Our Cork 2040: Domestic abuse won't be stopped without cultural change
Deborah O'Flynn, co-ordinator with Cork's domestic violence resource centre, believes that we need not only judicial reform but a cultural shift to eliminate domestic abuse.
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Our Cork 2040: Deborah O’Flynn
Deborah O’Flynn is the co-ordinator of OSS Cork, a domestic violence resource centre. She has a background in psychology.
What is OSS?
OSS stands for One Stop Shop, and the idea is to provide a free-of-charge, wraparound service to the client, because when someone finds themselves in a domestically abusive situation, they’re going to require support from a number of different sectors. Whether they are here because they are merely looking for a safe place to talk about what’s happening to them or whether they need something practical done, we can be traversing a number of different areas, everything from health to finances, to housing, to the Gardaí.
Each and every situation is unique. There will always be common threads, but how each person experiences what is happening to them will have been tailored by the perpetrator to them, so we are tailoring our service to the client.
The idea is to provide most of those supports in the one venue, rather than referring someone from pillar to post, because when you do that to someone who’s already drained and possibly in a dangerous situation, they can give up and go back into the scenario they were in.
What does domestic abuse look like?
I think society is moving steadily but slowly towards an understanding of abuse as being more than physical. There’s physical, psychological, emotional, financial and sexual abuse.
While the vast majority of our clients are women, we have male clients too but they might present with slightly different stories; instead of the perpetrator being a spouse it might be an adult child or a same sex intimate partner.
The majority of our clients are not experiencing physical violence; psychological abuse and emotional manipulation are the two key ones. That’s about the head and the heart: psychological abuse can be mind games, deliberately contradicting someone repeatedly to confuse them. The emotional manipulation is about the heart, and getting someone to feel guilty or to feel sorry for the perpetrator. There might be threats to take away the children, etcetera. The end game is always to satisfy the need of the perpetrator.
Sexual abuse is something that we see amongst our client base, but clients themselves can be very reluctant at the beginning of our relationship with them to disclose this, or sometimes it’s the case that they don’t actually recognise it as sexual abuse themselves. There are grey zones in a relationship where you may not feel comfortable with doing something, but you also may not feel comfortable denying that partner what they are looking for.
Unfortunately, there is lots of documented research about perpetrators becoming particularly aggressive during their partners’ pregnancy and mums-to-be can be very vulnerable during pregnancy and shortly after giving birth because there seems to be a welling up of emotions like jealousy in the father, so that can be quite a dangerous time for people.
Financial abuse is huge, and much more serious than we realised when we first started the service.
We have people from all walks of life using our service, from people on social welfare, people with literacy and language issues, to people with PhDs and professionals running businesses and everything in between. We see Irish, non-Irish, EU citizens, people from further afield.
The perpetrators
I always remember a very early client of mine describing these early petty jealousies in her relationship. Her boyfriend of the time, who went on to become her fiancée, was jealous of the attention she got from friends and family, and she took this as an indication that he really liked her.
But soon after, he started setting up these forced choice situations where he would arrange romantic dates or trips to the cinema to deliberately clash with her arrangements with friends, so she started dropping her friends to go and meet him.
These are all subtleties and they start to happen over a long period of time; somewhere along the way, the atmosphere in the relationship starts to change. You can’t quite pin down what’s happened and it takes a while for a cycle to build up where you’re living on eggshells, your life has become a matter of day-to-day survival and you can’t plan for the future.
Perpetrators want to gain two things from the relationship: the power and the control.
What they don’t want is the responsibility, so they’ll try to make our client take all the responsibility. The way they go about establishing that power and control can vary from relationship to relationship, as well as over the course of a relationship. Tactics they might have used in the beginning may not be having the same impact after a couple of years so they might try something else.
In general, you find that the perpetrator will try to manipulate a number of key areas. The one most associated with domestic abuse is physical violence, and the threat of physical violence, because the power lies in the threat. There can be a lot of subtleties, but what you’re looking for is patterns of behaviour.
The Courts
I don’t think there’s a woman in the country, or a decent individual in the country, who would have thought the judgement handed down this week in which a man who tried to smother his wife had the remainder of his 18-month sentence suspended because he had already spent a year in custody was a fair sentence.
The commentary was quite extraordinary too: the fact that he had been maintaining a job in a fish factory and said he had stopped drinking had been taken into consideration.
That poor woman was probably lucky she got away with her life. What kind of a message does that sentence and that commentary broadcast to the country, if there are women out there who are thinking of reporting an assault they have experienced? Because going through the court process is no easy feat and if you see that that’s what you might come away with, you might very legitimately decide that that’s not a route you want to take.
There’s still training that needs to be done and I know the Gardaí are commencing sensitivity training soon and they are making progress, but the real problem is the judiciary. That’s not necessarily any particular individual judge.
Solicitors and judges speak a legal language that can be difficult for people to understand, particularly if they don’t have English as a first language.
We can give people legal information but they need separate independent advice and we can accompany people to court, but they need to be represented by a solicitor.
One of the things I find very frustrating is adjournments and the length of time the process can take. We have a lot of clients who are essentially on hold and experiencing adjournment after adjournment.
No-one gets involved in the legal system unless they absolutely have to; it’s a last resort. But sometimes there comes a time when you have no other option open to you.
Lockdowns saw “a serious drop-off in contact”
The problem was that the pandemic afforded opportunities to perpetrators to gain even more control over their partner’s everyday lives. We continued delivering services because we were deemed an essential service. There were a few weeks where we relied only on telephone to do that, while we got our PPE and screens and sanitiser in, but we very quickly went back to face-to-face.
Not all of our clients could come back into us when the severest lockdown ended because either they or their partner was working from home.
What we found was there was a serious drop-off in contact during those initial restrictions. When the restrictions started to relax, there was an explosion. People took the opportunity to come back in. We had our old clients come back, and then we had a lot of new clients and a lot of the newer clients would have described the Covid period as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Everything was far more controlled and concentrated and people realised much more what they were living with on a daily basis.
When your general freedoms are taken away from you, your awareness of what’s going on becomes heightened. We are members of Safe Ireland and they were brilliant during lockdown because they immediately went online.
We work closely with Cuanlee Refuge, and they were faced with a load of issues because of the communal residential setting they have. We collaborated with them on finding external sources of accommodation because they couldn’t accommodate the same number of people. AirBnB has been wonderful during lockdown at providing accommodation for people who needed to leave home for domestic abuse reasons and it was a very generous gesture by AirBnB and it looks like that programme is going to be extended.
Resources
We are both a company limited by guarantee and a charity, but the core work we do is funded by Tusla. The money has increased over the year, but we need more, just like every service you talk to. Over the past 18 months, more funds were made available for the PPE and sanitation stations by Tusla. We get some funding from the Department of Justice and that helps us with the court accompaniment work which is a considerable part of what we do.
If Cork is set to double, how can we ensure that domestic abuse doesn’t double with it?
As well the changes to the judiciary I mentioned, housing is one of the biggest things that needs fixing. The fear of being out on the street, or being in a Bed & Breakfast with your children stops an awful lot of people in their tracks.
There are exemptions in the law for people who are experiencing domestic violence to be prioritised for housing, but in practice you don’t see it. That’s not the fault of the housing officer, where there’s nowhere to prioritise them to.
At the moment, there’s an audit underway by Tusla of the accommodation that’s currently available and what will be required in the future.
The Istanbul Convention on domestic violence has clear guidelines on the number of emergency accommodation places recommended per capita and Ireland has now signed up to that, even though we were one of the last countries to do so, because we had a constitutional issue to deal with on barring orders and the right to private property. That has now been resolved.
Culture change
More than anything, what’s needed is a cultural change. In workshops we did on our experience of law with artists preparing for their exhibition (details below), what emerged was that these things are very much systemic, and it’s unclear to me whether systems need to change from the top down or the bottom up.
The recent issue of Gardaí cancelling emergency calls has maybe shown that a cultural change doesn’t always filter right the way down through an organisation.
Another thing that’s really interesting is that it’s not necessarily a generational thing that will resolve itself. There’s the impression that young people are very “woke” and wise to the plight of their fellow man, but there has been research out of colleges that would definitely raise concerns.
Social media is so prevalent now and it seems to be eroding ideas of privacy and consent amongst young people. There are a lot of young women who are very aware of misogyny but who maybe aren’t examining the issues of consent in their own personal relationships.
What’s the old Fianna Fáil phrase?
A lot done, more to do.
This Will Not Be Pretty is an exhibition by the artists of r.a.g.e collective in collaboration with OSS Cork and Cuanlee Refuge, which will launch online on the 16th of September at 7pm. More info here.