Fergus Finlay: Ailbhe Griffith’s story shows how corrosive misogyny drives violence against women

Survivor Ailbhe Griffith’s story reveals how misogyny, not lust, drives violence — and why society must confront it directly

Ailbhe Griffith in movie 'The Meeting' in which her experience of a vicious physical and sexual assault has been portrayed.

It’s unimaginable, in my head anyway. A young woman is attacked and raped, by a man clearly full of hate. She believes she’s going to die, and to die in terrible pain because he is so full of hate that he keeps biting her. 

She is rescued eventually but it is the most traumatic event of her life. No physical or psychological therapy can fix it. It is so deep her very soul is in pain for years after it.

And then she sits in a room with the man who did this to her, and they talk about it. She leaves that room stronger and better.

You may not have heard Brendan O’Connor’s interview with Ailbhe Griffith on RTÉ radio last Sunday. If you didn’t, it’s well worth searching out. She told an honest direct story, simply and clearly. I wasn’t sure afterwards if it was her empathetic, almost matter-of-fact approach, or the content of the story itself, that gripped me most.

The story she told was of a vicious physical and sexual assault, perpetrated on her by a man she came to regard as a monster, and of the damage that assault did to her, damage that lasted for years. But it was also a story of healing and recovery, and the key was what she called restorative justice.

Ailbhe Griffith has written powerfully about her experiences and has portrayed them in a movie called The Meeting. 

In a piece she wrote in a recent Sunday newspaper, she includes two sentences that hit me like a brick. I want to play them back to you as she wrote them, together with the following couple of paragraphs:

“During the assault, the only word in my mind was stop. As soon as I was rescued, the next word was why.

"This is a man I had never spoken to in my life, and yet he had directed… venomous hatred and rage at me. As I tore at the grass to stop myself from screaming as he bit me repeatedly, I was certain he would kill me.

"He transformed into a monster — I had never seen a human behave that way. I knew it wasn’t me, Ailbhe, he wanted to attack or destroy. I wasn’t a human to him either; just a representation of a female on whom he could act out his … rage.” 

Ailbhe met her attacker years later, after he had served a long prison sentence, in a restorative justice setting. She asked the questions she wanted to ask. She transformed her vision of a monster back into a human being.

He didn’t apologise, not then anyway. But that wasn’t the point of it for Ailbhe. She wanted to ask him why, and why her. She believed that was the best way to get her life back from him. And she got her life back.

In an interview with Esther McCarthy in this paper when the movie came out, she talked about how being able to confront her attacker face to face, and look him in the eye, had been immensely empowering for her. She walked out of the meeting, she says, feeling physically lighter. “I couldn’t stop smiling, and for me it was like a dark cloud having lifted,” she said. “I felt at a very core place, very deeply healed. And also, not afraid, empowered again.” 

I have to tell you, I think Ailbhe Griffith is a braver person than me. I would never have wanted to go through what she went through in the restorative process. Nor do I think I’m capable of the same level of forgiveness she is (if that’s the right word for it). 

Although I do know that “getting your power back” is often the least thing that can happen in the process, and how powerful (to coin a phrase) that can be for many people who have had to deal with the traumatic aftershock of an assault.

But there are other insights in Ailbhe’s story that, every time you come across them, are deeply troubling. Her attacker wasn’t interested in sexual gratification. He wasn’t even really interested in attacking her as a person. His attack was motivated by hate — and it was hatred of women. “I saw your high heels, and I just lost it,” he said to her years later.

His attack on her was not — it never is — an attack of lust or sex. It was misogyny. Hatred of women. That’s the exact definition of the word. Hatred of women.

I’ve written here before that we ought to consider making misogyny itself a crime, rather than just some of the things that flow from it. Rape is the result of misogyny. But so is domestic violence, so is coercive behaviour. So are many of the forms of discrimination that affect women, in the workplace and elsewhere.

And so are dirty jokes. So is pornography.

But you know what’s happening now, all over the world? Anyone who raises as much as a whimper about misogyny is immediately accused of being an enemy of free speech. Our own Government has backed away from a reasonable attempt to update hate speech laws because of incessant attack from the defenders of free speech.

All of the debate is going one way — even though it is the most hypocritical way possible. In Trump world, for instance, they talk constantly about the intrinsic nature of free speech, while doing everything they can to shut down anything that is critical of them. 

Misogyny is actually at the heart of a lot of the so-called Project 2025 proposals designed to set the agenda for Trump’s second term.

We’ve yet to see them in action, but there is a clear determination to start rolling back the gains made in terms of women’s rights over decades. The all-out assault on so-called “DEI” being spearheaded by Trump is not just about race or sexual orientation, as bad as that is, but it is also about putting women in their place. 

At the same time, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the judgment that codified a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, has opened a window into the future that many women saw as unthinkable.

It's hard to imagine, isn’t it, that only a few years have elapsed since the height of the “Me Too” movement, when women all over the world “got their power back” and the poisonous culture of misogyny was in retreat.

Here is where you end up. When misogyny dictates human behaviour, the result is brutal and cruel and we can all see it. When misogyny influences public policy the result is a total undermining of respect for equality and human rights. But it’s often subtle and we don’t see it until it’s too late.

Put it another way. When you listen to Ailbhe Griffith and hear her story, you understand exactly how corrosive misogyny is and what damage it can do. But right now, all over the world, misogyny is winning. 

And if that trend isn’t reversed, the damage will be profound. We don’t just need to listen to the Ailbhe Griffiths of this world. We need to be led by them.