Fergus Finlay: We have an epidemic of sexual violence on our hands

I know enough about sexual violence to understand the kind of scars it leaves and the damage it does. I’ve known people whose entire lives have been traumatically twisted out of shape by an experience of sexual violence — or by repeated experiences.

There are graphic accounts in some of the reports of the inquiry into institutional abuse in Ireland of the memories that people have still of childhood experiences of abuse — of how a smell or a colour can trigger terrible memories, of how people have never been able to cope with the memories abusers have planted in them.

And here’s a strange thing. We will sometimes excuse an act of sexual violence by deciding it wasn’t extreme — it was looking or touching or language, not grabbing or forcing or penetrating. But the only appropriate way to measure the severity of an act of sexual violence is through its consequences. What can sometimes be casually dismissed by perpetrators can last forever in the heart and soul of the person they’ve done it to.

Last week’s study didn’t so much talk about consequences. But for the first time in years, and in an unchallengeable way, it set out the scale/ And what it told us is that we have an epidemic of sexual violence on our hands. The damage is incalculable.

www.cso.ie.is one of my favourite websites. It’s clear and accessible. If they publish a research study they always explain very clearly the process they’ve used. It’s full of fascinating stuff about how our population is changing, about our trade with the rest of the world, and how the economy is growing, or not growing.

They’ve got new hubs, with snapshots of how older people live in Ireland (I’m one of them), a well-being hub about how we’re doing in terms of mental health, how we feel about our jobs and other stuff. I’m even excited about the publication, any day now, of a series of reports about our last census. I can see myself poring over the figures and interpreting the findings in all sorts of ways.

But until last week I never expected to find myself opening the CSO website and being shocked to my core.

Here are some of the basic facts.

• Four of every ten adults in Ireland have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes — more than half of all women, and more than a quarter of all men.
• 3 in 10 adults in Ireland had experienced sexual violence as a child — younger people are more vulnerable to sexual violence than older people (52% compared to 27%).
• Women were almost four times more likely to have experienced sexual violence both as an adult and as a child (23%) than men (6%).

And more than three-quarters of both men and women who experienced sexual violence knew the perpetrator.

You have to read figures like that several times before they begin to make sense. And you have to read the underlying definitions too. Sexual violence doesn’t always involve physical violence. It can involve intimidation, pressure, exploitation of vulnerability, abuse of a position of trust or authority.

It always involves betrayal.

And the more I read it, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered — who has done this? How did we get to a point where so many of us can so casually and so explicitly do terrible, long-lasting things to each other?

Every time I write about sexual violence I get a flood of angry mail insisting that “it’s not all men". Or I will be attacked by those who argue that more liberal approaches to social policy have made this possible.

But it has been men — exclusively – who have created the systems and the rules and the culture and the mores that belittle and demean women. It has been men who titter at sexist jokes 

Throughout our history, it has been men who have evaded their responsibilities and women who have been forced to feel not just victims but almost the guilty party in any situation where a man is prosecuted.

It’s a simple enough fact to grasp. A tiny number of women perpetrate sexual violence, but it is men who are the essential perpetrators. They commit acts of intimidation or pressure or violence for sexual purposes against women and against other men.

But this is hidden. The figures tell us that it’s hidden in plain sight, but it’s hidden. It’s hidden because there are degrees of it we don’t want to take seriously. We use euphemisms to minimise the harm of unwanted sexual contact. We claim that people are overreacting to something that didn’t involve much harm. We refuse to see the damage we’re doing. We force people on the receiving end of sexual exploitation to feel shame at the thought they may have contributed to it, as untrue as that is.

And, of course, over many years we created systems of impunity to protect those in authority from ever having to answer any questions when it came to their own behaviour or the behaviour prevalent in their institutions.

But that alters nothing. Let’s repeat it again. What the figures tell us is that millions of women have been forced to endure the consequences of abusive behaviour. The only possible corollary of that is that hundreds of thousands of men in Ireland have committed that behaviour.

Isn’t that something we have to face? Don’t we have to analyse it, understand it, and get to grips with its causes? Isn’t it something we have to, somehow, find a way to change?

Only a couple of weeks ago here I wrote about the national Consent Campaign that has been developed and is being promoted by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in collaboration with a host of other organisations. They wouldn’t be doing that if consent was a part of everyone’s life and experience. They wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t really need to have this discussion.

What this survey shows — and there is a lot more data to come — is how deep and prevalent the problem is. Solutions have to go very deep too. We’re never going to address a crisis like this unless we find ways to develop empathy and respect through the very foundations of our education system. Unless we find a way to confront the culture of toxic masculinity that masquerades as “helping boys to be men”. Unless we — the men who aren’t perpetrators — front up more to the ones who shame us all. We have to begin to root this poison out.