Launch of SAOL’s Solas sa Saol programme, 4/3/14
As a teenage girl, Sophia McColgan loved poetry. She had been the victim of extreme sexual, emotional and physical violence at the hands of her father since childhood and described herself to me as having been so hurt that she couldn’t feel her pain. She was drawn to the poem from which I am going to read you an extract. “I love Shelley’s poem about dying”, she said. “…In the poem he is sitting on a beach looking at the beautiful sea and he imagines what it would be like to have someone else there to share it with. But he is alone. He imagines himself slipping away…”
This is from “Stanzas. Written in dejection near Naples,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
“Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned-
Nor fame , nor power, nor love, nor leisure.
Others I see whom these surround-
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;-
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.”
“At times my need to die was very great,” Sophia said. “It seemed a nice thing to do. It was like a hope, a fantasy, like the man on the horse who would come to save me.”
Sophia grew up in a family in which her father was a tyrant. When people asked why her mother had not protected the children, Sophia said, “She could not help us. She was one of us.”
I am sure that anyone who has experienced domestic or sexual violence will understand the urge for oblivion. Thankfully, Sophia did not succumb to her death wish – she struggled on and ultimately freed herself and her family. By speaking out about her life she has also inspired many other women in dire situations to believe in themselves.
Love is the Drug, addicted to love, kisses sweeter than cherry wine. Our songs are full of it. For the most part, they mean in a good way that love is intoxicating, that it brightens all the colours. However, the metaphor has a dark side. For the woman who gets entangled with them, an abusive man has one thing in common with an addictive drug, both make her feel she can’t live without them. In combination, they are a disaster and potentially a fatal one.
The SAOL project supports some of the most vulnerable women in Ireland, women from the North inner city of Dublin who as well as having to negotiate their way through all the other problems of the area, also have to do so while addicted to a drug, or, increasingly, drugs. Most also do so while attached to men who are themselves addicts and who are violent.
Saol’s new programme, Solas sa Saol, light of life, has been developed by Ger O’Rourke with the participation of women who have been through the sort of hell it addresses. It is based on a merging of symbols: the Ankh representing ‘life and safety’; the open circle representing the search for awareness; the Mexican Sankofa symbol for ‘learning from the past’; and the Maori symbol for ‘new beginnings’.
It will save lives, lives that have been put at risk not just by the violence of individual men, but by a government which has persisted with ignoring the urgent need for services, and with making cuts despite warnings that to do so was dangerous.
While I was discussing the programme with Gary Broderick, the director of SAOL, said that probably all of the women who come through the project have some experience of gender based violence, whether emotional, sexual or physical, or all of these. That is, 100%.
He told me that one woman who is part of the project had told him: “if it wasn’t for addiction, I believe I would have been dead.” It is a horrific statement. Addiction could kill this woman and it is certainly ruining her life. Domestic violence is making her life so unbearable that she welcomes the oblivion drugs provide for her. Between them, the addiction and the violence are conspiring to bind her to a life that no person with any self respect could bear. This is the vicious cycle that Solas sa Saol is going to try to break.
This woman believes she deserves no better than to be with a man who treats her like dirt. She believes she has no choice but to tolerate his violence. She believes she is lucky to have him.
He may be the one who supplies her with the drugs with which she dulls the pain he causes. He may well be the person she once saw as an escape route from another abusive relationship or set of relationships. Many young women turn to alcohol and other drugs to escape from brutalized childhoods.
Gary told me about another woman who was on her way home from a hostel to which she had fled because of domestic violence, when she met another man on the bus. He persuaded her he was going to be good for her – he was a serial abuser of women and soon had her back in the kind of relationship with which she was familiar. Abusive men can work their way into the lives of women who do have self esteem and they will then set about destroying it. Such men prey with ease upon women whose self protective instincts have already been destroyed.
It says so much that this programme has been piloted in Dochas, the women’s prison, which is, for many of the women in Saol, a place of safety.
I shudder when I remember a story a Belfast woman told me about the relationship her daughter had with such a man. “He wooed her,” she said, with fierce bitterness, and I’ve never since that day been able to see the word, normally understood to be romantic, as anything but sinister. She was a fragile young woman. He wooed her, her mother said. And he went on to make her his prisoner, a situation she dealt with by developing an addiction to Xanax which left her so constantly out of it that no one else could get through to her.
He could, though. He had convinced her that she deserved the beatings he gave her and that they were for her own good. She tried, obsessively, to please him. In the end he stabbed her hundreds of times and she died. Her mother, the woman I spoke to, was as we spoke preparing to take her daughter’s children and go into hiding. She knew that when he was released from prison their father would come after her to try to claim them. Domestic violence ravages generations of the families in which it takes place.
The first problem is to help a woman in this situation to recognize that she deserves and is capable of enjoying a life without drugs and without violence. This is difficult because of the extent to which our culture tolerates domestic violence and leaves it up to individual women to work out how best to cope with its multiple impacts.
If someone says in Ireland, I was just out for a few pints, you know it is a euphemism and may very well mean that they crawled home drunk having consumed in a night more units of alcohol than is recommended in a month. Similarly, there are men who say, I just gave her a few slaps, who if they were honest, mean that they left behind in their home a woman who is so beaten, so violated and so broken that she has stopped believing that any other sort of life is possible. I’ve heard older women say of a young woman, “She’s lucky – he’s very good, he never lays a finger on her.”
We’ve recently had a significant public discussion about our national drink problem. This followed the deaths of several young people as a result of a particularly stupid drinking game. However, domestic violence is the crime from which Irish society still averts its eyes.
Men do it to show they have the right to dominate the women and children they think they own, and the authorities do little to stop or punish them. We have a marital rape law but no one is ever prosecuted under it. Women are still obliged to send their children off to access visits with their violent fathers, regardless of whether the children want to go or dread it.
It is a vicious circle. When SAOL speaks out about the fact that it has noted an upsurge of such violence against the women with whom it works, it does so knowing that these are women whose own low self esteem is matched and indeed reinforced by a general lack of concern for their wellbeing. Women in this society are meant to look presentable and behave with decorum – obese women, angry women, drunk women, sobbing women, strung out women – these are sights from which the respectable turn away.
And of course alcohol has a role in domestic violence, too. Men who commit violence against women when drunk claim that they were not responsible for their actions because of the state they were in. Men of the same mindset claim that women who are drunk are asking to be violated or deserve whatever they get. What is certain is that a woman who is out of it whatever the drug she has taken, is not in a position to protect herself. Men who become excited into aggression by drug use externalize it, take it out on a victim. Women are more inclined to internalize their rage, take it out on themselves.
Gary told me that the so called “date rape” drug is also known as ‘charge sheets’ because men who have taken it and do not remember the violence they carried out under its influence, wake up to find charge sheets in their pockets. If a woman and a man have been taking drugs together, and nowadays this often means a cocktail which includes alcohol as well as other drugs, she may also experience memory loss though she may be seriously injured. This is one of a range of factors which inhibit her from bringing a complaint to the police for serious assault.
Shame is another, and a potent one. Too many women who are abused instead of feeling anger towards the abuser, accept his warped version of reality and blame themselves. I used to live in a house of flats. There was a young couple with a baby in one of the other flats. He shouted and beat her, and you’d hear her sobbing. When you’d meet them on the street or in the hall, he would look you in the eye and she would look at the floor.
The government is well aware that violence against women has risen dramatically since the collapse of the Irish economy and the introduction of austerity measures. Women’s Aid has said it. Safe Ireland has said it. The Rape Crisis Centres have said it. We know that dangerously overcrowded refuges are turning away women and children who have fled to them in fear of their lives. We know there are parts of Ireland which have neither a refuge nor a rape crisis centre.
Yet this government has persisted with cutting payments accessed by the most vulnerable women and cutting services provided for them by community based organisations – SAOL has seen its funding diminish year by year while at the same time demand for its supports has risen. It is unable to plan for the development of its services because of uncertainty about its ability to pay for them. It is a tribute to the resilience of the organization that it is forging ahead with new programmes like this one despite this unacceptable lack of stability.
The women who use SAOL and who were on Community Employment schemes used to receive a modest weekly payment. This has, has since 2012 been slashed. Their standing within their families has been diminished as has their ability to assert their independence by leaving violent relationships and setting up new lives for themselves and their children.
It is not a hopeless situation. Attitudes to domestic and sexual violence can and have changed. Take the issue of incest. In 1976 when 14 year old Noreen Winchester killed her father in Belfast after years of abuse and violence, social services took the view that incest was just something that happened in certain impoverished parts of society. One authority on the subject wrote that for some children this might be “the only sort of affection they ever got”. It would not be acceptable to say that today.
We have divorce now, and barring and protection orders.
Attitudes have changed because brave individuals have spoken out and feminist organisations have persisted in broadcasting their unwelcome message – that violence against women is a symptom of deep inequality, and that it is rife in Ireland.
No one is going to get out of addiction and a pattern of abusive relationships easily. The woman who said the violence would have killed her if it wasn’t for the drugs is going to have to face into her raw pain. This programme is based on a compassionate and empathetic understanding of this. Women undertaking it will be cared for as they make their difficult journey towards freedom. Towards the light of life. I’ll finish with another poem. This is called “The Journey” and it is by Mary Oliver.
“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.”
[ENDS]