One morning last week I was walking down the Rathmines Road at about eight o’clock. I was going for a swim. Going past McDonald’s I saw a woman, surrounded by children. She was calling in to someone inside the restaurant, asking what time it would be open. She was a small woman, and the children were very small. I counted them – six little girls, and the baby she was carrying looked like a boy. The older children were laden down with bags and bundles. McDonald’s wouldn’t be open for another hour, so they walked on. A duck and her ducklings.
I said to the woman that there was another café around the corner, and because she was so burdened I ran round to it to see when it would be open. It would be open at half past eight. I could guess what this little troupe were doing on the street, but the woman told me anyway. They’d run away from the caravan they live in at first light. Her husband had been beating her. You could see the bruises.
There’s a refuge for battered women in Rathmines. She’d been there already, but she’d been told to come back at half past ten when the health people would be there. So she and the seven children were looking for somewhere to shelter for the next few hours. They stood there, all with the same blue eyes. Matter-of-fact, they were, as if it’s just another thing you do in life, to pack up all your worldly goods and set out. The mother had organized the evacuation with such precision: the baby’s food had been prepared, the bundles were distributed according to what each child could carry. And they were all spotlessly clean, hair and clothes. How she had managed this, in a caravan, I just don’t know. I thought maybe I should go with them to the café in case they were refused service. The woman had a Traveller’s voice. But they were such an orderly group that I expected they would be all right.
So I went for the swim. There was me, paying money to get exercise. There was she, getting miles of exercise, whether she liked it or not. I went home via the café. They were sitting at some tables outside its door. They had no cups or anything in front of them, so I don’t know whether they’d eaten. The baby was chuckling away, but the little girls were bored. “What time is it?” one of them asked me. She had her schoolbag with her. Maybe she would have preferred being at school to trailing around with her mother, though you could see the confidence they had in her. I said to the woman: “There are eight of you, there’s only one of him. Could you not have thrown him out?” “That’s easier said than done,” she said.
I rang the refuge later. They have twelve families there at the moment instead of ten which is their maximum, and the place is so crowded that they’re sleeping on floors. But they had made room for her. She’s there now.
I could go and see her. She’s used to people with accents like mine asking her intimate questions. I could give her advice about housing and contraception and barring orders. But who am I to exploit her powerlessness further? The rich and powerful never tell you anything – you wouldn’t dream of asking. People like her tell you everything, because you might be able to help them. But I can’t help her.
Except by asking the broad question – what put her on the street? And you may say that whatever it was, it has nothing to do with us. We can’t help it if he beats her. It’s between themselves. We have nothing to do with it. As a community, we designate people to protect the weak. We designate the Garda. Of course, it’s hard to get to the phone when you’re being beaten up, and of course this woman had no phone. Still, in theory, you can always send for the guards. And we do provide refuges for battered women. Not nearly enough of them, but some. Not many women have to walk the streets with their children all night. Only a few. You could say that there is no more the community can do about what is essentially a private matter.
But there is more the community could do. It could begin to become conscious of the extent to which some men think they own their women and children, and the extent to which they feel entitled to wreak their power over them. Everyone assents to this. Beating your own wife is far more acceptable than beating someone else’s wife. Why?
Why is it that no one interferes? Why is it that wife-beating is considered distasteful and upsetting, but isn’t considered a grave offense? It is accepted as a part of life, something that always happened and always will happen, as if it were part of “nature.” But there is no one nature. We construct nature. What we think is natural, and therefore outside human manipulation, changes all the time. For example, it once seemed natural to be amused by the mad, and people went to Bedlam to laugh at the inmates. For example, it once seemed natural to do anything you liked to animals. You could prod a poor bear to dance in the street. That’s over now: what is “natural” has been reconstructed. To the point where I can say that if a man cruelly beat a harmless and devoted pet animal there would be public outrage. Whereas there is no outrage at a man beating the woman who “belongs” to him.
“Why doesn’t she leave him?” is what people say. Why is it assumed that she is free to change things, but he isn’t? Why is he assumed to be changeless? Why are there refuges for women, instead of refuges for men, where they could go or be sent to sort themselves out, and try to find some insight into their behavior? There is one self-help group, in north Dublin, where men who habitually assault their partners have come together to confront what they do. Why is there only one such group in the country? Look at what women have done, for themselves and for other women, over the past twenty years. First they started all the services that men’s abuse of women make necessary – services for single mothers, rape counseling, refuges. Then they moved on and today, literally all over Ireland, women are involved in self-development through schemes and groups and personal initiatives, and through the arts. Thousands of them are hoping to change themselves to understand things better, with the hope of living more fully.
Where is the corresponding vitality in the world of men? You’d think that they were perfect the way they are. You’d think patriarchy was perfect, even though patriarchy underpins beatings and abuse and rape and walking away from the responsibility of your own child. “Feminist” men claim to be such because they are personally blameless and because they support women. But why don’t they support men? Why aren’t they out there working with rapists, the same as women work with rape victims? Why does no man take responsibility for his brothers? Even about themselves too many men are lazy, and get by on the minimum of insight. In practice, the only men you meet who know anything much about themselves are men who have struggled to give up drink, because they have had to reflect.
Of course, someone is going to say that I’m generalizing about men. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Individual men are as likely as anyone else to give their time to the Vincent de Paul Society, or to be dedicated probation workers, or to lend their energies to social change, including all the changes that have come for women. But it is on the general level, it is as a mass, as a gender, that men are to date much less conscious than women.
Yet it is on the level of consciousness that change must come. Just as it did about Bedlam. Barring orders and more refuge places aren’t the answer to wife-beating. The answer is self-education, especially the self-education of men. The ideal people to get a process of self-education going are not officials, not social workers, not doctors, but other men. Ordinary men. But that kind of thing is not the kind of thing men do for each other.
I don’t know why that man beat up the woman I met. I don’t suppose he knows either. I don’t suppose she knows. And above all, I don’t suppose that the children know. But they were there when it happened. They were learning. So that’s seven more small human beings who have seen with their own eyes that brute violence makes things happen. The implications of such a lesson are social as well as personal. We will be dealing with them. But even if it meant nothing in social terms – even if the only victims of that night’s violence were the women and the seven children – look at the extent of what those children have lost. Theirs is innocence ruined, even though their mother is so brave.
The Irish Times, June 10, 1991