Violence Against Women in a Time of Tolerated Public Disorder

Which big promises are ok to make?

For whatever reason all of my recent experiences with public disorder have revolved around the Luas, which is Dublin’s tram system. About 18 months ago the gate into St. Stephen’s Green immediately by the Luas stop became a locus for drug-taking and drug-dealing; standing at the stop you would occasionally see a mattress in the bushes. I noted at the time the gate and stop itself suddenly had a rotating cast of eight to ten addicts in situ at all times, hanging around waiting for someone, passing things between their hands, arguing with each other. At about the same time one of them attacked me at the stop - I was at the stop fishing around in my wallet for my travel card when he shoulder-charged me into my back, hard, and then screamed in my face for a few seconds before moving off. I had my earphones in (won’t make that mistake again) so I’ve no idea what he said - my main memory of the incident is that, as he screamed at me I could see through my peripheral vision the tourists at the stop suddenly and silently move away from us like a school of fish, or as though pushed by an invisible forcefield. Funny the things you remember.

And then the most recent one: about a week ago I was coming home from work on the tram at rush hour (heatwave - bumper to bumper in a metal petri dish, seething with sweat). A drunk middle-eastern guy was having a monotonous conversation on speakerphone at full volume. A local (gristly, hair in corn rows, grey skin) got on and began bertaing him in a manner that started at talking volume but then rapidly escalated in volume and nastiness, and spent about 20 minutes not quite screaming his head off but almost, telling the foreign guy he was scaring and annoying people, to fuck off back to his own country, you’re not wanted, we speak english here or Irish here, do you even know what Irish is, no one wants to hear it etc etc etc.

It’s not limited to the Luas - every trip into Dublin city centre that I’ve taken in the last 5 years has at least one incident like this, you are constantly surrounded by marginal people who appear to be on the verge of an explosion of violence, or by people whose behaviour edges into the personal space of those around them in a careless, irritating and intimidating way designed to provoke confrontation. If I was to characterise the vibe of the city it would be an air of simmering menace, and all this is wreathed in dope smoke, the stink of which has become ubiquitous in all public places in the capital in the last few years.

Dublin has its own particular problems but every major city in the world I’ve been to in the last few years is the same. One feels there’s a continuum that starts with people playing music through their phone on the train, moves through being visibly high by a playground, and ends with a stabbing. Every link on that chain has loosened. Public disorder and interpersonal violence feel as though they have skyrocketed in all countries post-Covid; governments either don’t know how to get to grips with it, or aren’t capable of doing so, or don’t care.

So it’s worth noting the areas where governments, activists and media are willing to use the kind of law and order rhetoric that the public like, and yearn for, and that used to be more common in a less touchy-feely political era. There are a couple, but the most obvious is how politicians talk about violence against women. The death of an American woman at the hands of her boyfriend in Killarney has brought this topic back in the news but it hasn’t been far from the headlines. The murder of Ashling Murphy in particular seems to be an inflection point. Starting from then, it has become routine for politicians to employ totalising and utopian rhetoric that is absent from all other public order discussions - suggesting violence against women is something we can and should hope to eradicate entirely, and that that is a realistic policy goal.

At the time of Murphy’s murder the then Minister for Justice Helen McEntee, launching the Third National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (2022–2026) was titled “Zero Tolerance”, explicitly called for a “radical cultural shift (to) eliminate violence against women in all its forms…. Our North Star – zero tolerance – can only be achieved if we all work towards it.” At the same time her Government partner, green party Justice Spokesperson Patrick Costello called on the men of Ireland to “reflect on our own behaviour and to make the necessary changes in our lives to put an end to misogyny and violence against women in Ireland.” (Murphy’s killer was not Irish, by the way.) At the time it became a trope in Irish politics to refer to Murphy’s murder as as a “watershed” - not in the sense that we would redouble our efforts on this topic generally but that the move to fully end violence against women would begin here.

A war on violence against a vulnerable group is a valid political goal, and it’s sometimes important to speak as though the total solution of a particular problem is within reach, because to speak otherwise would seem to accept something unacceptable. What interests me is not the justice of a war to protect women, but how willing the government is to make utopian promises of one type of public disorder while ignoring, dismissing, and in fact through policy encouraging every other type.

It’s worth remembering therefore how the above contrasts with what happened during covid and after, which is that there has been a general increase in non-criminal social disorder in western cities since covid. Much of this contrasts with the reported statistics which state that violent crime is falling everywhere, but there is an increase in daily public incivility and social disorder that has changed how people experience Western cities since the pandemic. It starts at a very low level: nearly half of U.S. adults (47%) say the way people behave in public these days is ruder than before the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes 20% who say behavior today is a lot ruder. Commentators like Charles Fain Lehman have tried to parse the difference between what the figures say and how it feels by showing how a constant thrum of public disorder (which he defines as “the domination of public stress for public purposes”) creates psychological distress and feelings of a lack of safety amongst the public. He notes that Gallup found that 77 percent of Americans said they believed that crime was increasing. As in the US, so in Ireland; the general response to concerns about safety from politicians is that things are better than they used to be and you’re just wrong.

It’s especially hard to square the Hanging Judge tough talk from politicians about misogyny when so many of their positions seem to conflict directly with that talk, or undermine it. Obvious recent examples include the ongoing drive (with very uncertain support) to legalise drugs in Ireland; another would be this article in the Irish Times around the time of the Parnell Square stabbing, which sought to excuse the actions of the attacker as historically normal. Another obvious example: whether or not violence and disorder (including against women) are driven by immigration or not, it is simply true that a large amount of migration into Ireland is from countries with verifiably terrible cultures of violence against women, and no mainstream politician or commentator seems to particularly care. A clash of the list of Countries with Highest Lifetime Intimate Partner Violence with irish immigration and asylum statistics reveals that many nationalities listed appear in the most common groups of asylum seekers, immigrants or work visas issued in Ireland, reveals that countries who rank high on the first list (India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Uganda and DR Congo) also rank very high on the second.

It’s therefore hard to square a generally how violence against women and the utopian rhetoric that has come to surround it, and that has become the default way of speaking about it, conflicts with the progressive goal of a criminal justice system which in all other areas regards seeking to understand and reform rather than punish as the morally superior stance, and one that generally regards harsh sentencing an oppressive tactic and seek structural answers to questions rather than reducing them to good and evil.

One of the interesting facets of all this is that it’s not clear that women are more lenient in law and order terms than men are. So while we might be tempted to make this about a gender war, and women’s increased power in the political sphere, it’s not as simple as that. It may be that women are in favour of harsher sentencing for violence against women and that the utopian talk is therefore meeting a direct political demand; but polling shows women feel the same way about other kinds of public disorder too. Polling in both the US and Canada has found that women are more likely than men to state that the courts are “not harsh enough”, with the main the main difference being that women are generally more supportive of rehabilitation as part of sentencing and much less supportive of the death penalty than men are.

I think it’s easy to make an elision between intimate partner violence (which is the type that women specifically suffer from more often and is most dangerous to them, and which does require specific solutions) and general disorder and stranger violence and women’s fear about that. The first thing to say is that a number of the cases (in fact most) of the ones in Ireland that have prompted the zero tolerance talk, such as the murders of Urantsetseg Tserendorj or Aisling Murphy, have been instances of stranger violence. The second point is that discussion by the most stringent advocates for extreme moves on women’s safety always couch their concerns in terms of public disorder and stranger violence. An example of this is May Lou McDonald’s speech to the Dail after Ashling Murphy’s murder where she identified key challenges women faced as incivilities such as “mansplaining”, and dealt with the psychological toll on women as a lack of safety in public such as a feeling that

“I have played by societal rules even when I knew they were not fair and placed a disproportionate burden of responsibility on me, as a woman, because from the time we are young girls, we are conditioned to develop an awareness that young men and boys are not.”

She then listed the “everyday mental checklist women are forced to run through just to exist safely” in public spaces such as not wearing revealing clothes, not exercising with earphones in, and putting €20 in a bra on a night out in case of being mugged.

We’ll leave aside for a moment her idea (which I have spoken about previously) that men are not aware of violence and don’t worry about it because it doesn’t affect them, which is an insane lie utterly at variance with the facts and reality, and so false it almost qualifies as a kind of gendered blood libel. Her speech is representative of the general political reaction to violence against women, which is that it places it in the context of public disorder, and that they understand in large part as a subset of that issue.

Outsourcing the development of policy to specialist, representative expert groups who a centre (emotionally and morally) a progressive approach means law and order and disorder issues become solely a function of identity. There is no group for the average member of the public against disorder, and especially not men and the issue can only be dealt with in those terms since the Oppressor/ Oppressed model is the only legitimate one to understand any policy issue. Public debate about disorder - the decline in civility, the decline in safety, the absence of visible policing, the sense that violence is always poised to erupt - tends to focus on the problem generally but it can only become the focus of politicians when it can be placed in an identitarian category, and as a response to the civic society groups who represent those categories. That’s why street violence in dublin is almost always framed around the safety of immigrants, women or gay people, which directly creates this sense of a rising neo-fascist threat inspired by online toxicity, as opposed to a general degeneration of civic life that impacts everyone (men in particular, if we’re looking to pick a single group) but that only a few get to complain about and be heard.

This affects not just who we listen to, but the explanations we find acceptable. Violence against women is seen as an ideological problem rather than a law and order one - so for instance many Irish politicians such as Simon Harris and Paul Murphy have sought to blame the manosphere for violence against women in Ireland. In recent days we had Harris talking about “algorithms of hate” and remarking that:

We have to ask ourselves where this hatred comes from. It is being cultivated online, in dark corners of the internet, and by self-styled influencers who preach a gospel of misogyny. This is not just ‘online talk’ anymore—it has real, lethal consequences on our streets.”

Micheál Martin has also spoken about how:

There is a pipeline from the online manosphere, which normalizes the degradation of women, to the physical violence we are seeing in our communities. We are seeing a radicalization of young men online, and it is manifesting in the most horrific way possible.

After Aisling Murphy’s murder all members of the Irish political landscape sought to blame factors such as overbearing mammies and single sex schooling as reasons why Irish men had become such beasts. Again - the killer was not Irish, had not been through the Irish school system and did not have an Irish mother; there is no evidence that the manosphere has played any role in any recent Irish crime. But this is representative of the kind of explanation you reach for in any system that applies the Oppressor/ Oppressed framework, and it shows why such a framework finds public disorder in particular so tricky. If the majority of victims of (for example) murder are men, as they are in Ireland and everywhere else, that fact has no place in such a structure and has to be passed over for a more appealing victim group.

Just to be crystal clear: treating intimate partner violence against women as a particular problem seems totally reasonable to me and I would guess it is to most other people. The same goes for women’s feelings of vulnerability when out in public. If anyone wants to introduce strict policing and sentencing measures to address those, I’d vote for them - I’m here, waiting. I would not propose dealing with violence against men in the targeted way; in part because men themselves wouldn’t appreciate that so there is neither a benefit to the public nor benefit to politicians. But aside from that, there seems to me to be this basic lie at the heart of the “zero tolerance for violence against women” rhetoric which is that we can be tolerant of all types of public disorder and the collapse of civility and self-restraint, and ignore and encourage them through policy and inaction, and but then turn around and say one particular type of public disorder is unacceptable and must be crushed. In fairness to the public themselves I think they know this is a lie. I think politicians know that too but they don’t know of any easy way to address that within the Oppressor/ Oppressed system. The end result is that all the energy that goes into public safety has been pulled out of the places it used to be and concentrated in the rhetoric around “vulnerable” identity groups, with women being the key one. What you’re left with is a state of nature for 90% of people where anything goes, and preposterous rhetorical overreach in favour of identifable vulnerable groups, which in truth comes to nothing because it’s a false summary of the problem.

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