Men have ‘absolute responsibility’ to call out sexism and misogyny, says Ged Nash TD
A Labour Party TD has told the Dáil of an incident in which he encountered a woman who had just suffered a violent attack at the hands of her partner.
Louth TD Ged Nash said he was walking to the pub on a Saturday night in Drogheda to meet friends when he saw the woman sitting on a wall outside her home.
“A young man stopped. He saw a woman literally being kicked out of her home. He stopped to help. I stopped to help, and we brought her across the road to some degree of safety until the emergency services arrived” and she was taken to safety.
He said “I share the story because of its very ordinariness. This happens far too often.”
Mr Nash said there is an “absolute responsibility on all of us as men to call this out – that sexism and misogyny is unacceptable in any format and in any circumstances in this country”, and that men had a responsibility “to show example and to lead by example”.
He was speaking during a Labour Party private member’s debate on gender-based violence.
Opening the debate, Labour leader Ivana Bacik called in the motion for a review of the practice of suspended sentences and for increased urgency in the development of sentencing guidelines.
Justice campaigner Natasha O’Brien, who has spoken out about the fully suspended three-year sentence a serving soldier received after he beat her unconscious in Limerick two years ago, observed the debate from the visitors’ gallery.
Ms Bacik quoted Ms O’Brien, who had told her what she wanted from the criminal justice system is “common humanity”.
The Labour leader said “a cultural shift is also needed to ensure that common humanity is more evident in the system, and that judges and legal practitioners have more sensitivity towards the victims and survivors of crime before them in their courts”.
Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said many women who report sexual and domestic violence have said that “going through the system itself was more traumatic than what had happened to them. And that’s the worst thing that any of us can hear when someone takes the step to come forward.”
She said the Judicial Council had made a database available to judges on every sentencing judgment delivered by the Court of Appeal, as well as sentencing handbooks, to try to ensure the court system better protects and supports victims and survivors.
[ Cases like Natasha O’Brien’s prompt a sudden, disquieting voice in collective consciousness ]
Sinn Féin’s Pauline Tully said she had been contacted by women “who are living in fear of a court sitting. Violent former partners are frequently granted unsupervised access to children. And mothers have told me that their children are crying. They’re begging not to be sent on visits with the father.
“But if the mother does not send the child, they are the ones being found in contravention of a court order.” She said “a parent does not have a right to see a child if that’s not in the best interests of the child”.
Ms Tully said that in certain parts of the country, when a woman goes to the Family Law Court seeking an extension of a barring order and finds out that a certain judge is sitting, “they don’t bother, because the judge always sides with the man”.
She said there needed to be a more robust and accessible complaints procedure and oversight of decisions in such cases.
Sinn Féin justice spokesman Pa Daly highlighted difficulties for women from migrant and Traveller backgrounds who “experience violence at even greater rates. They experience a double disadvantage.”
An Immigrant Council of Ireland report, he said, “highlighted the vulnerability of migrant women whose migrant status depended on a husband or partner, who are then faced with the possibility of becoming undocumented, homeless and without means of support. And they need extra support.”
There is a “worrying trend of a toxic agenda that typifies men in being aggressive, strong, dominant and unemotional”, Mr Daly added. He said “we need to learn more about the abuser. There are men serving sentences and no work is being done with them,” and research was needed.
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