue to be rolled out and the critical conversations across campuses and about how we run and support programmes, how we evaluate them and how the target audience accesses them, continue.

In the research young people themselves identified how unprepared they felt for the complexity of negotiating sexual activity and they strongly recommended consent workshops be delivered at school age. Much work is being undertaken to address this critical gap. RCNI have a 5 year collaboration with Foróige to provide an integrated consent and sex and the law training to young people 12- 24 and has recently developed consent modules for inclusion in the B4uDecide.ie Relationship and Sexual Education resource materials. The Be4uDecide.ie resource materials are being revised by the HSE Sexual Health and Crisis Pregnancy Programme as an action under the National Sexual Health Strategy 2015-2020. The 2nd National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based violence aims to develop relevant education programmes within Youth Reach with the Department of Education and Skills.

TCD SU is to be commended for taking up this challenge and we look with interest at their innovation in making the workshops compulsory.

 

Clíona Saidléar, PhD