Myths that conceal the truth about roots of crime

"WE HAVE within the last few years to deal with an entirely new class of criminal, composed of half educated youths who would appear to have escaped early from parental control. They have grown up in lawless habits and the streets and the cinema have been the main sources of their moral education. Full of new and unsatisfied desires, these youths have been dazzled by sensational reports in newspapers of the large sums of money obtained by organised robbery and they are seduced by the prospect of getting money easily without having to work for it honestly . . . The first offender starts off with a more serious form of crime, and unlike his forerunners in crime seems after committal more concerned with the comforts or otherwise of his detention than the disgrace which it involves."

These are familiar complaints: the new kind of criminal, the pernicious effects of cinema, the loss of parental control, the irresponsibility of the media, the worrying fact that young thugs now start their criminal careers with serious offences, the molly coddling of prisoners.

But this passage is taken, not from a contemporary editorial or task force report, but from the annual report of the General Prisons Board in Ireland for 1924. It should remind us that the best way to be wrong about crime is to operate on the assumption that there is anything new about it.

Beneath the surface of the way we respond to crime, there are two persistent myths. Between them, they shape the emotions and perceptions that we bring to bear on the dreadful events of recent weeks. Alone, each of the myths is misleading. Together, they make it virtually impossible for Irish society to understand itself.

The first myth is that of an innocent past, a pure and unspoiled place now suddenly at the mercy of incomprehensible evils. But there is no golden age. It is true, of course, that there were fewer crimes in the Ireland of the 1930s and 1940s. It is also true that there were substantially fewer people and, in particular, fewer males in the critical 15 to 24 age group.

And, of course, a great deal of violent crime - sexual abuse, rape, infanticide - went unreported. Much of the abuse revealed recently relates not alone to the present but to the "innocent past.

Research by Alexis Guilbride, published by The Irish Times last autumn, showed that between 1940 and 1946 at least 46 cases of infanticide, many of these pregnancies presumably the result of rape, came before the Central Criminal Court. But they were not covered by the newspapers. They happened but did not enter public consciousness. It may be that some of the disturbance we now feel is the delayed shock of recognising our hidden history.

The second myth is that violent crime is inflicted by them on us. At the back of our heads we have images of invasion, of peaceful communities attacked by violent outsiders. In the case of many attacks on elderly people in isolated places, there is indeed much to suggest that the criminals are mobile, that they often come from outside the area where the crime is committed.

But this image is inflated into an archetype. We come to imagine violent crime as the effect that unsettled, nomadic people roaming the countryside have on settled, fixed communities. Thus, when members of the travelling community attack old people they are said by judges (as happened in Sligo this week) to have brought shame on the travelling community, as if there is an innate connection between their crimes and their culture.

What this myth obscures is the fact that in most cases of violent assaults, especially sexual assaults, on women in rural Ireland, those charged or convicted have been local men. They have been neighbours of their victims, not invaders of the community but members of the community. The- evil comes from within, not from the outside. It has been there all along, blending into the background of decent, friendly, law abiding places.

But this truth is more disturbing and harder to accept than the myth of the evil outsider. No judge would dream of saying that a violent man who had assaulted a neighbour had brought shame on his community.

Nor should such a statement be dreamt of. For the truth is that all our communities, traveller or settled, rural or urban, contain and always have contained the potential for cruelty, violence and crime. And, in the past, not all of our communities were prepared to confront such violence without ambiguity.

One of the things about violent crime in Ireland that really has changed is that it is now accepted without equivocation that a community that believes it may have a violent criminal within its ranks should help the police to get justice done. But this has not always been the case. It is not for nothing that one of the most popular dramatisations of Irish rural life throughout the 1960s and the 1970s was John B. Keane's play The Field, based on a real murder near Tralee in 1958, in which the drama turns on the fact that the community will not finger a known murderer.

When Keane's Garda sergeant says that "McCabe and his son killed this man. You know, I know, and the whole village knows. Nobody cares and the terrible thing is that nobody ever will care", audiences in Ireland did not riot. The response was one of recognition, not of outrage. If anything has changed since then, it is that respect for the law has grown, that Irish people are more outraged at violent crime, that it is now taken for granted that murderers should be handed over to justice.

The myths of an innocent past and of violence as a force essentially external to the community ensure that when especially horrible crimes happen, we respond in ways that are shaped more by the myths themselves than by the realities before our eyes. We tell ourselves that what is happening is something essentially new and that it has nothing to do with the ordinary, familiar communities in which we live.

And in doing so we avoid two central questions: what can we learn from the past? and why is violence so obviously inherent in the kind of society we live in? Those questions can't be answered at fever pitch. We have to look beyond law and order to a cruelty that is not the complete antithesis of our normality, but hidden within it.