ACCORDING to the Minister for Equality and Law Reform, Mervyn Taylor, the new Domestic Violence Act which became law last week will "provide a simple, cheap, quick and effective remedy" to the problem.
This may be true in the short term sense of giving abused women new ways of finding safety by having the violent man barred from the home, or arrested by gardai through the new powers of arrest that the legislation gives them.
But if the Act, which is a tribute to the influential work of organisations like Women's Aid, is really to provide the basis for a true "remedy" to the problem, resources, creativity and insight, political will and a long term co-ordinated strategy are required.
For a problem of such magnitude our traditional response has literally been cheap. The recent independent study commissioned by Women's Aid shows that 11 per cent of Irish women experience physical or sexual violence in intimate relationships.
Yet the resources that have been made available for abused women and their children to find safety in this State are totally inadequate. Despite the best efforts of women's organisations, there are currently only 18 family spaces in refuges in Dublin and a mere 83 in the whole of the Republic.
The international authority on the problem, Dr Rebecca Dobash, estimates that currently only three out of every 100 cases of wife abuse are reported to the police. Few cases end up before the criminal courts. It is estimated that only one out of 250 cases of wife assault ends up wish a report to the police, a court conviction and a sentence (prison, probation or a fine).
Traditionally, the sexism here has been such that abused women have been portrayed as nagging and domineering, and removal or arrest of the abusive husband in those circumstances viewed as unreasonable.
Such patriarchal cultural attitudes and the "peace keeping" response by the Garda and other professionals have begun to change. But there is still enormous resistance to properly naming the problem and the abusive man's fundamental responsibility for the violence. We often avoid this in subtle ways, adopting terminology such as "spouse abuse", "marital violence", or "violence in the family".
Language constructs meaning and practice. Those who seek remedies in working with couples or "dysfunctional" family dynamics implicate (wittingly or unwittingly) abused women in their own victimisation and fail to render the violent man responsible. This pattern (or could it be syndrome?!) has been best described as "The Mysterious Disappearance of Battered Women in Family Therapist's Offices".
Because the new power of arrest is discretionary, its use will depend heavily on the degree to which gardai, judiciary and social workers understand the dynamics of men's violence, the manipulative skills of batterer and that promoting the safety of abused women has to ultimately involve making such men "safe", i.e. non violent.
"Wife battering" must always be treated as a crime. While never being an alternative to due process, "treatment" has to become a systematic sentencing option. No violent man should ever leave a court without some punishment and/or measures being put in place to ensure he confronts his problem. The development of intervention programmes to work with men who batter - such as those offered by Men Overcoming Violence (MOVE) and the "Cork and Ross Male Violence Project - are essential to real remedies.
These programmes must also continue to reach more of that large population of men who manage to avoid being reported and never see the inside of a court. This too will require resources, strategic planning, careful co ordination of the various services on offer, and systematic evaluation of how the system is or isn't working.
TRAINING is essential not only for the Garda and the range of health professionals but the judiciary. This needs to go beyond "technical" issues to confront personal values and assumptions about gender relations. Recently, I was fortunate to share a platform with one of the male professionals who facilitates a MOVE group. It was so challenging and refreshing to hear this lovely, gentle man publicly admit to what working with men who batter has taught him about his own attitudes to women.
Denial and minimisation are rife because men are so rarely the victims of such violence and (literally) at a safe distance from it. And yet, we men have so much power and privilege to define "the problem" and influence policy and practice. Working on ourselves, admitting to our power and vulnerability, can enable us to properly own responsibility for and confront the problem.
None of this will be cheap, speedy or easy. But it's what a truly effective "remedy" has to involve.