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Jennifer Horgan: We must punish violent crimes but also help perpetrators to change

The uncomfortable truth is that murderers and rapists are humans with human stories
Jennifer Horgan: We must punish violent crimes but also help perpetrators to change

'When male violence and, in particular, domestic violence is so hard to prosecute and police, is reacting to violence with tougher sentencing enough?'

Are violent men born violent? Or do they become violent? How might we prevent that violence from happening?

This questioning is one of the things I admire most about Claire Keegan’s recent story, So Late In The Day. The story, if you haven’t read it, gets to the source of one man’s misogyny. The protagonist, Cathal, is struggling in his relationship with Sabine. He thinks back on a very specific memory. In this memory, his mother, in her sixties at the time, is preparing himself, his brother, and his father pancakes. Having served the three grown men at the table, she goes to sit down with her own pancake. The brother pulls the chair from under her. While she picks up the pancake, and the bits of broken plate, the three men laugh ‘heartily,’ then carry on enjoying their meal. As readers, we don’t excuse Cathal’s emotionally abusive behaviour towards Sabine in the story, but we understand it more with the inclusion of this memory — and understanding is not agreement.

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