Domestic violence data must be reliable

A REPORT published earlier this week by the Child and Family Agency, Tusla, contained some startling figures. 

It suggested that one-in-four women have experienced violence; that 8% of women aged between 18 and 74 experience physical and/or sexual violence each year, and that nearly a quarter of families — 23% — made homeless this year cited domestic violence as s a reason for leaving their homes.

These are challenging statistics, even in a society where, for far too long, we were far less supportive of the victims of sexual or domestic violence — or both — than we should have been.

Those who carried out these attacks were shamefully given cover by a culture not as vigorous as it should have been in confronting the issue or the perpetrators.

Victims were often accused of being the architects of their own difficulties.

Victims of violence were often wrongly dissuaded from making a complaint to the gardaí.

Thugs avoided their day of reckoning.

That is our inheritance from a different time, but the report has been undermined, because Rape Crisis Network of Ireland (RCNI) has challenged Tusla’s methods.

Social attitudes on these issues are deep-seated and sometimes hard to change and, without reliable, coherent data, it is even more difficult to do that.

Any suggestion of exaggeration, of poor interpretation, can only defer the moment when every victim of domestic or sexual violence will get a fair hearing.