ALL last week we read about the little girls trapped and tortured and starved to death in Belgium. All week we read chilling reports from the major child sex abuse conference in Dublin.
A man - a successful, much admired man - complained idly to me that there was too much coverage of the Belgian evil. "Day after day!" he said. "On the front page!" And then he added, musingly, "But then, I suppose the women are very interested in that kind of thing."
Would it take much to look around and see that the torture and murder of children by men is not a specialist woman's issue? Or to see, for example, that a man can walk through the world day and night without much fear whereas women and children must fear male violence all the time?
Would it take much to see that men use little girls for sex a lot more than women use little boys and that says something about the way male and female see themselves and their entitlements in this rotten world of ours?
The answer is: yes, it would take much. It is easy to be unconscious, and hard to carry around an alert consciousness. It is difficult to imagine things outside our experience. We hurry past the images.
What is it like - as happened in Co Kilkenny recently - to be raped by your father while he makes your mother watch? What is it like - as happened in Co Sligo - to be brought home early from Mass by your father to be raped and then sluiced out with a veterinary syringe? What was it like for the girls in a Thai brothel - 17 of them - as the flames consumed them, when the brothel went on fire, because they were chained to the beds?
What was it like to be tied hand and foot and to see burning cigarettes approach your flesh and realise what Fred and Rosemary West were going to do? What was it like for those little girls in Belgium, uncomprehending, broken, dying slowly in animal hunger? I won't think about it. I can't think about it. It is intolerable. We could not go on if we stopped at such scenes and allowed our mind's eye to see them.
Yet we must allow enough of a picture to seep in under our closed eyelids to move us to act. Otherwise there would be no moral outrage, and the world would never change.
We must titrate our doses of reality. I read one true crime book about a man in California who captured a woman and kept her in his basement, naked, inside a box, as a "sex slave." The details of that atrocious household joined the load that people my age carry. That's all it did: it weighed me terribly down.
WHEN a man or woman is ready really to face what power means and what powerlessness means, and to consider how male establishments prop up the male power which shows itself, in paedophile and incestuous rape among other things, as a sexual preying by the powerful on the powerless, there is a guide at hand. Art is not like true crime. Art illuminates, and because it does, what it shows us can be borne.
We Irish people are known by a great artist and prophetess. Edna O'Brien's latest book is called Down by the River and in it a young Irish girl is abused by her father before and after her mother dies, becomes pregnant by him, goes to England to get an abortion, is warned to come back to Ireland before she does, and is then prevented by the Attorney General from travelling to England again.
She is all but imprisoned by anti abortionist women, but she runs away, and is hidden among strangers of opposite views while her case goes to the Supreme Court. A boy who once helped her is ruined. A woman who befriended her is ruined. Her father is ruined.
She and the fruit of the incest arrive into the hands of male lawyers and politicians, each of them shaped by deeply unconscious experiences of maleness and femaleness. In the police station a garda punches her father in the face .
Mary prises a rusty nail out of a wall and tries to kill herself Mona, whom she met in the English clinic, says little prayers to her aborted baby... The girls go drinking in a karaoke pub at Christmas and Mary gets up to sing...
This isn't journalism or polemic. This is being brought into the world of starving and tortured little girls in a Belgian cellar on the level of feeling and seeing and flesh and blood presence.
Book reviewers will talk about Down by the River as a book - a literary fiction, capable of being criticised. But I am primarily astonished by it as a spiritual achievement.
No doubt there are others whose vision encompasses, like hers, a whole vastly detailed picture of Irish society in all its swirling unconsciousness. But how many others are so far beyond convention, in a landscape teeming with people and animals and experiences and sounds and sights and actions, each springing from the level of vital imaginativeness which only artists know?
The death dealing cruelties that the womb attracts are only one theme of this pageant. It is not a narrative so much as a great frieze, with screaming mouths from Goya or Munch in it, and the hunched, malevolent, figures of lawyers by Daumier, and flying devils and angels like a mad nurse and a saintly busker and a lascivious and hypocritical Taoiseach.
And at the centre, there's a 14 year old child, and the terror that lies in wait wherever her father is waiting, and wherever "Ireland" is waiting.
BECAUSE Edna O'Brien is a writer, and not a silent visionary, we have access to at she sees. We can borrow her imagination. We can hear the complexities of her tone appalled almost to hysteria, but also poised, balanced out there at the very edge of what can be said at all, vatic. This is the only way it can be if we are to really face, really know, really imagine, what the sexual abuse of a child is. Because we need a sorceress's aid to "take it in."
To stop it being foreign. To see that many depraved men and some depraved women, in Ireland and everywhere else, use children in ways that torture them. And that the torture continues when pressure groups and interest groups and establishments deny the child's reality and then - in the X case, anyway - go on tormenting the child, especially if she is a girl child, with a womb by deploying their power against her powerlessness.
There are ways and ways of trapping a child in a cellar. We have no excuse for not being able to, imagine child sex abuse. We will have to answer our doors to children, now. The blind eye can't go on being turned for ever. The newspapers won't let us escape the facts: Down by the River, the experience.