Breaking the silence on violence against women

By Barbara Daly

An Irish woman murdered in a hotel on holidays in Spain; a woman found dead in a house in Cork; a young Mayo woman speaking of the brutal rape she endured 10 years ago.

All this in the last two weeks.

This is only the violence against women that has been reported because it ended in murder or because one woman was brave enough to endure 10 years of torture to get justice for herself.

What about all of the other violent incidents that go unreported? It feels like the tip of the iceberg.

That is not to deny that violence against men does occur and it is equally to be called out and punished, but in the much greater majority it is violence against women that is happening.

Listening to Ciara Mangan from Castlebar speaking after the man who brutally raped her 10 years ago was finally convicted of that attack was harrowing.

She sounded like any girl we all know living an ordinary teenage life and then her life had been ‘devastated’ by what had happened to her.

Somehow she found the strength, inspired by other women who had waived anonymity in similar cases, to be named and to speak to the media. She wanted to give other victims of violent sexual crimes the courage to come forward.

Yet it took her ten years to get to this point. As she said herself, she only recently walked around her hometown without the fear of meeting her attacker.

Is it that certain men think they will likely get away with these crimes or do they think they have the right to commit these acts?

What is it about their make-up, their upbringing or their society that has made them behave this way?

We do not have an equal society. Full gender equality does not exist. I see this every day in my own life and in the lives of my friends and colleagues.

I have the same conversations over and over which more often than not end with eye rolling and ‘it’s a man’s world’.

That type of inequality does not obviously correlate with violence but I do wonder whether it is a starting point for the changes that are needed. With inequality surely comes a lack of respect and an arrogance on one side and a lack of self-esteem and self-confidence on the other. The issue of consent gets muddied.

I wonder if what happened to Ciara Mangan has happened to many other young women at parties and night clubs?

Did many of them say nothing and tuck it away, allowing it to slowly destroy them? I suspect they have. Did they blame themselves? Were they afraid of the publicity? Were they afraid of not being believed or thought less of?

I have a son and a daughter. I want to be a strong role-model for my daughter.

I want to bestow self-respect in her and the confidence to know what is right and wrong and what should never be tolerated. I didn’t have that growing up.

I want my son to respect women, all women, and see them as his equals. Yet our household is laughably gendered and I suspect I am already failing on both these accounts.

I can’t afford to fail.

None of us can, otherwise the many, many women out there, living on our street or working beside us each day who are suffering inequality, repression, cruelty or violence will continue to be silent victims.

And who knows if our children will be next in line.