Last month two serial child sex offenders, Jeffrey Donaldson and George Gibney, were sentenced to 15 and 15 and a half years in prison respectively, for the horrific historical sexual abuse crimes they committed against multiple child victims in the 1980s and 1990s. One of them, Jeffrey Donaldson was sentenced in Northern Ireland and the other, George Gibney in the Republic of Ireland. Both cases involved historic child sexual abuse, rape and sexual assault against multiple child victims and both involved serious harm and breach of trust.
Donaldson was one of Northern Ireland’s most prominent and most powerful political figures holding public officer for nearly four decades. Gibney was a high-profile ‘celebrated’ Irish Olympic swimming coach to teams at the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. They were sentenced within three days of each other Monday 12th and Thursday 15th of October. I thought it would be interesting to write a comparative piece highlighting the similarities and differences between how each of these predatory men were sentenced.
However, when I started to write about it I realised that while their conviction and sentencing are very significant moments for their victims and for all victim survivors of similar offences, I found myself thinking more about why it took so long to bring these men to justice than about the sentence lengths they received and how they were calculated.
Then, within weeks of these sentences being handed down the Minister for Justice in the Republic of Ireland described a video Ad about the importance of consent for children shared on social media by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC), depicting a child not wanting a hug from her grandparents, as ‘both inappropriate and demeaning to grandparents’. The Ad was one of three, and part of a campaign run by DRCC called We-Consent, “premised on the idea that boundaries should be respected from an early age and to respect others’ boundaries too”.
The Minister’s officials intervened and asked the DRCC to remove the add and the public controversy lit up on radio, television and social media channels. The debate seemed to be evenly divided by those who thought it was a huge insult to grandparents, a waste of resources and an example of state overreach on one hand, and those who completely supported the Ad and saw it as a legitimate attempt to highlight an important message about children and consent, that they have the right to so no to hug, even from their grandparents. The backlash to the consent Ad provided us an opportunity to examine our cultural norms about children and their right to consent over their own bodies and who may touch them, and about who gets upset about the idea that children should have the right to say no to a hug. This reminded me of the work done by Associate Professor Sinead Ring analysing a body of case law on delay in historical sexual abuse cases in Irish courts between 1996 and 2006, and what this analysis tells us about the role of adults and courts in silencing the voices of children reporting sexual abuse.
In her 2017 article titled ‘The Victim of Historical Child Sexual Abuse in the Irish Courts 1999-2006’, Ring asked ‘why did the sexual abuse of children go unrecognised as a societal problem for so long?’ and concluded that the courts, through their use of the notion ‘dominion’, colluded with society in the silencing of children who were sexually abused. Examining legal cases taken by defendants between 1999-2006 to prohibit their trial for child sexual abuse offences due to delayed reporting, Ring’s analysis (2017) found that when the courts viewed the victim as still under the ‘dominion’ of the abuser then their reporting delay could be excused and the application to prohibit the trial was denied. Trials of offences committed against victims whose delayed reporting was not covered by the notion of ‘dominion’ did not go ahead. Ring (2017) notes that ‘under the dominion paradigm, the courts distorted victims’ accounts of their experiences and sidelined stories that pointed towards a culture of indifference to abuse’. In particular, she notes that if the judgments of our courts become the story of our history, then the delay cases tell a story of victims proactively disclosing the abuse to adults at the time, but their disclosures were not acted upon. In addition, she notes that ‘the courts interpreted the notion of dominion in a way that silenced these elements of victims’ histories and closed off consideration of the indifference shown by adults at the time’. Ring concludes by noting that:
‘The experiences of victims presented to the courts in the period 1999-2006 indicate that parents, teachers, gardaí and other members of society were involved in creating and sustaining a culture of silencing around child sexual abuse that existed not only during the period of abuse, but for decades afterwards. If Irish society is serious about reducing the incidence of child sexual abuse in society, the burden is on the community to create a climate of safety and transparency, in which the abuse of children is not tolerated, and in which children are supported in reporting.’
The courts approach to dealing with these delay cases during this period in Ireland was to neatly close off the indifference shown by adults to children who reported their sexual abuse to them. No questions were asked about why the adults the children reported to did nothing or worse in some cases responded to disclosures with beatings and threats. Many of these victims never got to have their day in court because they were deemed not to be under the ‘dominion’ of their abuser, and their resilience in reporting contemporaneously the abuse they suffered was punished sometimes with beatings, but definitely with silencing of their voices and denying their right to seek justice.
Ring’s work is instructive when seeking to understand why the cases against Donaldson and Gibney took four decades to come to court As Ring notes, in 20th century Ireland a climate of fear existed around reporting abuse as well as a culture of indifference to abuse. Illustrating this point, Justice McCarthy writing in the Irish Times outlines the four previous investigations against Gibney that failed to result in a successful conviction. The existence of child sexual abuse was not a secret in Ireland; its prevalence and the harms it caused were widely acknowledged, and yet the children who experienced it were routinely silenced.
Knowing that the silencing of children’s voices when they report sexual abuse is part of our history makes it particularly difficult to understand the reaction to the DRCC’s consent ad. Knowing that representatives of the Irish State led the march to remove the consent ad is frighteningly reminiscent of the State’s deference to and collusion with the abuse that took place in institutions run by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 20th century and its at times begrudging acknowledgement of the harms this has and continues to cause.
Dr Niamh Maguire is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the South East Technological University
Discover more from Doing Feminist Legal Work
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.