VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN IRELAND... WHEN WILL IT END? BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
VIOLENCE
AGAINST WOMEN IN IRELAND… WHEN WILL IT END?
BY SANDRA
HARRIS. ©
About three weeks ago, a beautiful young school teacher
called Aisling Murphy was brutally murdered in Tullamore, while going for a run
in the afternoon. It was broad daylight. A man came out of nowhere and
strangled her.
She was in her early twenties, loved her job as a primary
school teacher (and the kids loved her) and was well liked in her community,
not to mention loved by her family and boyfriend. She loved playing her
traditional music at festivals with her fellow musicians. She seemed like a good,
decent person who would have gone on to achieve worthwhile things and
contribute something to the world.
Last weekend in Cork, a woman was hit in the face and head
and left with a broken jaw while walking home alone late at night. A boy of thirteen
has been identified as a person of interest in the case. I don’t even know
where to begin talking about what’s wrong with this sentence, except to ask the
following: why the hell was a boy of thirteen allowed to be roaming the streets
at eleven thirty at night…?
Earlier this week, a seventeen-year-old girl was attacked by
a man wielding scissors as she was out jogging in Johnstown, Co. Kilkenny. One
line of inquiry is that the attack was the start of a failed abduction attempt.
The woman’s injuries were not life-threatening but she still had to be treated
for shocks and cuts and bruises.
Then, just yesterday, a woman in her fifties was assaulted in
a Dublin park and taken to hospital. Nothing else is known about this incident
as yet. There have been other notable attacks on women and girls in Ireland in
recent months and years, but that list would be a long one so I’ve confined
myself to the most recent.
This piece wasn’t meant to merely be a litany of attacks on
women, which would make for some depressing reading, and rightly so. This was
meant to be the point at which I would make a few insightful remarks about what’s
wrong with this country that we continually permit its women to be so abused
and threatened, and maybe a few suggestions as to how we could right some of
our wrongs.
The thing is, though, I’m as stumped as anyone else. All that I
really know for sure is that I’m scared to be out alone after dark. That’s been
the case for a long time, but we women apparently have reason to fear the
daylight now as well. If Aisling Murphy was murdered during the day while
innocently and joyfully going for a run, then I could be killed while walking
through my local park in the afternoon for a bit of fresh air.
I was obliged to be out late one evening last week. Well,
when I say late, it mean it was eight o’clock, but it was a pitch dark night. I
had to go home via a really dark street in search of a late-night chemist, and
I felt nervous the whole way, especially when I encountered a lone male or a
couple of guys walking together or even a group of guys. That’s all men, then,
basically, with the exception, I suppose, of elderly men.
A young woman passed me at one point at speed. Long hair bouncing in a
ponytail, clad in fashionable sportswear, she was going for a run. I wanted to jog
alongside her for a minute and say to her, How can you be out for a run in
the dark? Don’t you know what happened to…?
And of course she would have heard what happened, but she can’t
put her own life on hold, can she, because of what happened to someone else?
And she’d be right to say that, but I feared for her, just like I feared for
myself on that exceptionally dark January night.
My daughter and I text each other constantly when one or
other of us goes out at night. We tell each other where we are at every point
of the journey, and when we reach our destination and have joined up with the
people we’re meant to be meeting. It takes up nearly the whole evening…!
We text each other the names and licence numbers of any taxi drivers we engage. After first deciding, of course, whether taking a taxi would be more perilous than walking home alone in the dark, or less perilous. You might as well flip a coin, as it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Sometimes, a taxi driver can make a woman feel unsafe and chancing a walk instead can seem like the better option.
We normally won’t go to bed, my daughter and I, until the other is safely home from their night out.
I was happy when the lockdown and the closure of the pubs, nightclubs, theatres
and cinemas meant that there was no reason for anyone to be out and about after
dark.
Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? And yet it was how I
felt. I’m scared for my daughter, in particular, now that society is opening up
again. I’ve no intention of reviving my own tired social life, as I’ve grown
lazy over the pandemic, but I do worry for my daughter.
Sooner or later, she’s going to want to go gallivanting
again, and that’ll mean the return of sleepless nights for mammy. And there’ll
be nothing I can do, because you literally can’t stop someone from living their
life.
We’ve had conversations, though, about what might happen if
either of us went missing on a night out. We’ve each promised the other not to
give the Guards any pictures of us that make us look fat. That happened to a poor
woman who went missing a few years ago, a woman who was eventually found
murdered. Her killer is still in prison.
The pictures the Guards stuck up on all the telegraph poles
described the woman, a perfectly nice-looking woman, as being ‘of stout build.’
Stout. I ask you. Everything else is bad enough, without that. Without being in
any way flippant, I can tell you that my heart went out to her over that little lapse in sensitivity. No
woman wants that.
I haven’t really much to add to all this. I know that men go
missing too, and men get murdered too, but I wonder how many men have gone
through their photograph albums in search of the most flattering photo of
themselves to give to the Guards, in the event that they are abducted by a
potential killer during a night out. The odds of its happening probably aren’t
high, but they might be higher than they were.
Even as I type this, a reporter on the news is talking about the latest criminal act women have to fear from men: the ‘one punch and walk away’ attack, which they think is what happened to the woman in her fifties who was assaulted in a Dublin park yesterday. If you put a name to something like that in the media, there’s a fear that it can become a trend. Let’s hope that’s not the case here.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN
STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is
out now from Poolbeg Books:
Comments
Post a Comment