LAST UPDATE | 12 Jul 2024

IT IS 2024, but I am shaken and angry to find I feel as though I am in a late 1980s time warp with the dial stuck on 30 years ago.

As a woman, reading the newspaper headlines in the last few weeks has been nothing short of depressing. There has been the Cathal Crotty assault on Natasha O’Brien and the subsequent treatment of that case by the courts, as well as numerous other sexual assault cases where survivors have bravely spoken out. Hearing Bláthnaid Raleigh’s harrowing account in particular, of the assault she suffered at the hands of John Moran was truly shocking.

Then, the recent revelations about allegations of historical abuse of female players at the FAI and, also this week, the utter horror in the UK where three women from the same family were brutally killed. Meanwhile, we were hearing about the abuse suffered by Irish woman Tori Towey in Dubai and the despicable treatment of her by the regime there. 

When do we get to shout STOP?

How much of this barbarism is enough?

When do we truly ask ourselves the question, ‘As supposedly evolved, rational and sophisticated societies… why oh why do men (and yes it’s not all men, but it is mostly men) continue to brutalise, attack and seek to destroy women? And when they do, why do our legal systems serve to compound that trauma by not protecting victims and survivors?’

Frozen in time

In my early 20s, I spent four years as the head of what was then known as the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre (now Rape Crisis Mid West). Time after time, when supporting a woman whose case had progressed to a court hearing, which was even rarer in those days, ‘mitigating’ circumstances such as a man having no previous convictions; being a ‘family man’; or the potential financial/career implications of serving jail time were regularly used as rationale not to impel the perpetrator to serve jail time.

It might almost have been described as the norm in sentencing in that era. I repeatedly had to comfort victims who found themselves re-traumatised by the legal process, who were aghast at the gap between the character references given on behalf of their attacker and their experience of him. They often felt diminished and exposed after suspended sentences were imposed for serious violent assaults.

I’m talking of a time in Limerick City (and in our country) in which family planning and contraception had just very recently been legalised; where it would be another eight years for access to divorce to become available; a place in which 27 years hence, 64% of voters in Limerick City (62% in Ireland) would vote yes to legalise same-sex marriage and where 30 years would need to pass before our country voted by a two-thirds majority to repeal the Eighth Amendment in our Constitution.

So having witnessed how much Ireland has changed and believing we now live in a society in which we have begun tackling these issues towards women, I could have assumed things had majorly improved since my Rape Crisis Centre days. The recent high-profile cases, however, though have proved to me, once again, how very little the dial has truly moved.

A judicial system failing victims

Incarceration following a conviction and the removal of a defined term of one’s ability to live one’s life in freedom is, in many societies, including ours, deemed the highest punishment we can impose when judging wrongdoing. While we can argue and debate as to the rights and wrongs, and the values or otherwise inherent in the incarceration system — it IS the system Ireland operates within.

However, when you watch cases play out in the courts, often it just seems that the odds are so very much stacked against female victims and survivors. Time and time again, those survivors are forced to engage publicly to be truly heard. We hear interviews, read articles written by them and we are moved at how courageous they are.

But it should not be this way. Why is the onus on the female victims to be ‘the hero’ here? Why is the onus not on the judicial system to convict and sentence? Is that not the system we have all been asked to adhere to?

When you read through the court reports of many serious sexual assaults in this country, invariably you’ll find the character reference. A family friend, work colleague, manager or person of some sort of social standing will tell a judge before sentencing just how safe and decent the accused really is. It is heartening, to be fair, to see that the government has recognised the need for this practice to be curtailed.

However, to say someone is of ‘good character’ is to miss the point entirely. Were the priests who carried out a litany of abuse against children not people ‘of good standing in the community’? Are abusers not fathers, uncles, brothers, neighbours? I find it difficult — irrespective of my time warp — to correlate such descriptions with the actions of the perpetrators.

The meaning of words

The recent Cathal Crotty case raises very troubling questions about the meanings of words, and their impacts on victims in court, and indeed on court decisions. It’s important to clarify that what happened in the Crotty case wasn’t so much a character reference as a senior officer following the rules of the Defence Forces and reading Crotty’s military record when it comes to such cases. The officer was compelled to be there and to say what he said. 

Nevertheless, the message about Crotty and his character was no less impactful than a character reference in a case like this and in this context, language matters. Crotty, who had rendered Natasha O’Brien unconscious in an unprovoked violent attack, was described as ‘exemplary and courteous’. Having consulted quite a few dictionaries in bewilderment, given that Crotty’s behaviour did not quite fit my understanding of these words, I found the most common dictionary definition of courteousness is ‘marked by respect for and consideration of others’.

He was also described as “professional and disciplined”. Again, I found myself challenged to align his behaviour with these words, so out came the dictionary again. I reassured myself that my understanding of the word disciplined was indeed correct — and the most accepted definition of disciplined is ‘showing a controlled form of behaviour or way of working’.

Again, words matter. Courteous? Disciplined? They didn’t tally with events on the night. And perhaps this is the problem. Perhaps the judicial system and we as a society have yet to understand that someone can project ‘exemplary’ character in the workplace but also be capable of such heinous, violent acts. Perhaps the pillars of society, the men who walk tall in communities can also be capable of cruelty to women. Not all of them, of course, that needs to be repeated. But some of them. And we need to call them out, to try to stop it. 

Related Reads

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Opinion: Victims need to be placed at the heart of the justice system

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Some improvements

In the 35 years since I have worked with the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre, I have enthusiastically welcomed much change and many improvements. But the sentencing in the Cathal Crotty case in particular only serves to underline how much is left to do. I very much welcome Taoiseach Simon Harris’s refreshing anger and recent strong statements on what needs to change.

While I believe the Taoiseach means it when he says “Zero tolerance is not a slogan”, it is the words of Sarah Benson, CEO of Women’s Aid which most resonated with me when she said this decision “surely calls into question Ireland’s national strategy of zero tolerance of violence against women”. The DPP’s decision to move so quickly to lodge an appeal on the grounds of undue leniency is also a welcome new development. So is the assurance from a judge in an even more recent case that a character reference ‘goes up in smoke’ when a serious offence is before a court.

I think it’s also important to recognise one vital element which has changed in the intervening years since my Limerick Rape Crisis Centre days, and that is how much more likely a woman who speaks out is to be believed and supported nowadays.

The traumatic experience of the woman attacked by Crotty, Natasha O’Brien, merely began on the night he viciously assaulted her. Some of the ordeal that she and other victims of assault experience is due to the structure of Ireland’s Criminal Justice system where the DPP is bound to prosecute cases on behalf of the people of Ireland, not on behalf of an individual. In this system, the victim becomes a witness in the case and is not entitled to personal legal representation in court unless the defence team requests to cross-examine their sexual history and the judge allows them to.

Natasha O’Brien’s clarity about “the true trauma” being what she experienced in the courtroom and her unambiguous statement that if she had to choose which to live through again, she would choose the assault over her judicial experience, is a cogent and devastating rebuke to our judicial system.

I have been applauding Natasha, Bláthnaid, the women of the FAI teams and all the survivors who’ve spoken out in recent weeks. I’ve been applauding their bravery and guts in leveraging their experiences as a catalyst for change.

I have been cheering at the scale and calibre of national support these women have rightly received. What’s also heartening is the quality of media interaction and debate after the cases of Natasha, Bláthnaid and other women following the extremely smart and passionate articulation of their experiences and demands for long overdue change.

If this doesn’t move the dial into fast forward, what will?

Trish Long was the first head of the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre (now Rape Crisis Mid West). A former Vice President of the Walt Disney Company, Trish is Chair of Dublin International Film Festival and Medicinema Ireland.