Saoirse, a Domestic Violence Service Group, last year published a report highlighting the shocking levels of violence against women in the Cherry Orchard area of Dublin and how housing insecurity can trap women in situations where their safety and lives are at risk. Hazel De Nortúin, a People Before Profit councillor in the area, gives her take on the social epidemic that is gender-based violence.
It’s difficult for me to speak about the effects of gender-based violence and to not get emotionally upset.
Without realizing it, I’ve grown up in a very violent community. My neighbour was violently assaulted regularly, and some of my young memories are of either covering my ears, all hours of the night under the duvet. Or pleading with my mother to take my friends in, because they could be heard screaming for the violence against their mother to stop. The next day, people would just get on about their day, like the previous night’s events never happened. It just was what it was. It was a ‘domestic dispute’ and nobody should get involved.
As a young woman, I was in a relationship that I now know was coercive and emotionally abusive. That wouldn’t be the first time, and it took me years to slowly look outside of my own surroundings to question what exactly was happening.
I don’t think my experience is dissimilar to many other women’s experiences. 1 in 4 women in Ireland have said that they have been victims of domestic violence at one point in their lives. 1 in 6 young women aged 18-25 in Ireland have been subjected to coercive control by a current partner or ex.
Refuges and Housing
A lot has been done in recent years to broaden the conversation on violence against women and to educate on the different aspects of abuse.
So now that we have all this language to identify and address the increase in gender-based violence across Ireland, what exactly are we calling for? Sonas CEO, David Hall, told Morning Ireland that they have refused 379 women and 700 children a space in their refuge, within the last year. That’s if you’re ‘lucky’ to have a refuge in the county you live in. In the South, there are currently nine counties with no domestic violence refuge accommodation units whatsoever. These are Carlow, Cavan, Laois, Leitrim, Longford, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, and Sligo. The refuge provision is similarly bad in the North.
Is it the case that we need to build more refuge spaces? Yes, because we need an emergency space for women to present when they’re fleeing. But what next? The majority of women who are staying for longer periods in refuge spaces because there’s no housing available for them to move on to is increasing year on year.
70% of women who present to homeless services will do so because of domestic violence. Similarly in Ballyfermot Garda Station, 70% of their call outs are for domestic violence. But like local authorities, once you present to either service, you’re not entered into the system as presenting due to ‘domestic violence’. Rather you are given the categorisation that dilutes the situation like – breaking and entering, or as a HAP transfer, and therefore the volume of the crisis is missed.
A Problem for the State
The space for education has fallen on those within the education system – if there’s someone willing to take on that piece or Non-Governmental Organisations. All of which are extremely underfunded and understaffed. There’s also been a conversation around the court system and how the experience is traumatising for women and children. There’s talk of streamlining cases to speed the process up, changing the access to women’s personal counselling notes – for example as part of Ruth Coppinger and ROSA’s ten point plan – and coordinating services at the entry point of the courts system to stop re-traumatising victims.
These are well thought out and much needed and must be implemented. I know those proposing these changes would agree that the judicial system in general has been a failure to those navigating it – that to reform it isn’t where change will happen.
It was never lost on me, as I became more political, that women have constantly been a problem for the State. The conditions that I grew up in were direct circumstances of social policy. The hangover of Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes and the constant despising of ‘lone parents’ seeped into communities.
Real Material Change
Until we have a situation where women are no longer seen as something to ‘put manners on’, and our reproduction no longer monetised or controlled, where we don’t have to be pitted against one another for the right to housing or to choose how we spend our time with our families, when we’re not seen as a constant problem, then we’re never going to see any real material change.
I could list a lot of governmental recommendations which supposedly back up the argument for change, but ultimately, they have failed. Until we see a change in how women are perceived and respected in society, at all levels, any changes we implement will never have the desired outcome.
I could also discuss the situation in the North where the trends are similar. The political establishment will speak of their concern at the epidemic of violence but will refuse to provide anywhere near the resources needed to push back against it. And then they go and engage in attacks on the trans community.
Now, more than ever, we need to build a mass movement that spreads across all of society, which shows clearly that the ‘lone parents’ struggle in Cherry Orchard isn’t an isolated struggle. None of us want to be a statistic on a those lists of incidents of gender-based violence which are ever increasing.
