The one issue that has been central to the women's movement and remains a constant concern

PATRICK SMYTH

A photograph from a Women's Aid campaign day to highlight violence against women

'THE STREETS are ours. We are not looking for jail for men, we are not looking for castration for men, we are not looking for men at all," Nell McCafferty, journalist and a leading light in the Irish Women's Liberation Movement, told the crowd of several thousand women and a handful of men.

Women were simply insisting on their right to walk the streets safely, she said, and she excoriated a minister who had suggested that they contributed to their own vulnerability.

It was October 15th, 1978 and the dramatic torch-lit march was the first of its kind It weaved through the streets of Dublin behind the banner of Women Against Violence Against Women to protest against rape and demand greater protection for women in the face of complacency by the state and even what appeared state legal complicity. How else could one describe the legal protection of marital rape, the hostility faced in the witness box by the few women willing to charge their abusers, and Garda unwillingness to intervene in domestic violence settings?

When McCafferty and the late Nuala Fennell attended a women's rights tribunal in Brussels in 1976 (600 women from 30 countries), they brought with them someone who epitomised what the fight in Ireland was about. She would describe her experience of brutalisation in the family home, escape, then seizure from a train by gardaí, and incarceration in a mental hospital at her husband's order. Her case was not unique.

In 1974 Fennell been involved in establishing Women's Aid to campaign against domestic abuse and provide refuges for abused women, and the 1978 march would be marked by the announcement of the imminent opening of Dublin's first rape crisis centre.

From the earliest days of the women's movement in Ireland a critical strand of the work of activists has been to highlight and campaign over violence against women. The movement saw such violence, whether rape or domestic abuse, child abuse or incest, as things not distinct from the legal and social oppression of women but part of a continuum, the most extreme expression of it. Rape, the movement has argued, is not primarily a sexual act but a demonstration of power and inequality.

It was an analysis accepted importantly by the UN General Assembly in its 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, recognising that: "violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women . . . and that violence against women is one of the crucial mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men".

Over the years the campaigning has encompassed a wide range of related causes from trafficking into prostitution, bullying at work, child pornography, forced marriage, rape as a weapon of war and a basis for asylum, genital mutilation, and the plight of women who underwent symphysiotomies.

In recent years surveys reported by Women's Aid record that one in seven women in Ireland have experienced severe abuse, defined as "a pattern of physical, emotional or sexual behaviours between partners in an intimate relationship", and more than four in 10 (42 per cent), some form of sexual abuse or assault in their lifetime. Almost a quarter (23.6 per cent) of perpetrators of sexual violence against women as adults are intimate partners or ex-partners.

In 2007, the group's national helpline responded to 11,733 calls detailing a range of abuse including 245 rapes, while the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre alone carried out 10,155 counselling calls.

A 2002 World Health Organisation report found that only 20 per cent of physically abused women in Ireland even contacted the police, but in 2007 there were 11,374 applications in the courts for protective orders, 3,335 barring orders were applied for and 1,420 were granted.

Legislatively and socially, we have travelled a huge distance since the 1970s. New legislation on rape was enacted in May 1981, and marital rape become an offence in 1990. Since then, however, there has only been one successful conviction under this law. In the 1990s, however, Ireland's policy and law underwent substantial development. Funding of voluntary agencies began to increase, and they were afforded a greater role in influencing the national agenda. In 1997, the Report of the Task Force on Violence Against Women, contained proposals for a co-ordinated, coherent and integrated response to violence against women, through the development of services and preventative strategies, and the improvement of legislation and law enforcement.

In 1997, a Minister of State was also appointed and given special responsibility for equality issues, including violence against women. Among key reforms were the Domestic Violence Act, 1996 (amended in 2002), the establishment of the Garda Domestic Violence Sexual Assault Investigation Unit in 1993, and the 1994 Garda Síochána Policy on Domestic Violence Intervention, amended in 1997. The rape crisis centres network expanded.

Today , however, the fight goes on. A recent survey by Cosc, the National Office for the Prevention of Domestic, Sexual and Gender-based Violence, finds 44 per cent of people say they know somebody who personally had been a victim of domestic abuse while 96 per cent agree that abuse in the domestic context is a criminal offence.

In February the office saw its plan for the next five years endorsed by the Government. But Cosc will have to do so with a budget reduced by 13 per cent to €2.7 million.