History, Hysteria and Barbara Hewson

In what were less-than-halcyon days for us girls and women, we lived in a world of blithe and accepted sexism. As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, if I had a fiver for every time in my girlhood that I was pawed by a man, I’d be retired on Bali. With my friends. Were we damaged?  No. Would we call a helpline? No. Are we victims? No. And well-intentioned efforts to make us victims is to degrade and devalue the experience of those men and women who are and were.  

I was half-way through my second Mikado biscuit the other night, when I heard reports of Barbara Hewson’s comments regarding civil-liberties and historical abuse.  Dislodging the snowy bits from my sinuses, I went online to read the article itself.

I disagree, outright, with Ms Hewson on the lowering of the age of consent. Moreover, I cannot understand how any situation involving a nine-year-old girl could possibly be deemed a “misdemeanour”. But applying common sense, I doubt very much if a lawyer of her standing and expertise did, in fact, intend to include such a situation in her comments.

As a mother, I am ever-anxious about, and alert to,  the safety of my own and other children. The idea of an adult being sexually attracted to, or God forbid active, with a child repulses me.

Though I believe Ms Hewson is absolutely wrong about making the age of consent 13, I have to commend her on her courage for raising the wider issues, knowing she risked being categorised as something along the lines of, say, ‘a disgrace to her sex and her profession, mad, bad, disgusting, childless, heartless, clueless, a rape-apologist, or paedo-protecting, paedo-loving filth’.   

I am disappointed, but not quite surprised, that experts working in this difficult area have not emerged to say that the broader issues Ms Hewson raises are at least worth discussing, calmly and objectively. Perhaps, in time, they will do so, despite their fear of the anti-scial media. The angry-bird twitter reaction is quite something to behold. Members of the twitterati would want to hope, fervently, Ms Hewson is not litigious.

Some child-protection experts, especially in the UK, will tell you of their discomfort, sometimes alarm, at the lack of common sense being applied to historical cases, and by the blanket application of the very different standards and attitudes, we so rightly hold today, to the society of 40/50 years ago. A time when people could, and did, marry at 15. There’s the sense, almost, that applying those standards and attitudes now, will suddenly right past wrongs. 

In the last 24-hours, I’ve read some considered, common-sense posts, that deal with the issues Ms Hewson raises, as opposed to the hysteria that followed. They point out that while today, we rightly consider our 16 year-olds to be children, 40/50 years ago, a 16-year-old girl might not have been considered a child at all. She could have been at work, engaged, or as one excellent poster, a mother and teacher, put it “dating the boss”.

In those less-than-halcyon days for us girls and women, we lived in a world of blithe and accepted, sexism. As I wrote in another entry on this blog, if I had a fiver for every time in my girlhood I was pawed by a man, I’d be retired on Bali. Was I damaged? No. Would I call a helpline? No. Am I victim? No. That said, I believe it is important to make it clear that what had no impact on me, apart from anger and annoyance, might have had a far greater effect on those who were less resilient, particularly and especially, according to the context.

From talking to my women friends, our shared experience is typical of the culture and attitude of the time. To a woman, we are disturbed by current moves to equate our contemporary, common and casual experience, with the horror visited on others. Far from supporting victims, I believe such efforts  – however well-intentioned – devalue and diminish the experience of the women and men whose lives and futures were damaged, even annihilated, by what was done to them as children.

Leaving the 70s and 80s aside, what if today our own teenage daughters were to have a similar experience? Let me put it this way. God Herself would have to help the poor man find his bits. Because law enforcement and nanoscience combined could not. And that’s only because while we, the mothers,  were scrabbling around the house, for the glasses on our heads, our daughters in their needle-heels and Converse would have got to him first. It’s what we did ourselves all those years ago. We’ve made sure to teach our children well.    

Today -  and thankfully -  abuse is abuse is abuse. Society is clear on what is acceptable and what is not. But if we are at all concerned for our children, if we are at all committed to knowing more about what is a complex, disturbing issue – particularly in the context of the past – we must be able to have a public discussion  that does not involve our establishing ourselves as the ultimate protectors at one extreme, while vilifying those with whom we strongly disagree, as the ultimate abuse-apologists, at the other.  

Ms Hewson’s comments might make for a good tabloid headline. But for the sake of the victims whose lives have been blighted by their experience as children,  the issues she raises demand more from all of us than a tabloid response.  In her comments about lawyers, agendas,  “do-gooders” and “crusades”,  she does no more than echo the stated reaction of many innocent, responsible parents to their experience of social services.   In that sense she has insight into the lived experience of families.

But in the “moral panic” currently gripping society, and our efforts to make up for our past and lavish failures, do we risk making the idea and application of  ‘justice’,  absolutely ‘unjust’? Is it safe to apply our hard-won knowldege and standards of today, to the ignorance and laissez-faire attitude of an era long past?

While many of us might not agree with Ms Hewson on specifics, the broader issues she raises are worth looking at in-depth. Given her work and experience to date, I find it hard to believe that she sought to be, or become in the public mind, an apologist for rapists and abusers.   But from the populist reaction – and indeed that of her own firm – it seems that even to raise a question about the practice and standards within the current child-protection system in the English-speaking world, is to be immediately “ignorant”,  a pariah, pro-abuser or abuse.

If we really want to protect our children, then what is so dangerous about debate, reflection or common sense? Or is our concern for children and their protection so new, pc-shallow or shaky, that in a situation like this, we feel forced to protest too much?

As a mother of a teen and an almost- teen, I would like to see us do more, vastly more, for victims.  But that does not include equating the wrong of what was, once-upon-at-time, a commonplace, socially-accepted experience, with what left them with a lived  – and for many still-living  – hell.  

Miracle Creams

 

It was my birthday last week making me older than Garibaldi when he struck against Austria for Italy and the Risorgimento, and Captain Scott of the Antarctic when he died. That realisation of uselessness and waste propelled me to an ancient farmacia where unguents are prepared according to ones desires and ancestry, then left by elves on rosewood counters for discovery at first light.

Actually, I headed off to the local Co-op and picked up Olay Regenerist Night Recovery Cream off a chipped, chipboard shelf.  The cream is purple and scented. But it’s smooth. Very smooth. For 13 euro this signalled both investment and intention, given that my traditional facial-beauty regime is the shower-gel of the day followed by a quick rub of Dove Body Lotion.  Thanks to the genes or the Dove, my face is still fine. The traitor is the neck. I have my mother’s and she had her mother’s.  That mother’s mother died in childbirth aged 27. How her neck aged, we will never know. But I look at my beautiful daughter and think…. hmm… she has all that puckered, goosey-business before her.

This morning I had a text conversation with a criminal lawyer friend about Regenerist. She has yet to try it.  We decided we really needed to read magazines as our beauty regimes were parlous.  About as safe and desirable as the Yemen.

The thing is, I read two magazines recently and was shocked by what I found. Not by what was in them, but by what I did to them. I found myself pulling out some pages for the beautiful pictures. I used to do that as a teen. Now here I was, the mother of a teen, ripping out images of girls looking distinctly architectural, holding bags that had the softness secret of magnolia petals.

I’ve kept the pictures by my desk and paw them from time to time. It’s another world. A world of possibility to which I was once privy. A world from which, through work and responsibility, I had exiled myself.

With these pictures I’ve applied for a permit to revisit that world, and indeed, the world in which I first encountered it.  One of self-consideration and excitement. In that new, old world, attention is expected and required.  Therefore, there’s more walking and fruit, less work and wine.

There’s time, too, to look in the mirror.  And maybe just in time.

The jury is still out on the Regenerist and the peptides, but in the new light of the new year and the new spring, what’s perfectly clear is this: being a mortgage meeter/metre/meter and a Mom can function as a perfect vanishing cream.

Time to open the purple jar, look in and through the mirror, to the world of the beautiful pictures.

 

Cardinal Keith

The Cardinal Keith story stank from day one.  So he felt-up a few men.  They were men. Grown-ups. Lads. Well aware of the clerical shenanigans of the life they had chosen and well able to take care of themselves. If they were that aggrieved, they could have gone around to the palace some dark night and sorted him.

But no, far better to sit and wait. Or better still, to lie in wait, in the long, fragrant canonical grass.

It’s like the Rennard case all over again. Boo hoo. Only this time in drag and anonymous, safely hidden behind correctness and process and procedure and ‘concern’.

Those shouting loudest about double standards should think again. His cardinal sin was to deny his humanity and sexuality to the point he decried it in others.

If the Cardinal has learned a lesson, I hope that Keith has friends and family around him at this time; men and women who have lived a little and failed a little and because they have, possess the compassion and insight necessary to mind him.

Hell, indeed, hath no fury. Either side of the straight/LGBT divide.

We are all of us fragile. We are imperfect. We are human.

God forgive us.

In Praise of India Knight

Ah India Knight…in today’s Sunday Times. You do my heart good.

Ladies, let’s get a grip

 

If I had a fiver for every time I was groped or harassed I would be retired on Bali.

While I’m rearing my son to have absolute respect for women, when it comes to the workplace, I’ll be apprenticing my daughter in the art of smash-and-grab.

Since when have we women forgotten how to apply a good kick?  Or confide ‘Gosh, I’m sure your wife/partner will love hearing about this’. Works a treat.

In my prime, I always favoured a good feel right back.  Only suddenly and violently.

That hot, slippery, gelatinous mass in my tightening fist, redolent of the eyes of camels with hyperthyroidism.

The groper, wincing, open-mouthed, left, literally, on his toes.

In the workplace we should refuse to become victims of harassment, by making it absolutely clear that we will first-time -  guaranteed to be last-time –  get a grip.

 

Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries

Today, a report will be published into the 30,000 girls and women enslaved in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.  

In Tamil Nadu is a caste lower than any caste. The most untouchable of the Untouchables. They are the Puthirai Vannars, the “unseeable” Washermen to the dalits. According to the Indian news-magazine Tehelka,” they live on the fringes of dalit colonies, condemned by birth to eke out their lives in a state worse than slavery. Traditionally, they were not to leave their homes during the day and could go about their work only by night. When they went outdoors, they were to tie coconut leaves around their bodies to sweep away their footprints as they walked.”

In Ireland we have our own Puthirai Vannars: the unseeable washerwomen of the Magdalene Laundries. The 30,000 girls and women imprisoned, enslaved, humiliated, tortured in 13 laundries run by four religious orders. Throughout this 150-year-old institutional insanity, hair was shorn, identity and dignity stripped, lives and sanity lost, numbers issued, beads said, tears shed, hymns sung. Over 2,000 of these women’s babies were stolen, many exported as big business -  and bigger redemption -  to “real mothers”.  Returning to the dormitories to find their babies gone, the washerwomen would collapse on the rows of small beds, crying from milk and madness, their breasts the size and heft of drumlins.

Being ‘put away’ to the holy gulag was entirely arbitrary. Having parents deemed to be ‘unsuitable’ by the clergy, or by social workers, being already an inmate of a psychiatric institution or orphanage; raped by strangers, family or clergy; ‘retarded’,  flirtatious, unconventional; pregnant, or deemed likely-to-become pregnant, outside of marriage; all featured in the committal mix.  Frequently, being a widowed father was a parlous condition in terms of keeping ones daughters at home. In certain quarters, the idea of a father rearing his girls alone was deemed to be dangerous. Women who escaped were regularly ‘arrested’ by the police and returned to their ‘prison’.

For the son who inherited the farm, the laundry was a handy way to ‘Disappear’ the daughter who might become the maiden aunt, long before a wife was found or seed sown.  Apart from their crime of being raped, unlawfully pregnant, headstrong, or just bloody contrary, almost universally, these girls and women shared a particular danger: they were poor.

My old school had a laundry attached. A Magdalene asylum founded  in the 19th century “for the protection and reform of dissolute women”, it was later taken over by an order of nuns who ran an academically-superb girls’ school. To this day, I’m proud of my school and grateful for the first-class education I got from the nuns.

I remember clearly my first year in the faintly-loamy classroom. Towards the end of a day practising letters and getting high on newly-shaven pencils, the teacher would say would say Leanaí, téigí a choladh. 40 small girls would park our heads, ear down, beside the cold ceramic inkwells on the warmer battered desks, suddenly privy to the random scrapings of another world. Doing our best to do as we were told:  “Children, go to sleep”.

Gradually we became expert on roll-calls, the intricacies of the letter S and ‘Penitents’.  ‘Penitents’ was perfect for a four-year old with a fetish for words.  Never having never seen it in print, I took it as Penitence. Like Justice sitting over the courthouse, Penitence walked among us, scrubbing albs and amices, tablecloths and candlewick bedspreads, steam-ironing uniforms, glossing floors with beeswax to the limits of insurance (though who, then, would ever even imagine suing the nuns?), endurance.

When I asked my mother what Penitents meant she said something about “atoning”. When I asked my grandmother what “atoning” meant, she said don’t mind my mother. That My Dead Grandfather believed “atoning” was public madness where bitter priests and do-gooders committed innocent women to living hell; that My Dead Grandfather had no time for do-gooders or the clergy.  I asked her what “the clergy” was and she asked me was I stupid. Hadn’t she just told me?

I loved My Dead Grandfather though I knew him only vicariously. He’d crossed the local bishop about the conversion of the ‘Black Babies’. Believing they and their parents should be left with their own, infinitely-superior, spirituality and morality. Making my then school-boy uncles marked men for the less Christian of the Christian Brothers. Even as a pre-schooler, then, I knew that do-gooders thumped craws and would never see the face of God. The instruction of the heretic’s widow? Look the Penitents in the eye. Show respect, kindness.  Say ‘good day’.

It would be a while before I had my chance, breaking off from what must have been Bring Flowers of the Fairest in the May Procession. As a hundred or more girls, hands joined, marched in reverence and the cherry-blossom confetti of the convent garden, a hint of two women eyed us by the convent wall. The nun in her winged-glasses, small and white like an edelweiss, headed up the schoolgirl crocodile, waving her arms as if wrestling the real thing. To us small girls, it was entirely possible. She was home from Zambia after all.

“Sing, cailíní, sing. Let your voices float up high into the air. Up to our dear Blessed Mother”.

Buckets of arial cover.  Great . “Good day!” I said in the holy noise, to the pair of women watching the invisible notes ascend. They turned, horrified. Running for their lives, with their ruined teeth, mutilated hair, shunned even by the tail of the pink-petal blizzard.

At school we would see the unseeable washerwomen regularly. A tragicomic huddle, blown along the convent avenue by the prevailing South-Westerly, on their way to buy hair-slides in the toyshop, or a sneaky chemical-cream doughnut in the bakery next door.  I was in the toyshop buying little angel and wedding images – what we called ‘Scraps’ -  for swapping, one day when they arrived. Some nervous . More loud and giggling. Others dead. Two things are vivid. The shopkeeper’s kindness to these alien, neighbour women. And their scent.  In the laundry they smelled of starch, shock and rosaries. Here they smelled of less than nothing.

The laundry itself was heaving. Taking in washing from hospitals, businesses, religious orders and families across the city and county, returning immaculate tablecloths, sheets, bedspreads, altar-cloths and assorted clerical ‘smalls’. On weekends, my sister and I would go through the red door, stepping down into the lemony heat to collect our stiff, brown-paper package  - with its personalised laundry tag – from a bespectacled nun, in a semi-wimple and industrial gold cross.  Behind her, was a tiny, speechless woman in miniature clothes, small-boys’ lace-up shoes, elfin hands red, tight, shiny. A Miraculous Medal dazzling on a blue string. Today, as mothers, we agree: in her small silence she devoured us with her eyes. We became phobic about the laundry-parcel’s killer twine, imagining her boiling fingers pulling it tight.  One snip and families slept for the week between immaculate, guilty sheets.   In the laundry the washerwomen were kept calm, carried on, with battlefield bandages over their hearts.

Was this laundry at all more humane than its counterparts? Though I’d like to think so, I don’t know. One lovely nun who taught art never used the word ‘Penitents’ and banned it from our lips. To this gifted, vaguely-rebellious nun, they were always “The Ladies”. Before she died, she described the day they got their freedom, as the happiest of her life.

I’m writing about the Magdalene women, because like the rest of the Irish nation, I let them down. The conditions were no secret. Yet, as far as I know, there were no Bastille stormings by kindly neighbours bearing John’s Gospel, hugs and torches. Rather, the incarceration and ‘atonement’ of women were accepted and acceptable in a society where generations of girls lived with the ultimate -  yet idle –  threat  “if you’re bold  you’ll be put up to the Good Shepherds”.  The mere mention of the holy herdswomen being enough to detonate an explosion of Divine, everlasting resolve in the worst, recidivist, eight-year-old heart.

Today, Senator Martin McAleese, will present his long-awaited report into the treatment and conditions of the Magdalene women.  It will be an important step towards removing the social cataracts, sweeping away the traces of our indifference, to finally apologising and atoning for the abattoir treatment of our unseeable washerwomen, the Irish Puthirai Vannars.

My Dead Grandfather, wherever he is, would mightily approve.

 

Counting our blessings….. forever and today

 

All weekend, I have been counting my greatest blessings in this life: my two children.

The task took no time and forever.

My heart goes out to the parents at Newtown and to every mother and father across our world, grieving the loss of their daughter, their son, today. And always.