We need to break the culture which allows depraved abusers to flourish

Last week, following what I’d call a ‘code red’ situation regarding the increase in the number of women killed in this country last year (and, I’ll add, a phenomenon which continues), a call from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) was made ‘urging our government to set up domestic homicide reviews’. Well done to the IHREC for at least trying to take action. It’s been proposed that this domestic homicide review (DHR) would include representatives from the HSE, social services and the Gardaí who would ‘investigate after someone is killed following domestic abuse’, in the hope it will ‘help prevent and eradicate domestic homi- cides’. So far so good. However, given in 2021 there were 817 sex crimes with a domestic abuse motivation reported to Gardaí, (compared to 205 offences the previous year, representing a ‘399 per cent increase’ and accounting for a ‘quarter of all sexual offences’ reported that year), it’s clear the time for ‘reviewing’ has come and gone. What we need now is immediate and urgent action.

How many women need to lose their lives in violent circumstances before wider society – and our law-makers – work together to break down the culture which allows these depraved, twisted, power-hungry cowards to flourish?

Only last week, the Court of

Appeal heard that a violent individual who ‘raped a woman with a mild intellectual disability’ on a side street, then imprisoned her in his home where he ‘raped her twice again’, was handed down ‘an extraordinarily lenient sentence because ‘he can’t speak English’. I won’t repeat what I said when I heard what I’d call the trial judge’s pathetic reasoning, but suffice to say, the air turned blue, and he-who-was-eatinghis-breakfast nearly choked on his fried eggs.

Apparently, at the time of sentencing, the judge had ‘factored in’ this rapist’s status ‘as a foreign national with no English, which would make prison life more difficult for him’.