Refugees and asylum-seekers in the State who have been raped can find it hard to come forward for help because of attitudes to the crime in their countries of origin, a conference heard yesterday.
Ms Angela McCarthy from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said some women had cultural attitudes which made rape victims ashamed and fearful of being stigmatised as prostitutes or pariahs.
Ms McCarthy, the centre's head of education and training, was speaking at a Dublin conference on refugee women organised by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Ms McCarthy has trained aid workers for trauma counselling in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
"In Kosovo it was said to be that if a woman was raped, it was better for her to die than reveal that she had been raped . . . These are the deeply entrenched attitudes within families and within communities which silence women," she said. Women coming to Ireland with such attitudes would have difficulty reporting the incident or receiving counselling, she said.
It was important in counselling to assure victims that they were being treated confidentially and to explain Irish attitudes to rape.
Ms Lyndall Sachs from the UNHCR in London outlined experiences of refugee women in countries where rape was used as an instrument of war.
She recounted the story of a solder in ex-Yugoslavia who said rape of women prisoners had become "normal, like taking a shower and having breakfast".
One young woman in the Muslim "safe haven" of Srebrenica in Bosnia had killed herself rather than bear the shame of having been repeatedly raped by a local mafia member, she said.
The UNHCR's representative for Ireland and the UK, Ms Hope Hanlan, said it would be "a great step forward" if refugee women were consulted before being dispersed from Dublin to other parts of the State.