Tag Archives: Domestic violence

This morning.

National Concert Hall, Dublin 2.

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee addressing media after she hosted a consultation with NGOs on the development of the Third National Domestic, Sexual and Gender Based Violence Strategy.

Minister McEntee said that the creation of 72 new family refuge spaces for victims of domestic abuse and ten replacement places in ten locations across the country will be “prioritised”.

Via RTE:

The areas are: Sligo (eight family places), Cavan/Monaghan (eight family places), Cork city (12 family places – six new, six replacement), North Cork (five family places), West Cork (five family places), Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown (10 family places), Westmeath (eight family places – four new, four replacements), Portlaoise (eight family places), Balbriggan (10 family places), and Longford (eight family places).

Minister in pledge over new family refuge spaces (RTE)

Sam Boal/RollingNews

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This morning.

Mansion House, Dawson Street, Dublin 2

At The Safe Ireland Summit – bringing together “40 global leaders on domestic violence” – where Bray’s Hozier performed a couple of numbers, took questions from RTÉ’s Claire Byrne.and met with Maria Dempsey, mother of Alicia Brough who was murdered in 2010, Ms Dempsey was the opening speaker at the summit which concludes tomorrow.

Safe Ireland Summit

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We would like to add our voices in support of Sharon O’Halloran of Safe Ireland, when she states (February 23rd) that the issue of domestic violence is a horrific reality faced every day by thousands of women and children in Ireland.

And not just by women and children.

The incidence of domestic violence where men are the victims is also on the increase. In 2014, slightly over 6,500 contacts were received by Amen, an increase of just over 35 per cent on the previous year.

Amen Support Services has been providing support and help to male victims of domestic abuse for almost 18 years.

We welcome the contribution by Hozier in the Cherry Wine video to increasing awareness of domestic violence and hope that the often ignored issue of male victims of such violence will continue to be highlighted.

Niamh Farrell,
Manager,
Amen Support Services,
St Anne’s Resource Centre,
Railway Street,
Navan,
Co Meath.

Male victims of domestic violence (Irish Times letters page)

Amen

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 Free Dessie Ellis, Sinn Féin TD, spoke this morning  on the Domestic Violence (Amendment) Bill 2014.

Yesterday, I stood with party colleagues and other members of the Oireachtas at the Dáil gates for a minute’s silence in memory of the men and women and children who have died at the hands of their partner or ex-partner since 1996. This was a very poignant event coming on the International Day Opposing Violence Against Women. A shocking 78 women and 10 children have been murdered in these 18 years. The event was organised by Women’s Aid who had laid out shoes along a blank sheet to mark a timeline of these needless and tragic deaths. Shoes, flat heels and sandals standing in silent memoriam of the lives stolen. These lives as the vigil so movingly stated are stolen lives. They are stolen from their families, their friends, their communities. Snuffed out by an abuser who should’ve been stopped.

One in five women experience domestic violence in their lifetime. This ranges from physical, emotional, sexual to financial abuse. From abuse, threats to kill and abuse behaviour, to stalking and harassment. By their very nature these are mostly crimes which go on behind closed doors when the curtains are drawn when the world around stops looking. But it also happens right out in the open.

We must strive to improve public awareness of the risk factors of domestic violence and to encourage everyone to make their homes, their community, their circle of friends, a place where this kind of abuse will never be accepted. Because unfortunately we have a culture today where subtly every day teaches young men to do many of the things that can lead to domestic violence. This trend in our society is called the ‘rape culture’. Its name is shocking and some dismiss this as over over the top but the symptoms are undeniable and its effects illustrated by those 78 empty womens’ shoes are too horrific to ignore. Rape culture is the tendency in modern culture to dehumanise, devalue and commodify women. It has always been there but has become much more obvious in the modern era with the partial successes of the early feminist movement and the 24-hour consumer capitalist culture which has sprung up alongside the internet.

Technology is not to blame but it is often the medium through which this culture finds its most vile expression. This tendency creates a culture which normalises the idea that women’s bodies are not wholly their own. It encourages blaming rape victims instead of rapists. It jokes about men who beat their partners and it belittles, demonises and threatens all those who challenge it. This is the culture our young men are growing up in.

It seems like every week there is a new case of a woman who has been a victim of sexual assault who has watched her abuser go free because a judge felt sympathetic to the criminal. These judges have handed down fines for which must be the vile and reprehensible crimes a person can commit. This is a slap in the face to those who sought to have their attacker prosecuted but it also says to women and girls who are victims of sexual violence: Don’t bother, the state will not punish your attacker but you will be put through the mill anyway.

As with many of our worst social issues, there are why many whose voices are not heard. This is why we have brought the bill. It’s to try to make it easier for people to flee this kind of abuse. It is crucial that we promote opposition to this kind of behaviour.

But it is also essential, that people who seek to leave, to get out can do so, can be supported, validated and protected. That is what we seek to do.

*cough*

Full text of speech via Oireachtas.ie here.

Earlier: Staying In Tomorrow Night?

Previously: Falls Memory Syndrome

Féin Concern

Briege Of Trust

Kick In The Shinns

“Unfounded And Untrue”

Police, Judge And Executioner

“Would 50 Murders Be An Exaggeration?”

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Some of you may remember one of our ‘Judge of the Day’ posts from last year on the assault of Jane Ruffino by her then boyfriend. On the anniversary of the attack, Jane wrote the article below and posted it on Facebook. It was subsequently removed without explanation or notification and was restored today (with a similar lack of explanation) and then pulled again. We’ve republished it here in full with permission from Jane.

Update: Facebook this evening said the article should not have been taken down, that it was removed in error and have apologised to Ms Ruffino.

Update 11/05/2013: And it’s gone again.

Exactly a year ago, my then-boyfriend put me in a headlock and punched me until his hand shattered. The only reason I didn’t die on my bedroom floor on the night of May 3, 2012 is that he didn’t know where to put his thumb when he made a fist. It wasn’t the first time, nor, I’m sad to say, was it the last time, but it was the one he got caught for, and the one I can’t get sued for talking about.

He spent the night in a hospital, having his hand rebuilt with pins. I spent the night strapped to a trolley in a different hospital, having everything x-rayed. I left with stitches in my face and my blood-soaked clothes in a Dunnes Stores bag. He left the hospital five days later, in a cast, and with a diagnosis of “work and home stress”.

I still get concealer in my scar (and it is still sore), and I’m still not totally safe, but I’ve started to rebuild my life, and it’s getting pretty good. But while my life improves, dudes are still beating up women.

As much as I’d like to shut up about this and have people stop identifying me with something that happened to me, it’s not that common for an abuser to be convicted. I’m in a position to do something that many women are not, so I’ll keep talking until dudes stop beating up women.

We all know victims, so we all know perpetrators. It’s always someone you wish it weren’t. Believe me, I know this better than anyone.

Even though you can’t make a relationship with a violent dickhead safe for his girlfriend (or possibly for any woman), we can make the world safer for women by making it harder to get away with cracking our faces open.

Here’s some of what I think we need to do differently.

1. Swap your sympathy for empathy, and get angry: Nothing could get better for me until I got really angry, and empathy helped me get there. Empathising with me means you’ll stop asking me why I stayed, and assume that, like with any violent crime, it could happen to anyone. Empathising with him means you accept that it’s done by seemingly normal human beings, and not by easily identifiable monsters.

I do appreciate the “Sorry for your troubles”, but I’d rather you be angry with me than sad on my behalf. I know the sympathy comes from the right place, but it can feel a little like a pat on the head, and even a bit isolating. We live in a world where you can beat your girlfriend nearly to death and walk out of a criminal court straight into a pub for a burger and a pint. That should piss you right the fuck off, so if you don’t think it’s my fault, then don’t make it all my responsibility.

2. Trust us: Women like me lose the ability to trust ourselves, and we don’t often speak believably about what’s happening until it’s well in the past. Even I sometimes don’t believe me. And yes, we all take them back. It seems to have undermined my credibility with a lot of people, forever. Because hey, if I hadn’t been exaggerating all along, then why would I take someone back after he put me in the hospital?

I managed to gloss over the time I woke up with a pillow being pushed to my face. I didn’t want to believe he was capable of it any more than you did, so you should probably trust that I’m not going to make this shit up.

3. Start calling bullshit: Does your friend, your brother, your colleague insist that his girlfriend or wife is“batshit crazy”? Does she sound like a wild-eyed shrieking harpy who is totally ruining his life? I’ll tell you something: having the shit slapped out of you makes you a little crazy. Five weeks after I contacted his family to ask them to help him, I was in the hospital with a busted face. They hadn’t believed me because they’d been told I was crazy. I’m not, by the way, which I feel the need to say because trauma does all sorts of things to you, whether or not you ever get your face broken. But maybe if someone had started calling his bullshit years ago, he wouldn’t have ended up the way he is, and I would not have to rebuild my life and my sense of self.

Try it. Next time some guy says “She’s crazy”, assume what he really means is, “I’m an enormous dickhead with no respect for women.”

4.  Stop looking for the truth: My account is true and real, and verified in a criminal court, but his account also represents a world he truly lived in. The fact is, we were both delusional. He believed I was a monstrous asshole, and I thought if I stopped being such a monstrous asshole, he would stop throwing things at my head and be the loving boyfriend he promised he’d be – if I only changed a few more things about myself.

It’s a Venn diagram, where the overlapping bit was “Jane is an irredeemable piece of shit”. It’s when I started insisting I was a worthy human being, when the punches and the slaps would start. You can rearrange the data points all you like, and get a hundred different versions, but there is no grey area between two overarching perspectives where you’ll find the truth you’re looking for. That crisscrossing of narratives applies to normal human relationships, but these were two competing and incompatible narratives, neither of which were rational.

This was a situation where I was trying to have a normal relationship with someone who once threw a pint of beer over me to prove he wasn’t an alcoholic. OK, so maybe that is a little crazy.

5. Let go of the checklist: You know the one. You Google “emotional abuse” because someone was a dick to you, and there it is. It’s a useful guide, perhaps, but you can’t identify abuse through a Cosmo quiz. Yes, abusers fit a profile, and in some ways, they’re all the damn same. They all try to smash your computer. They all put your phone through a wall. They all search your fucking email. And they all cry and beg for your love right after you’ve cleaned up the glass they smashed at your feet.

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