Domestic violence victims are suffering unprecedented levels of abuse with sometimes fatal consequences National Domestic Violence Intervention Agency (NDVIA), said today.
Social workers are struggling to keep up with the case load of increasingly severe and intense abuse, NDVIA clinical director Dr Don Hennessey told the Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Equality and Women's Rights.
"We are seeing a much more severe form of abuse. What has emerged is the clear understanding that we are dealing with serious crime. We now see our work as homicide prevention," Dr Hennessey said.
He suggested the change could be caused by a more prevalent drink and drugs culture.
The NDVIA intervenes in domestic violence situations and engages with offenders referred by the courts. Every year, gardai receive call-outs to up to 10,000 domestic violence situations and a total of 5,000 applications are made through the courts for the safety or protection of victims.
Dr Hennessey said that "the system fails to prioritise victim safety and the offender has an extraordinary power" to manipulate it. He said that "a combination of sanction and tracking" of offenders was the only way to tackle the problem but he couldn't see any major change in attitudes in his lifetime.
Fine Gael's justice spokesman Mr Jim O'Keeffe described domestic violence as the "hidden web of crime in Ireland that doesn't show up in national crime statistics".
Senator Sheila Terry noted that domestic violence was not always about physical violence "but also about psychological and emotional abuse".
Dr Hennessey told the committee that 90 per cent of offenders were male and between 5-8 per cent were female. He had worked closely with over 1,000 men in 15 years and "they knew exactly what they were doing when they beat their wives", he insisted.
"Offenders have a tendency to feel they have an entitlement to behave in a certain way in their own homes. "They are no different from you and me in many ways but they are self-centred and use violence and abuse as weapons of control."
He also expressed concern for children in households "living in terror every evening" of domestic violence.
"A lot of children grow up feeling so ashamed and guilty that they couldn't protect their own mothers."