Clíona Saidléar: Sex attack survivors are 'worth' only 0.4% of a €4bn problem

Let's not congratulate ourselves for the funds we provide, when survivors on waiting lists are ‘worth’ only 0.4% of a €4bn issue

Women and girls all over Ireland will have nodded in recognition at Josepha Madigan's disclosure in the Dáil that she had endured sexual assault. File Picture: PA/ThinkStockPhotos

“I would say that I am old enough to know that there are very few women my age who have not been subjected to some form of sexual assault in their respective lifetimes. I know this because I am one of them.”

Minister Josepha Madigan’s speech during a Dáil debate on domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence on Tuesday would have had many women nodding in recognition. There are very few women who have not been subjected to sexual assault. Most women have been. A not insignificant number of men, a fifth of girls, and almost as many boys will be.

The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) will be launching a report calculating the monetary cost of gender-based violence across Europe in August. In this report, the cost to Ireland is estimated at €4bn every year. Some 80% of this annual cost of gender-based violence arises directly out of men’s violence against women. And EIGE estimates funding for victim’s services across Europe amounts to a mere 0.4% of this cost.

Gendered budgeting at its sharpest

Let us remind ourselves that an annual €4bn deficit after the recent economic crash was deemed so untenable it triggered harsh austerity measures for a decade.

On reflection, spending more on preventing and addressing sexual and domestic violence during the crash might have been an alternative way to balance our books. 

Instead, the decade of austerity hit the domestic and sexual violence sectors hard. That was gendered budgeting at its sharpest. That was systemic and institutional misogyny. A welcome million here and there over recent years saw rape crisis budgets almost reach 2008 levels by 2019. Almost.

For Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI), the only specialist sexual violence evidence and policy level body in Ireland, we entered 2020 carrying only 30% of our pre-austerity capacity. 

Survivors on waiting lists 

Rape crisis centres have been able to draw on additional funding from Tusla, but the funding can be ad hoc and insecure. We cannot provide survivors with the beginning of what can be a challenging journey in specialist counselling, confronting the impact of the trauma they carry in their lives, and then abruptly finish that relationship because the funding has run out. People accessing rape crisis centres face ever-growing waiting lists. We are innovating around how to protect and support survivors on waiting lists when we should not have waiting lists.

We cannot build specialisation to understand and develop solutions to rape culture, rape myths, and systemic hurdles if we can only bring people in on short-term contracts. We cannot deliver survivors’ voices as statistical evidence without a skilled network curating that data.

Research into sexual abuse in schools

Very shortly, RCNI will be launching Storm and Stress: An Exploration of Sexual Harassment Amongst Adolescents which provides up-to-date evidence that children and young people are experiencing sexual abuse at school. One of our rape crisis counsellors undertook this research as a PhD after our calls to the Department of Education to undertake this research fell on deaf ears over the past decade. We continue to highlight the appalling vista of there being no national policy to combat sexual harassment in schools, while the prevalence of harm is so normalised it is hard to grasp.

Appointments at crisis centres rise 25%

In the autumn, we will release the national rape crisis statistics from survivors for 2020. 

We can already tell you that, in a sample of seven rape crisis centres, there has been a 25% rise in appointments for counselling and support, and a 22% increase in contacts to helplines compared to the previous year. All of these helplines are funded by donations — no rape crisis centre helpline outside of Dublin gets State funding. This is vital information to Government as it faces into the challenges cited by the deputies on Tuesday in the Dáil.

We depend on volunteers and donations

These statistics are available only because volunteers across rape crisis centres, our partner software specialist, academics, and some of the best data protection experts in Ireland gave of their time and expertise generously and for free. Only in 2020 did the Department of Justice begin to provide some funding support for this work. 

In the autumn we will also complete research into how sexual violence survivors’ needs are being met by specialist counsellors and how we support that ongoing learning. However, there is currently no funding to train more counsellors.

We had two hours in the Dáil this week to discuss what we are doing to prevent sexual violence. 

When survivors are ‘worth’ only 0.4% of a €4bn problem, we should not be congratulating ourselves for ad hoc, insecure, relatively small pots of extra funding. 

We should be asking why we have not built and secured an infrastructure commensurate with the scale of the problem. This is the opportunity this moment presents, this is what this Government can choose to deliver.

• Clíona Saidléar is executive director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland.