A 25-year war against ignorance

The Rape Crisis Centre broke the taboo on talking about rape and incest - and challenged the establishment every step of the way, writes Susan McKay

On February 14th, 2004, my daughter celebrated her 12th birthday with her friends. She was not a child any more, she told us, firmly. She was nearly a teenager. They played on the swings on the seafront near our house, carpeted the living room with popcorn, and laughed a lot. It was late by the time various Mums and Dads came to collect their children, their girls becoming young women, their boys becoming young men.

Next day, we heard a 13-year-old girl had been raped near the swings by a teenage boy.

Everyone in Skerries, Co Dublin was talking about it, but no one really knew what to say. Especially to the children. What do you say about sexual violence to those too young to know sexual love? My daughter's teacher encouraged them to talk about it in "circle time". Many of them knew the girl. In June this year, a 16-year-old boy admitted raping her. He had told her he was going to kill her, kicked her repeatedly in the head and strangled her until she blacked out, before carrying out "various sexual acts".

Her mother had brought her into town that evening to meet her friends, and was to collect her later. The girl wasn't allowed to walk to or from home alone. When she didn't turn up, her mother began frantically calling her mobile. By the time she saw her daughter again, she could hardly recognise her bloodied and swollen face. "The picture of how she appeared when I next saw her is in my mind every day of my life since," she said in court.

The girl's mother said she blamed herself. For what? For caring about her enough to drive her to meet her friends, and arranging to collect her afterwards? For getting her a mobile phone so that she would always be contactable and able to call for help? No. Probably, it was for letting her out of her sight. For opening the garden gate that had been kept carefully closed for all the years of her childhood, when it led out into a world where there are vicious boys and men who take their pleasure in rape. For not being able to protect her.

When the girl came round, the boy told her it was "the best Valentine's night" he ever had.

That rape happened soon after Breda Allen, chairwoman of the board of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, had asked me to write a book to celebrate the centre's 25th anniversary. By the time the case came to court, I had written the book. In the meantime, thousands of women and men have called the centre.

The book is called Without Fear - 25 Years of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. It is in many ways a book about fear. The title comes from a fine song by Peggy Seeger: "Reclaim the night and win the day/We want the right that should be our own/A freedom women have seldom known/The right to live, the right to walk alone, without fear."

The Rape Crisis Centre was set up in 1979 to fight the fear. June Levine wrote about this fear in her book, Sisters. She described an incident in her younger life. She had a hospital appointment in a town about 40 miles from her home. Afterwards, as she was getting into her car, a group of young men getting into another car said something to her. She responded politely and drove off. A few miles out on the road, she realised they were following her. They began to try to shunt her car off the road.

She was terrified. She broke into a sweat. Her nose began to bleed. Her bowels opened. She drove fast. They abandoned the chase. When she got home, she didn't tell her husband. She washed her clothes. She blamed her high-heeled shoes. Later, she told a psychiatrist about the episode. "Yes, but nothing actually happened, did it?" he remarked.

Levine, like me, did one of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre's first training courses. During a discussion about rape as part of that, she remembered the incident. "I remembered that fear. It had been a fear like no other, yet familiar, sickeningly recognisable, making other fears trivial," she wrote. "It had a life of its own. It dwelled as a race memory, poised in the pit of my stomach, prepared to grow in relation to one signal, the ancient atmosphere of rape."

The Rape Crisis Centre began when a small group of feminists set up the Campaign Against Rape in 1977. The Women's Aid refuge, set up in 1974, was already sheltering 117 women and children in a four-bedroom house. One of the CAR's first political actions was to object to the exclusion of women from the jury which was to try a man for the rape and murder of a young Mayo woman. It had been argued that the facts in the case were too emotionally disturbing for women and might result in a bias against the defendant. "What a comment on our society," wrote Anne O'Donnell and Evelyn Conlon. "Should not such horrific facts be as disturbing to men as they are to women?"

The Rape Crisis Centre was a militant, campaigning organisation. Rape had entered the law as a property crime of man against man, with women as the property. "Rape is to women what lynching was to blacks, the ultimate physical threat by which women are kept in a state of psychological intimidation," declared the centre's first annual report. Rape was socially acceptable except in the most extreme circumstances. It was surrounded by myths which tended to blame the victim and exonerate the aggressor. While traditional attitudes to women prevailed, rape would thrive, and women would continue to blame themselves.

The report quoted the American writer, Susan Brownmiller: "All men are potential rapists." This was 1979, the year Pope John Paul II came to Ireland, and more than a million people flocked to hear him telling women their vocation was to be wives and mothers in traditional families. If marriage meant violence for women, then they should be helped to leave it, the centre insisted. If the family meant violence for children, then the family should be broken up.

The Catholic extremists wanted the centre to be starved of funds and shut down. This was a feminist conspiracy to destroy life as we had known and loved it in Ireland, they argued. It would lead to tolerance of contraception, homosexuality and abortion.

There was great ignorance of the issue. When Gemma Hussey demanded in the Seanad that the law on rape be radically changed, one senator said that many women "upset the biological balance of a man and then claim they were raped".

Establishment figures played down or denied the trauma of rape. "The fear of parental rebuke and the fear of pregnancy are the two outstanding reasons why so many willing partners, later on reflection, decide to report their case as one of rape," wrote a leading doctor, in 1984.

In 1992, a "celebrity" priest suggested the girl in the "X" case might not really have been raped. The case had been "planned deliberately" to test the 1983 amendment, designed to outlaw abortion. In the same year a prominent barrister opined that when "a girl who knew nothing about rape was late home, her knickers in flitters and she was worried whether she was pregnant or not . . the easiest thing was to scream rape."

In 2003, a judge gave a rapist a suspended sentence and wished him well. "This was not a vicious rape," he said. "It was just something that happened between them, but he went too far."

The Rape Crisis Centre challenged all of this. It stood up for the girl in the X case, the girl in the C case, Lavinia Kerwick, the McColgan family, the young woman in the Kilkenny incest case, Joanne Hayes. It defended the rights of prostitutes - known as women of "notorious character" - and of countless other women. It demanded law reform, proper services for victims, and treatment programmes to stop rapists re-offending.

According to the late Irish Times journalist, Dick Walsh, post-colonial Ireland had looked for "an excuse for its own failure not to live up to expectations". Its version of morality was to see sex as the only sin and women as "the most provocative temptation".

Anne O'Donnell was the centre's first director, Olive Braiden its longest-serving one. Irene Bergin took over last year. Hundreds of people, mostly women, have worked in the Centre as staff or volunteers. Thousands of women and men have been counselled there, and the Centre has also run programmes in Bosnia and Kosovo. It broke the taboo on talking about rape and incest. Set up by women, for women, when male victims came looking for support, they were welcomed. It warned us about clerical abuse before we heard of Fr Brendan Smyth. After Dear Daughter and States of Fear were on TV, it provided helplines. One 80-year-old man rang to talk about how he was abused in an institution as a child. He had never told a soul before.

It helped other groups to start new centres and is now part of the thriving Rape Crisis Network, with centres from Belfast to Tralee. Its education and training services are in demand. Its research is held in high esteem. Rape Crisis work has become respectable, but has kept its radical edge.

There is a large Georgian room in the Rape Crisis Centre on Leeson Street lined with files full of press cuttings. I worked my way through this catalogue of depravity and grief. A quarter of a century of horror stories.

Rapists have preyed upon victims of all ages, from babies to the elderly. People have been raped and then murdered, murdered and then raped. No place is sacred. A girl was raped on Yeats's grave. It is hard not to feel helpless and overwhelmed by the sheer extent of sexual violence in this country. But the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre has dared to imagine that we can do something to protect ourselves and those we love. That rape can be stopped. After 25 years of campaigning, it still insists that we have the right to live, without fear.

Without Fear - 25 Years of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre is published today by New Island. €15.99