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The Central Statistics Office this week published statistics on sexual crime reported by the Gardai from the second half of 2021 onwards that examines the nature of the relationship between the victim and reported suspect for the first time ever. This data proves to be a valuable addition to our knowledge base as the more information we have on patterns of sexual violence the more effectively we can tackle its roots by creating targeted and effective early intervention and prevention programmes. We can further use this data to supplement and deepen our understanding of our own RCNI Statistics collated every year from data supplied by our participating Rape Crisis Centres. RCNI statistics tell the collective story, not only of those survivors who have reported to the Guards, but all who have utilised RCNI rape crisis services. Here we compare the two sets of data and what they tell us about sexual violence today. 

While the CSO found that 63% of survivors reported the incident within one year, RCNI statistics reflect a more complex picture of how survivors report. Our latest data from 2021 shows that approximately 35% of survivors attending RCCs for counselling and support made a formal report to An Garda Siochana and we can trace an increase in the figures reporting to AGS and improvements in survivor’s experience of reporting over the past 17 years of RCNI data collection. This is welcome news and lends weight and credence to this recent data gleaned from the Gardaí. Trust between the survivor and the Gardaí is essential if these figures are to be meaningful.

Another correlation between CSO and RCNI figures that stands out is the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator. The CSO report that 83% of reported suspects of sexual offences are known to the victim. This chimes with RCNI annual statistics that show approximately 90% of perpetrators are known to the survivor and this figure remains approximately consistent in sexual violence against children and adults. Furthermore, the CSO finding that sexual offences against male victims are more likely to be perpetrated by a person in authority or with care responsibilities (13%) than for female victims (2%) backs up RCNI data that finds that 18% of boys and men disclose that the perpetrator was an authority figure. When we break this down further and look at the age of the victim at the time of the sexual violence, we see that boys (under age 18) are more vulnerable to being targeted by authority figures than adult men. This finding reinforces the fact the sexual violence perpetrators are opportunistic and often misuse their positions of power and authority.  

Having a breakdown of the age of a victim at the time they were abused and the victim’s sex is important as both of these variables impact the pattern of sexual violence perpetrated. In RCNI data we see differences in patterns of abuse disclosed by those subjected to sexual violence in childhood and adulthood. Furthermore, we see significant differences between children subjected to sexual violence when under the age of 13 compared to those aged 13-17. The relationship to the perpetrator, location of abuse, nature of abuse and other key indicators differ between all of these age groups.

Sex and gender of the victim are also important indicators in understanding sexual violence and patterns of abuse. Sexual violence is a gendered crime which is predominantly perpetrated against women and children by men. In RCNI data we see that boys and girls under the age of 13 disclose similar patterns of abuse. However, when girls enter teenage years, their vulnerability to abuse increases and they become more vulnerable to more extreme forms of sexual violence and patterns of abuse which are common to adult women. Boys on the other hand become less vulnerable to sexual violence as they age into adulthood.  

For a large number of children who are subjected to sexual violence, the abuse is perpetrated by a family member. In RCNI data we see a further breakdown of this information whereby children under the age of 13 most commonly disclose abuse perpetrated by a family member/relative and those ages 13-17 most commonly disclose that the violence was perpetrated by a friend/acquaintance/neighbour. This change in the relationship to the perpetrator is reflective of the natural lifecycle of the child which often involves them spending more time outside the home and developing a wider social circle as they move into their teens. 

Rape Crisis Centres only need the piece of the story that relates to how we provide services to survivors. However, the interplay between official Garda figures and what survivors tell us in RCCs illuminates the experience of the survivor, clarifies patterns of abuse and may help to point the way to earlier intervention and prevention. So much of a survivor’s experience of sexual violence is mediated and navigated through the agencies they interact with, be it the Gardaí or RCCs, and it is of vital importance that all services and professionals meeting a survivors’ needs are able to join up their knowledge with others. 

In the first week of July RCNI was delighted to welcome Maja Mamula, Kristina Mihaljević, Jelena Čaušević, Andrea Domitrović and Svea Kučinić of Women’s Room Croatia (Zenska Soba) for a fleeting three-day visit to Ireland. The purpose of the visit was to give the delegation an overview of the services available in Ireland to survivors of sexual violence. Women’s Room is a Croatian feminist, non-profit, civil society organisation established in 2002. It provides direct services to victims of sexual violence including survivors of sexual violence as weapon of war and aims for the prevention and combating of all sexual violence as well as promotion and protection of sexual rights. The visit was designed to be an exchange of expertise, experience and opinion and to forge deeper connections between members of Ireland’s sexual violence sector and their sister organisations in Central and Eastern Europe.  

On Monday 4 July  Deputy Jennifer Carroll MacNeill welcomed our delegates to Leinster House accompanied by Lisa Marmion of Safe Ireland and Cliona Saidlear of Rape Crisis Network Ireland. There they discussed their respective country’s response to male violence against women, reflected on the Croatian experience of widespread rape and sexual violence visited upon women during the Bosnian War. In particular we focused on the prevention work our partners in Croatia are doing in schools programmes and our own curriculum development here in Ireland. We also shared the different and similar challenges faced in both jurisdictions in resistances to providing access to all children to good sex and sexual violence prevention education.  

 Our delegates were kindly hosted by One in Four on Tuesday when Maeve Lewis gave an overview of the organisation’s vital work in providing professional counselling to adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, its sex-offender intervention programme and its vision of an Irish society where children are safe from the threat of sexual harm.  Maeve reflecting also on her own time working in Croatia following the war. This was followed by a visit to the Sexual Assault Trauma Unit at the Rotunda Hospital facilitated by Clinical Nurse lead Noelle Farrell.   

Tuesday afternoon saw a joint session led by Clíona Saidléar of RCNI during which we were joined by representatives of Kvinna till Kvinna and its partner organisations from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kvinna till Kvinna was founded in 1993, when, as a reaction to mass rape in the wars in former Yugoslavia, Swedish women started raising money to support local women’s rights organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  It is estimated that during the war at least 20,000 women fell victim to rapes and other forms of sexual violence. More than twenty years have passed without any redress for most of them and with little access to medical, psychological and financial assistance. Most perpetrators walk free. The discussion centred on best practice, legacy, structural and cultural barriers to realising and implementing the specialist rape crisis response to survivors of sexual violence as required under the Istanbul Convention.  

Delegates from Zenska Soba (Women’s Room) Croatia and Kvinna till Kvinna

The Bosnian women’s movement works to promote peace, dialogue and dealing with the past beyond division lines. It calls for accountability for war crimes and ending violence against women. As the country embarks on constitutional reform, women human rights defenders have united to push for the inclusion of gender perspective into the Constitution. But opposition is fierce: with ethno-nationalist rhetoric on the rise, women’s rights activists are regularly threatened as they challenge the nationalist political agenda of division. The following organisations were represented at the session.  

Center for Women’s Rights (Zenica): Center for Women’s Rights was established in 1996 with the aim to provide legal assistance to women, both face to face and online. They directly assist women survivors/victims of gender-based violence in exercising their rights and access to justice, and work on promoting the rights of victims to fair and equal protection by using evidence-based advocacy. They regularly monitor the criminal justice system response by directly monitoring GBV cases at courts throughout FBiH. 

Lara Foundation (Bijeljina): The Lara Foundation, founded in 1998, runs a safe house in Bijeljina and supports women survivors/victims of gender-based violence with legal aid and psychosocial support. Lara has for years worked to assist victims of trafficking and has also been monitoring and advocating for an improved police response to gender-based violence.  

United Women (Banja Luka): United Women Banja Luka has worked against violence against women since 1996 with supporting victims/survivors as well as advocating for positive changes in laws, policies and implementation.  In 2007, United Women opened a shelter for victims of domestic violence outside Banja Luka. They have an SOS hotline and provide legal aid to women victims. With the support of Kvinna till Kvinna, they advocate for a fair and equal protection and access to justice for women and child victims of violence and monitor the institutional response to gender-based violence. 

Trial International (Track Impunity Always): Trial is a renowned Swiss organisation fighting impunity for war crimes and supporting victims and survivors in their quest for justice. It conducts programs in several countries, including Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where Trial’s office operates independently. Trial’s work in BiH is, among others, focused at improving the status of survivors of war sexual violence and countering the stigma attached to victims. 

On Wednesday the group visited Ruhama where Jennifer Roche gave a tour of their premises and talked about the work and ethos of supporting women and others being exploited in the sex industry. Lest we left our partners too positive an impression of where Ireland is today we then crossed the river for a viewing of the harrowing Alison Lowry exhibition Addressing Our Hidden Truths at the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barrack. This exhibition presents a profound piece of commentary on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home revelations and audio testimony including poetry and song from those who experienced the industrial school system and Magdalene Laundries. Dr Sinead Ring from Maynooth University very kindly joined us and gave an overview of the role these institutions have played in our nation formation and right up to today.

The final stop was a tour of the premises of the Divisional Protective Services Unit (DPSU) in Fitzgibbon Street led by inspector Conor Ó’Braonáin. The DPSU was established in 2017 to deal specifically with sexual crime, human trafficking, child abuse and domestic abuse and is now based in a newly opened facility, in a carefully restored building that includes Ireland’s first Crime Victim Support Suite. The Suite includes several specially designed spaces to allow Gardaí to cater for the varied and sometimes complex needs of victims in a compassionate and dignified way. 

It was a pleasure to host a group of women so dedicated to tackling the cause and the aftermath of sexual violence and an honour to learn further of their experiences and perceptions. The trip was of great benefit to both RCNI and, we hope, to our visitors and helped deepen our partnership. Male violence against women knows no boundaries but misogyny takes many forms and manifests differently according to a country’s history, its prejudices and its particular socio-cultural climate and context. We hope that this visit will be the first of many opportunities where women can share their wisdom and understanding and work together to face the challenge of sexual violence and exploitation against women and children.  

 Children experience sexual violence in ways that are often difficult for us to see and they speak about the harm done to them in ways that may not resonate with us.  When a child discloses their experience of sexual violence they may do so in small parts or in one disclosure, with words or with behaviour, to one adult or to many. Our task as adults, professionals and agencies is to ensure that the piece they tell us counts towards the whole story. To do that we have to speak a common language. 

Our collective understanding of a child’s journey currently can fall between the cracks as parents, schools, GPs, clubs and other services working with children, the family or the community are engaged for a range of reasons and not primarily focused on or specializing in sexual violence. All of these services do their best to understand, to support and to protect the child but between all these people it is not surprising that the child’s voice may falter and their story become fragmented and unheard.   

All of these adults are essential in protecting the child, but they each serve the child’s best interests in different ways and therefore their focus is unique to that service. But if a child’s experience is revealed in fragments, then we need to ensure that we can put those fragments together to understand the full picture. We do that by putting in place common language to underpin robust and comparable data collection so that our overlapping knowledge can form a whole, locally, nationally and internationally and we can meet our legal and ethical obligations. 

Currently the many points of contact a child may have, where valuable parts of their experience are told, are using various terminology and collecting different data. For example, of the services meeting the needs of child victims of sexual violence, 12 of our 16 databases do not record sexual harassment of a child and 5 out of the 16 do not use the rape of a child. This does not serve the best interests of the child. RCNI, with funding from the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, invited all these NGO and statutory stakeholders to come together to share our current data collection points and agree the basic building blocks of how we record what we know from the children we encounter.  

Ireland is a signatory of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention). The Istanbul Convention recognises the need for data collection to be fit to contribute – not just to national – but regional and international monitoring. All signatories are legally obliged to report specific information about sexual violence; Ireland does not do this, a fact that GREVIO, the Council of Europe monitoring body who will be shortly be evaluating our performance on implementing the Istanbul Convention is sure to take note of.   

There are positive indications that comprehensive, reliable and comparable is increasingly recognised as an essential driver of policy development and a vital element in improving interagency pathways.  The Minister for Justice recently presented its Third National Strategy on DSGBV for public consultation recommending ‘developing enhanced coordination of data collection strategies’.   

In Ireland our leaders, policy-makers and the general public are asking what we can do to cherish and protect those who have experienced Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (DSGBV).   An important part of the answer is that we need to collect better data that gives the survivor a voice – a safe and anonymised voice amongst the thousands of survivors, in whose combined stories we can find patterns that can inform policy and cultural change. It should be noted that the first step in collecting such data is that it does no harm, this means that the child’s interests and privacy is steadfastly protected so that they can access services freely and without fear.  

Last month RCNI launched Breaking the Silence: Terminology Guidelines for Data Collection on Sexual Violence Against Children, the culmination of a collaboration with 28 organisations working with children who were subjected to sexual violence. Most collect data already. The finished report includes shared terms and definitions for collecting information on sexual violence against children in Ireland which comply with Ireland’s international legal obligations.  

So much of a child’s experience of sexual violence is mediated and navigated through the adults around them. It is important that all services and professionals meeting a child’s needs are able to join up their knowledge with others’, especially when our children cannot and it is paramount that the voice of these survivors informs and is reflected in policy. To do this we must develop a common language. 

‘Breaking the Silence’ is free to download here.

The Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, otherwise known as the Istanbul Convention, is an opportunity across Europe and our neighbours to make sure that no matter where a survivor of sexual violence is in Europe they will have support and justice available to them that is appropriate and specialized.  

Istanbul Convention’s Article 25:  

Support for victims of sexual violence  

Parties shall take the necessary legislative or other measures to provide for the setting up of appropriate, easily accessible rape crisis or sexual violence referral centres for victims in sufficient numbers to provide for medical and forensic examination, trauma support and counselling for victims.’ 

One of the challenges in conversations and learning across Europe, as we raise the standards, is our complete lack of a shared starting point and language on what we mean when we say, ‘rape crisis’ and ‘sexual violence referral centre’. In addition, we define sexual violence itself differently in different European countries. What counts as rape in Ireland, where we have defined rape as the absence of consent, would not qualify as such in other countries where only the presence of physical violence makes an act rape. 

While there is a lot to fix in Ireland you might be surprised to know that relative to our neighbours across Europe we have something of a head start in terms of specialist responses for survivors.  

We are working off a 50-year legacy. In the 1970s and 80s, second-wave feminists and other activists established the first six Rape Crisis Centres, the RCNI and CARI. From the mid 1990s, as we lifted the lid on institutional abuse, more rape crisis centres (about half of the rape crisis centres we have today) were opened and also One in Four. Alongside these community-based specialists supports, doctors, nurses and activists built Sexual Assault Treatment Units. All of us today specialise in sexual violence.  This sexual violence specialist infrastructure is unusual in Europe and is a situation only mirrored in the UK.  

Across Northern and Central Western Europe what was built by second-wave feminists were largely Women’s Centres, delivering a range of responses and advocacy, many focused on domestic violence with very few specialising in sexual violence. To the East, where the state provided all responses under Communism, there is little if any tradition of statutory or community sexual violence services and often no specialisation. As they build their brand new infrastructure they are neither helped nor indeed encumbered by an existing  sexual violence service infrastructure. We all have different starting points, with much to learn from each other and a variety of challenges and opportunities. 

To start with we need to understand what different specialisations are needed, where, when and why. A forensic examination facility is not a rape crisis centre and a rape crisis centre is unlikely to offer forensic medical exams – this may seem obvious to us in Ireland but is not at all obvious elsewhere. While the evidence so far broadly supports the Irish model, the experiences of our European partners challenges us to look at our model and ask ourselves why we built it in this particular way and if it is indeed the best fit.  

RCNI has always worked with European partners to ensure specialisation and standards are there to meet survivor-informed needs. We founded the European network of specialist sexual violence services in 2002, chaired the 2012 international Conference of Survivors of Rape, our Executive Director is a governor of the European Women’s Network Against Violence Against Women, adviser to UN Women on their Southern Balkans and Turkey Istanbul Convention project and we are active members of the WAVE European Network’s Sexual Violence working group. Through these collaborations we hope to develop shared language and support shared innovation and best practice to not only better serve survivors here in Ireland but all survivors across Europe. 

Dr Cliona Saidlear is Executive Director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland