Misogyny causes and allows violence against women BY EMMA SHEERIN
‘Gender based violence’. The use of this term, one might argue, is relatively novel in Ireland. The phenomenon itself is sadly not. A new way of describing, acknowledging, and challenging something that is as old as time itself. If we’re honest with ourselves, the frank conversations about the prevalence of ‘gender-based violence’ are commonplace in the wake of one particularly shocking event, after which there is a tendency to go back to normal, to go back to sailing along, saying nothing. Until the next time. The brutal murder of Ashling Murphy on 12 January struck a chord with our nation in what was described by many in the following days as a ‘watershed moment’. Thousands lined our streets to mourn her loss.
21 women have been murdered in Ireland since the beginning of the pandemic. The north has the highest reported domestic violence levels in Europe Candles were lit in windows. Column inches were filled and leaders came together to call for change. She was going for a run. A hashtag trending on Twitter, a slogan across Instagram stories, young women angry that this had happened, dwelling on their own evening runs. At the heart of the reaction are two conflicting narratives. ‘She was just going for a run in the middle of the day’, ‘I do that, it could have been me’, ‘She didn’t deserve to be murdered’. When I think about these often well-meant words, uttered at flower strewn roadsides and in candle-lit town centres by people with compassion and love in their hearts, the first question I find myself asking is ‘who does deserve to be murdered?’ An obvious, if unintended, inference in this commentary
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is that all those women killed by their partners, or their exes, or by strangers late at night, whilst socialising, or running alone in the dark, or walking home from work, ‘should have seen it coming’ or ‘left themselves open to it’. That it was their own fault. ‘She was going for a run in the middle of the day in a public, well lit, densely populated place’. She followed all the advice that women grow up being bombarded with,
2004 ISSUE NUMBER 1 – 2022 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 anphoblacht
