The ex-boyfriends aren’t the villains

Last week, following the publication of a report into the abuse of women incarcerated in church-run institutions in Ireland in the mid-20th century, I saw series of tweets assigning guilt to the men who impregnated the women who then ended up in the institutions as a result:

What we do know is that for every one of those 56,000 pregnancies, there was a man who shuddered, and came, and said “thanks very much” or “I love you”… and who subsequently buggered off and didn’t have his life ruined one bit. And never came back. And NOBODY. EVER. TALKS. ABOUT. THE. MEN. So all these men are STILL protected by the silence of the women that they put into these camps. F**k ’em. Let’s find out who they are by DNA. “Oh but they’re lovely fellas and they went on to have nice families”. Well, they’re NOT lovely fellas. They’re complicit in crimes. As I’ve said elsewhere: the Israelis are capable of finding and prosecuting 90 year old war criminals. What’s stopping the Irish?

I’ve not named this person as I don’t recognise their name and there’s no reference to a publication, university or government department or any other institution of any sort in their bio. But I do want to address the argument. There was a song written back in the 1980s by the late John Prine and Bobby Braddock called Unwed Fathers about a young mother cast aside by her family when she got pregnant (unlike in the majority of cases in Ireland, she got to keep her child) which has the refrain:

From a teenage lover to and unwed mother,
Kept under cover like some bad dream
But unwed fathers, they can’t be bothered
They run like water through a mountain stream.

But to complain that it’s the mothers who carry the shame and punishment as well as the hardships of pregnancy and childbirth while the dads just disappear and pretend it never happened is a different matter from saying they are criminals and should be hunted down using DNA profiling. Some of the fathers were rapists, some of them priests, teachers and others who might have known what lay in store for the women they abused. However, many were just naive young men, including teenagers, who didn’t know this and didn’t think of it and the phrasing used suggests that the women got no pleasure from the consensual sexual encounters. The boyfriends played no role in the subsequent abuse; this was carried out by the people who ran and staffed those institutions and who oversaw the organisations that ran them and most of those are dead. If anyone else bears responsibility for the women’s suffering, it is their parents and most of them, too, are dead.

It seems to me that some people are desperate to find someone to blame for the scandal who is still living and still in decent health. (Let’s not forget there were other abuse scandals involving Irish church-state institutions, such as the industrial schools; the victims were children as well as women.) It is more important to compensate those still living and to reunite families, where desired. As for the former, all the organisations in question took their orders from the bishops and cardinals who could have intervened to stop the cruelty and exploitation and the culture which fed it, but chose to enrich the church through it instead. The church surely still has land, buildings and other assets in Ireland and much of this could be sold to compensate the victims of their abuses. If the individual orders still exist and have assets, these could be seized but if not, they had parent organisations which are equally responsible.

As for the comparison with Israel and Nazi war criminals, this is also quite ridiculous. Israel tried and failed to bring a number of Nazis to justice using kidnappings and assassinations but in any case those targeted were non-Jews who were involved in a genocide against Jews, not Jews who abused Jewish girls and women in Jewish institutions in Israel. If such institutions had existed, no doubt there would be every bit as much difficulty bringing the perpetrators to justice as there has been in Ireland and elsewhere. Look at how difficult it is to bring Israeli soldiers and settlers who kill Palestinians to justice: it’s pretty much impossible. The war criminals are, in any case, more comparable to the actual abusers in the Irish institutions than to the victims’ ex-boyfriends.

Image source: Auguste Blanqui, via Wikipedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.