Any belief that domestic violence 'is not that common' is plain wrong, writes Kitty Holland
Eileen, now in her mid 40s, remembers rushing past neighbours who were stopping to greet her on Saturday afternoons, such was her panic to be home from the shops in time for her husband.
"He'd have to get out for the day. He'd be minding the children and there'd be murder if I wasn't home when he told me to be. If I missed the bus I'd be in total panic."
Living with him, she says now, "was like being on high alert all the time. It was walking on egg shells, praying he'd have had a good day at work, terrified of what his mood would be, doing anything to avoid a confrontation. It got to the stage that when he looked at me once when I was pregnant with our youngest, and he said 'You repulse me,' I believed he was right."
Eileen, now confident, even upbeat, had met this man in Limerick in her early 20s. "He was charming, very complimentary and I was totally in love with him when we got married.
"It was a few months into the marriage that he began to criticise me. He started to find fault with things, like the meat wasn't cooked right or I hadn't cooked the right dinner."
He told her skirts didn't suit her as her legs were "too thin", so she stopped wearing skirts for more than 20 years. He told her she was not to cut her hair short and she'd be terrified coming home from the hairdressers in case he didn't approve. He criticised her home decorating skills. He told her any time the children misbehaved she was a useless mother. He'd go berserk if his dinner was not on the table when he came in from work, kicking over bins, kicking in bannisters.
"I got so I'd be ahead of the posse," she explains. "I'd have the dinner on the table on time even if he said he wasn't coming home till later."
She says she became "a bit of a DIY expert" and would do jobs around the house. "Whenever I finished a job he'd criticise it, or say I needed to get another one done. Sometimes I'd stay up till four o'clock in the morning trying to get a job finished."
He told her when she could and couldn't go out; what time she had to be back; what she could spend the "housekeeping" money on. He would put her down in front of their two children, telling them she was mad.
"I'd do anything to avoid confrontation but when I ignored him he'd run the children down, maybe about their looks, and that would get a reaction out of me because I'd tell him to leave them alone."
HE ALSO UNDERMINED her with their children. If she told them they couldn't do or have something, he would tell them they could. As her son got older he too became emotionally abusive, but also violent. "If I ever got upset he'd go 'Eileen's mad, Eileen's mad' in a sing-song voice." He also punched and pushed her, and also his younger sister - at this stage about five or six years old.
"If I had to go out to get milk or something I wouldn't leave her alone in the house with him. I'd be afraid he'd beat her up."
She suggested marriage counselling to her husband but he "didn't want to know". Asked whether she thought of leaving she laughs.
"Oh God, I left loads of times. I'd take the children and go to my parents. He'd ring and beg me to come back, tell me he loved us and that things would be different."
Also, she says, she had no one to confide in. Though she'd tell her parents they were having rows, she couldn't reveal the extent of the abuse. She had no friends, she says, as she had been made drop any she had had. "It was a case of where could I go?"
In the end she rang Women's Aid. She got some literature on domestic abuse and laid it out on the kitchen table. "My husband did his usual laughing at me. Two weeks later I walked out, with my daughter [eight years old at this stage]."
"I hadn't realised you could go to a refuge for emotional abuse. I thought you'd have to be black and blue. I was very distressed, all over the place. But you know, being able to get a full night's sleep, knowing me and my daughter were safe, knowing I had someone to talk to - I wasn't on my own. Oh, it was pure relief."
That was 10 years ago. Since then 124 women have been murdered in this State - 78 per cent of them in their own homes. The vast majority knew their murderer. Of the resolved cases, 47 per cent of the women were killed by a violent partner or husband.
As well as the women who die at the hands of their intimate partner, many more are almost killed, says Margaret Martin, director of Women's Aid. Definitive statistics do not exist but those we have belie any belief that domestic violence "is not that common".
Taking one service dealing with this human rights abuse, Women's Aid this week released its national helpline statistics for 2005. It saw a 30 per cent increase in the number of calls, with 25,843 compared with 19,901 in 2004. And the proportion of calls that could not be answered has reached 40 per cent (10,504 calls), compared with 26 per cent of calls in 2002.
There are 18 women's refuges around the State. All are "going at full tilt, 365 days a year" according to Sharon O'Halloran, director of the National Network of Women's Refuges and Support Services (NNWRSS). The managers of several refuges - in Donegal, Dublin Limerick and Cork - told The Irish Times this week they often had to turn to the local Society of St Vincent de Paul or a B&B to accommodate women and children when they were full.
Last year Bray Women's Refuge turned away 276 women with 326 children because they were full. "And these were families in crisis," says manager Joanna Fortune. "It is really awful. We are so overstretched."
Studies such as the 1995 Making The Link study estimate one in five women have been subjected to abuse by a partner here; a National Crime Council report last year said 213,000 Irish women had been "severely abused by a partner". There are 114 refuge beds. The same report also suggested just 20 per cent of women who experience domestic abuse are being reached by appropriate services.
THE STORIES BEHIND the statistics are "very grim" said the manager of research and policy with Women's Aid, Rachel Mullen, this week. Women calling its helpline last year had been assaulted with sledgehammers and hurleys; raped in front of their children; made to re-enact pornography films while heavily pregnant, and one was locked in a car that was then set alight.
The Government in 1997 established a National Steering Committee on Violence Against Women (NSCVAW) to co-ordinate and integrate a national response to the issue. However bodies such as Amnesty International, Women's Aid and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) say services remain unco-ordinated, with funding levels capped for the past three years.
"What we're struggling with all the time are insufficient resources and a fractured system," says Margaret Martin, director of Women's Aid. "The steering committee doesn't have any real resources and no staff working to it. It needs to be resourced and set up with a clear mandate, targets and functions."
She describes, for instance, "intractable rows" between the Departments of Justice, Health and the Environment over which is responsible for funding different parts of a refuge in Blanchardstown which, three years on, remains unfinished.
THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of the DRCC, Ellen O'Malley Dunlop, echoes her, saying "there is no champion at political level for people suffering domestic abuse. No one at Cabinet level is saying 'This has to stop.' And this is at a time when levels of violence are going through the roof."
A spokesman for the Health Service Executive says it allocates more than €10 million a year for services in the area of domestic violence.
"There are currently eight multi-agency regional planning committees on violence against women located throughout the country. These committees plan services, allocate and account for resources and co-ordinate with the voluntary providers in this sector.
"The HSE strives to provide a consistent approach to service provision in this area and is putting processes in place to achieve this."
Martin feels there may be "the seeds of change" in the quiet work being done since 2003 by the pilot project, National Domestic Violence Agency (NDVIA), based in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin. Funded by the Department of Justice, its co-ordinator, Martina Boyle, explains its mandate is to coordinate the work of the civil and criminal systems and women's support groups while keeping the safety of the victim and accountability of the perpetrator central to the system. All relevant agencies in the Dún Laoghaire/Bray area are taking part.
"We have been evaluated and the feedback from the Department has been very positive," says Boyle. "We are meeting the Department soon with a view to possibly rolling the project out slowly to one or two more areas in the country." Funding, she says, is "not enough on any level. It is and remains a bit of a battle."
Eileen says she knows what she has regained every time she puts her key in her front door. She moved on from the refuge six months after she arrived, and was housed with the help of Sonas Housing, a voluntary housing agency. She is working and her daughter too is doing well.
"Every time I put the key in the door of my own place I get a feeling of relief and peace of knowing I can go in, sit down and no-one will disturb that or take it from me.
"The best thing I ever did in my life was to walk away. The only person he has to look at now, and take it all out on, is himself."
Women's Aid Freephone: 1800-341900; Dublin Rape Crisis Centre Freephone: 1800-778888
Gender imbalance: Male victims, female abusers
While women are twice as likely as men to suffer severe physical abuse and seven times more likely to experience sexual abuse in an intimate relationship, last year's study from the National Crime Council, Domestic Abuse of Women and Men in Ireland, points out that "domestic violence is something that also affects a significant number of men".
That survey found one man in 25 had experienced "severe physical abuse" and one in 90 had experienced severe sexual abuse in the context of an intimate relationship. The survey does not specify, however, whether the perpetrators were men or women.
The Women's Aid statistics published this week indicate about 10.5 per cent of callers to its helpline last year were from women suffering abuse by another woman.
The perpetrators of the abuse suffered by callers were female family (4 per cent), female intimate (1 per cent) and a female other (5.5 per cent).
Rachel Mullen, director of policy and research with Women's Aid, says that in a situation where a male intimate is abusing a woman, she may also be abused by his sister or mother, or other female associate.
Among the recommendations in the Crime Council report are that consideration be given to opening a refuge for men "on a pilot basis" in Dublin.