16 Days of Global Activism Against Violence Against Women & Girls

This year the Family Resource Centre celebrated twenty-five years of providing a Community Response to gender based violence through it’s Inchicore Domestic Violence Outreach Centre. A service embedded in the community working from a bottom up approach, using all its senses to respond to gender based violence and has made a real difference down these years to over 4000 survivors of  male violence and abuse.

 The innovative Community Response is much more than a service, it is present, on every street, in every group, at every school, shops, at voluntary and statutory and medical centres. A disclosure of abuse happens in all of these spaces to those trusted at the moment of disclosure. The survivors know they are ready, it is then that talk becomes action. The cornerstone of the Community Response is relationship. All of the staff of the Outreach Centre and the main Family Resource Centre are excellent at relationship building. Without relationships and the know how of the wisdom holders, the process cannot begin. Gender violence takes many forms. It is a process of oppression and the strength of any Community Response lies in its critical analysis and understanding of power. Its capacity to work with survivors for as long as needs be. It takes human compassion and connection from the heart, allowing tears to flow and the wounds and the pain to heal in a non-judgmental atmosphere. It is also about believing and listening, providing choices and leadership.

 While it sounds service based at an individual level, it is a core part of the overall daily work of the Family Resource Centre, Community Development Project collectively challenging structural and patriarchal power. The personal is political. So beginning in the home where hurt is present is going deep into the roots and as good a place as ever to start. Power is very present in the structures of communities. It can be used for good or bad, revictimizing survivors by ill informed services. The reinforcement of the powerlessness. Our Community Response, in its early years provided a lot of education to ensure all the statutory and voluntary workers and agencies were working from the analysis of power and control. Now, twenty-five years later, the Domestic Violence Outreach Centre is well rooted in the direct and surrounding areas and communities. Those wanting to leave violence and abuse don’t have to leave their homes, they have a service that offers them support, information, confidentiality and accompaniment to legal aid, solicitors and through the courts. They can be linked into the relevant services, counselling, financial agencies, Garda and medical. All of these happens as a result of a Community Response, refuge is the very last option because the community has the survivor’s back.

 Other strategies of the Community Response model is the use of art as a means of raising collective awareness. Seizing opportunities to bring focus and giving voice to survivors to tell their own stories through art in all its forms. Through a relationship with the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Education and Community Program, seventeen local women were invited to work with artist in residency; Rochelle Rubenstein in 1995, along with other artists; Ailbhe Murphy, Joe Lee and Rhona Henderson. This collaboration resulted in the renowned exhibition; Once Is Too Much, an eleven piece installation of powerful expression. It spent fourteen weeks at IMMA in between Andy Warhol and Kiki Smith. For eight more years it travelled key cities and institutions in Ireland. One of the installations which we made with Ailbhe Murphy was ‘And they tell me…’. It consisted of glass shelves and fresh lilies. It started with 29 lilies and has gone on as a living memorial, unfortunately growing each year. This year it had 263 lilies representing and keeping the women’s spirits alive, although they were brutally beaten, shot, burned, stabbed and strangled in Ireland between December 1996 – 2023. It is a beautiful, intense image but all is not s it appears. Ben Okri’s poem; ‘And they tell me life is good and to live it gently’ gives it’s name to this piece as a juxtaposition to these women being killed by their intimate partners, their sons, their brothers and strangers.

For our action for this year’s 16 Days Campaign, which ended on Sunday 10th of December, we celebrated in Richmond Barracks the success of a Community Response which is life giving, protective and inspirational in its simplicity as a model of practice. The other action we took was to actively and collectively Remember, through both the power of art and the beauty of the lilies to make publicly visible what is usually a set of statistics. The 263 women who lost their life through male violence in Ireland between December 1996 – 2023. On Sunday 03rd of December, the local women of the Flames Not Flowers Group, gently laid out the women’s names along with a lily on the steps of Dublin City Council and on the bridge by the Four Courts, institutions responsible for safe homes and communities. A legal system for the protection of all citizens of the Irish State. Gender based violence is a local and global power issue. Don’t let oppression be serviced by silence, challenge it deeply.