One in three women worldwide experience physical or sexual violence mostly by an intimate partner. The UN has described this as a ‘shadow pandemic’. But survivors and their supporters are standing up, and the campaigns to tackle this crucial social problem are gaining momentum. Isidora Duran looks at some of the recent cases in Ireland, and the work being done to end gender-based violence here.
“But he was in his room, weren’t he? What harm can he do in there?” — the words of an agonised Eddie Miller, the father of Jamie who was arrested for the murder of a 13 year-old girl in the Netflix miniseries Adolescence, which broke records as the most watched British title of all time. Just four episodes paint a desperately bleak picture of a deeply violent and sexist society where the rigid and backward gender binary is further entrenched at every stage of life. Jamie was only 13 himself when he stabbed his classmate Katie, but by then he had already witnessed his father fly into rages, leading him at one point to ‘tear the shed down’, attended schools where fights were a daily occurrence and teachers tried to maintain control through intimidation, and most importantly, lived in 2025 – when violent misogynists like Andrew Tate prey on boys just like him. In the wake of the show’s popularity, a recent study has found that almost 50% of children under seven are displaying misogynistic behaviour.
It comes as no surprise then, that at just 13 Jamie had already absorbed some of the most toxic talking points of the manosphere: that 80% of women are attracted to just 20% men, so they must be tricked or coerced into relationships; that masculinity is under attack and must be re-established through the subordination of women; and above all else, that they are to be despised. It calls back to the distressing case of Anna Kriégel in west Dublin, who in 2018 was sexually assaulted and killed by two 13 year-old boys. In the run-up to the attack, they consumed large amounts of violent pornography. Adolescence is no dystopian nightmare, tragically it is capitalist society today.
Conor McGregor
On Monday, 17 March, serial rapist, macho provocateur and far-right darling Conor McGregor clasped hands with Donald Trump in a nauseating display of mutual bravado after being invited to the White House. McGregor had just delivered an anti-immigration rant steeped in the white supremacist ‘great replacement theory’, the putrid cocktail behind far-right organisations and agitators worldwide that is used to both drum up racism against people of colour and migrants, and attack the reproductive rights and bodily autonomy of women and LGBTQ+ people. McGregor and Trump are ideologically kindred, and their widely publicised meeting follows the pattern of many high-profile DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) campaigns – falling four days before McGregor entered new evidence seeking an appeal against his rape conviction in a civil case that brought hundreds onto the streets in support of Nikita Hand and against his violent misogyny.
In contrast to McGregor’s pitiful charade in Washington, the march for Nikita four months earlier was replete with vibrancy and urgency and solidarity. Hundreds of women and LGBTQ+ people marched to the Criminal Courts of Justice protesting the Director of Public Prosecutions’s (DPP) failure to take a criminal case against McGregor. Nevertheless, Nikita had the temerity, in an age of vicious online misogyny which McGregor could unleash at any time, to pursue a civil case against the multi-millionaire D-lister. Thankfully, she won, and her victory shattered what was left of McGregor’s reputation after numerous sexual and physical assaults in the years prior. His St Patrick’s Day cameo at the White House would then be comical if it weren’t part of a broader anti-feminist backlash that elevates abusers, trolls feminists and is causing gender-based violence, misogyny and transphobia to rise everywhere.
Misogyny in the Courts
Four women were killed in the first 4 weeks of 2025 in the South. In the North, four women were killed in the space of just six weeks last Autumn. The WHO has reported that gender based violence is the greatest threat to women and girls worldwide. Femicide is the worst expression of this, but women everywhere can attest to its daily presence, from being cat-called on the way home from work, to being belittled and undermined by the men in their lives, to realising months or years later that a relationship they were once in was in fact abusive. The thousands of survivors of institutional abuse in industrial schools and Mother and Baby homes living in Ireland today are also victims of gender violence and patriarchal capitalism. But no other case in recent memory exemplifies the pervasiveness and insidiousness of violent misogyny more than Gisèle Pelicot’s. In what was a hugely meaningful and landmark decision for women and survivors everywhere, she faced down the silence and secrecy that underpins rape culture to waive her right to anonymity so that all 70 of the men who were invited by her husband to violate her would be named.
Despite the existence of concrete video evidence, she still faced horrendous victim blaming in the courts. The extent to which misogyny is normalised within the judiciary and then weaponised against survivors seeking justice is sickening, and even Gisèle, who had been through an unfathomable amount of trauma, was asked if her husband could consent for her, if she was playing a sexual game and pretending to be asleep and even hit with claims from some of the men that they had believed she was dead. Upon winning the case, her rallying assertion that “shame must change sides” resonated deeply.
Now more than ever, a spotlight has been shone on the sexist judicial system and its inability to address gender-based violence. In June 2024, thousands protested across Ireland in solidarity with Natasha O’Brien who had just been told that the man who had beaten her to unconsciousness for calling out his homophobia would be given a suspended sentence. The reason cited was his reputation as an ‘exemplary soldier’ in the army. The outpouring of anger onto the streets, which ROSA Socialist Feminist Movement and Socialist Party activist, now TD, Ruth Coppinger helped to facilitate, mirrored that of 2018 when the defence barrister in the rugby rape trial cited the survivor’s choice of underwear as proof of consent – a classic yet obscene victim-blaming tactic. Since then, survivors who have sought justice and experienced the misogyny of the judicial system for themselves have been coming forward to demand change – and it is beyond vital for activists and campaigners to listen.
Experience of Survivors
But what is it that survivors want? To be listened to. To be believed. To be able to trust the various institutions and organisations they come into contact with in their pursuit of healing and justice, or as Judith Lewis Herman describes, truth and repair. They don’t want their abuser to harm anyone else. Infuriatingly, they are more than often dealt the exact opposite.
Let me sketch a timeline of what the average survivor goes through. You experience gender-based violence. This can be anything from a single attack to years of abuse. It can include sexual assault, coercive control, gaslighting, manipulation, intimidation and the increasingly popular and gut-wrenchingly sinister DARVO (more on this later). You most likely know your abuser, they are a partner or an ex-partner, a family member or a friend. The first thing you might do is ring the police – you hope they pick up – more than 3,000 domestic violence calls were ignored by Gardaí between 2019 and 2020. If you are a person of colour, a traveller and/or working-class you might not want to involve the police at all, knowing from experience that you are even less likely to be believed, and more likely to be villainised. If you are both present when they arrive, it is now your word against theirs, and a battle to be seen as credible in the eyes of the police who are woefully under-trained and often harbouring their own deeply rooted chauvinism.
Gabby Petito, who was killed by her boyfriend on a road trip across the US, came into contact with the police one month before her death. Body-cam footage shows Gabby crying with bruises on her arms while her boyfriend stands laughing on the other side of the van. The police sent him to stay in a hotel for one night and ordered Gabby to sleep in the van alone, characterising the incident as a ‘mental breakdown’ rather than domestic violence. Survivor and campaigner Sarah Grace has said that when the police arrived at her home she had to go out of her way to tell them that she had been sexually assaulted. In her words, the Garda ‘went red’ and pointed towards his senior who she then had to convince that she needed to go to the hospital. If she hadn’t, her abuser’s DNA wouldn’t have been identified and he would have gone on to harm other women. Bear in mind legal processes haven’t even begun yet! So much evidence is then required for the DPP to even take on a case that the sexist myth of women lying about gender-based violence is completely shattered.
Survivors are forced to wait years for the trial to begin, and when it does, the misogynistic practices and undermining tactics stitched into the court system are then regurgitated out in a sustained campaign of character assassination in what survivors describe as a ‘second rape’, often worse than what led them to seek justice in the first place. Due to this, only a tiny minority of survivors go on to report, with the vast majority only doing so to prevent others being harmed in the same way.
This includes the use of character references given after the victim impact statement, in what survivor and campaigner Ciara Mangan has described as a ‘kick in the teeth’. Her abuser was lauded for ‘going to the gym six days a week’ which bears no relevance, as Ciara has repeated, if you are a rapist. Before a former Garda was convicted of sexual assault and false imprisonment in February, 35 character references in his defence were handed in.
Counselling notes used in trials
Recently, a tide of anger has risen against the use of survivor’s counselling records. A survivor’s private thoughts and feelings being read by the prosecution, judge, even the accused (who is often known to them) and then paraded through a courtroom to discredit and undermine them is enough to put anyone off seeking justice. Furthermore, it is a real deterrent to seeking therapy and beginning the healing process. Many psychotherapists have stopped taking notes altogether for this reason. Elements of the judiciary have argued that counselling records are essential to ensure the accused’s right to a fair trial. This vacuous claim ignores that the practice directly contradicts a survivor’s right to privacy, to healthcare and to seek justice. It assumes that survivors lie and is used to expose them. Their testimonies, their trauma, their physical injuries, the fact that gender-based violence is the biggest threat to women and girls worldwide – in ‘the eyes of the law’ none of this is enough to be believed.
In practice, the routine requesting of survivor’s counselling notes facilitates the defence team to forage into the past of the survivor – to see if there’s information on their sexual history or other entirely irrelevant private information that could then become fodder in an attempt to use victim-blaming tropes to throw sand in the eyes of juries. There should be no place for this in any gender violence trial – it has nothing to do with the vital right to a fair trial and in practice is not only damaging individual survivors, but propagating the culture of victim-blaming and trivialising of sexual and gender violence.
It is no understatement to say that we are living in the ‘post Amber-Heard’ era. DARVO (deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender) is a popular abuse tactic used to silence victims and deflect responsibility onto them, either by blaming them for pushing their abuser to cause harm, or by straight up switching the roles of victim and perpetrator to elicit sympathy from others and covertly tighten control. In the past decade, anti-feminists have done this by exploiting the expanded consciousness around abuse dynamics, mental health, and consent that was consolidated by the feminist wave of the 2010’s. Think Jonah Hill telling his then-girlfriend Sarah Brady that posting pictures of herself in a swimsuit and surfing with other men impinged on his ‘boundaries’. It can also take the form of litigious abuse, suing or counter-suing victims / survivors for fees, child custody, defamation and even gender-based violence. Think Justin Baldoni counter-suing Blake Lively for defamation and extortion after she accused him of sexual harassment on the set of It Ends With Us. Often it manifests in a sly and pernicious ‘questioning’ of a victim’s actions to sew doubt in others about their credibility.
A common thread in DARVO campaigns is an arrogant glorification of ‘justice’, easily achieved by abusers when the judicial system is already set up in their favour. The injustice of the justice system fails survivors everywhere in a plethora of dehumanising and re-traumatising ways. In Ireland, it may be encapsulated by the sobering fact that our system of common law inherited from British imperialism means survivors are not victims, but merely witnesses to a crime committed against society at large.
Ruth Coppinger’s 10-point programme
Women all over Ireland were holding their breath and crossing their fingers waiting for the verdict on Nikita Hand’s civil case against Conor McGregor. The sheer amount of rape myths hurled, bringing up what she was wearing, that she was intoxicated, that she had willingly gone to a hotel with McGregor was enough for the result to be uncertain. The DPP dropping her criminal case sent a false message to society that she had brought spurious evidence to the courts, which backed up the misogynistic and victim blaming tirade against her. Even in a civil court, the odds were stacked against her – a working-class woman up against a rich and famous celebrity who represents the very worst of macho culture. Nevertheless, she won, and a river of solidarity flowed toward her and kept flowing into the protestors that marched through Dublin City three days later, chanting over and over again ‘thank you Nikita!’
“For absolute clarity:
The jury believed #NikitaHand, a survivor.
The jury believed #ConorMcGregorIsARapist.”
This was the viral tweet posted by Ruth Coppinger the moment Nikita won her case. One week later she was re-elected as TD for Dublin West. A key part of her campaign was her 10-point programme to overhaul the judicial system for cases of gender-based violence. Some of the objectives are more complex than others, for example, a public domestic violence register, as Ciara Mangan has pointed out, is not viable as it could be exploited by far-right vigilante groups and is a veritable threat to the confidentiality of survivors.
- 1. Outlaw character references in cases of Gender Based Violence.
- 2. Protect confidentiality – no access to counselling notes for defence legal team.
- 3. Provide Advocates and representation for complainants in the court process.
- 4. Compulsory training of the judiciary and juries regarding sexual and gender based violence. Outlaw rapes myths and victim blaming by defence lawyers in court cases.
- 5. Invest and recruit court personnel so that nobody waits more than a year for a SA, rape or GBV case.
- 6. Education programme in schools, colleges (and wider society) to challenge misogyny and gender violence.
- 7. Introduce mechanism to recall and make accountable judges who make misogynistic and insensitive rulings.
- 8. Introduce ‘Valerie Law’ to block any parental or inheritance rights for those who kill spouses.
- 9. Femicide and intimate partner violence training for Gardaí.
- 10. Introduce Domestic Violence Register / ‘Jennie’s Law’ to make available information about anyone with a conviction for domestic violence.
Survivors seek justice to right the wrong that was done to them. What they face instead is ‘a subterranean river of chauvinism’ from the individuals, organisations and institutions that they place their trust in. When a criminal case is dropped, when an abuser is given a suspended sentence, when a survivor loses their case, a double-sided message is sent that gender-based violence is acceptable and normal, and that survivors are not to be believed. The judicial system is chock-full of contradictions and, ironically, injustices, that will truly never resolve gender-based violence, so deeply rooted as it is in capitalism itself. However, fighting misogyny in the courts is still vital, as is doing anything we can to fight for reforms that improve people’s lives in the here and now. For survivors who choose to seek justice, it is not necessarily about wanting the perpetrator to suffer, but about being validated in a world that tries at every point to silence them. It can be a vital part of the healing process.
Struggle vital to end gender-based violence
The implementation of any aspect of Ruth Coppinger’s 10-point programme that is rightly being fought for by socialist feminists and survivors alike, would make a monumental difference, but without a connected broad struggle against the capitalist system, the deep-rooted systemic change that is more desperately needed with every day that passes will slip through our fingers. This includes survivors continuing to empower themselves and identify with each other on the basis of their experiences, but it also extends to taking on all of the violence and suffering that the capitalist system metes out on ordinary people, from depriving the trans community their right to healthcare and existence full-stop, to the increased militarism and warmongering globally, to the deeply depraved and beyond heart-breaking genocide in Palestine – drawn together most recently by Ella Keidar Greenberg’s inspiring refusal to enlist in the Israeli Occupation Forces. Her refusenik status is one example of this, but protests, walk-outs, occupations, targeted boycotts and strikes all have a role to play.
A united working class movement that subsumes and integrates the fight against gender based violence, misogyny, transphobia and racism as an integral and indispensable current is the only thing that can ultimately challenge the deeply misogynistic and violent culture that flows through and from the increasingly fascistic capitalist system and its manifestations in the patriarchal, adversarial judiciary.
Over three thousand people marched for this reason on International Women’s Day in Dublin, and hundreds likewise in Belfast, Cork, Galway and Limerick. All over the world, in Kenya, Bangladesh, Argentina, France, Iran, India, hundreds of thousands of women and LGBTQ+ people are being spurred to action as capitalist justice reveals itself to be another side of the same sexist, racist, transphobic and anti-working class coin. This doesn’t mean that any reform that makes the judicial system one iota less re-traumatising isn’t worth fighting for – it absolutely is – as part of doing everything we can to grow our socialist feminist struggles and movements for deep-rooted systemic change that must in every instance be predicated on believing survivors.
