The front desk of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in Leeson Street is often adorned with fresh flowers from the garden of its departing director, Olive Braiden. In her own tiny office (she's granted herself the least space of anyone at the centre), Braiden has a bright orange and pink Lainey Keogh jumper hanging on the back of her door, and a bag from another favourite designer, Vivien Walsh, with a new purchase. Incense, flowers, pretty colours and soft lighting are all part of the centre's soothing atmosphere. The femininity of it all seems to be a subtle way of telling clients that, while they may be traumatised, they will recover to enjoy sensuality again.
Braiden is proud to be leaving behind a centre with a top-notch staff of counsellors and a solid financial base, now that the Eastern Regional Health Authority has signed a contract with the centre for £500,000 worth of counselling services this year.
Olive Braiden has chosen the end of this month to terminate her 10-year stint as director of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre for personal as much as professional reasons. Now that her profoundly deaf daughter, Sinead, has finished university in the US, Braiden no longer needs to earn an income. A lover of fashion, red-haired Braiden has remained well-dressed and glamorous by buying her clothes in secondhand shops while putting Sinead through school.
Sinead's education at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Along with 1,000 other deaf students, Sinead attended lectures assisted by full-time signers - who interpret lectures into sign language for the deaf - and note-takers - who present deaf students with written notes at the end of each lecture. "That kind of education just isn't available here," says Braiden.
Armed with a degree in social work, Sinead will shortly become the Republic's first deaf social worker. Sinead was born deaf because Braiden had rubella - German measles - while she was pregnant with her. As the parent of a child with a disability, Braiden always strived to get the best education for her, which at the time meant teaching Sinead to lip-read and to attempt to speak.
Today, Sinead's speaking voice can be understood only by her mother, but she has been liberated by learning sign language, although lip reading is still important to her. At Rochester, buildings were designed so that lighting would perfectly illuminate speakers' lips, enabling students to understand every word. Even the canteen workers knew sign language. At Sinead's graduation in June, the US Secretary of State delivered the commencement address - an indication of the high calibre of the institute.
Sinead is the last of Braiden's five children to become independent. The eldest, Aisling, is press and cultural attache at the Irish Embassy in Tokyo. Braiden also has three sons: Conor, who is training to work with street children in Angola; Killian, who works with United Parcel Services; and Aodhaghain, who manages a small cargo company. Braiden feels that her sons "didn't benefit from the Celtic Tiger, they are . . . laid back and quiet, they haven't got money and cars, and I think they missed out a bit."
Be that as it may, with her children now self-sufficient, Braiden is planning to focus on herself. While she and her husband Sean are building a house in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare, her personal goal is to attain an MPhil at Trinity College, Dublin in either "women and the law" or "women in history". These are modest ambitions for a woman who in 1995 ran for a European Parliament seat as a Fianna Fail candidate, ail, but Braiden now claims to have no further thoughts of achievement in the public eye - although after her year in academia she will clearly remain a highly desirable catch for many projects, both public and private.
Now in her 50s (she won't admit to anything more specific, fearing a backlash in this "deeply ageist society"), Braiden feels "slightly apprehensive" at the prospect of being a full-time student despite her belief that the MPhil will "round off my years".
The luxury of introspection and pursuing ideas at leisure will contrast sharply with her 17 years at the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (she worked there for seven years before she became director). She is happy to leave the centre in as stable a position as it has ever enjoyed. "In the last 10 years it has been so busy, one project running into the next, constantly reacting to crises . . . I'm looking forward to this time for reflection and sitting back," she says.
She is also excited about being in the heart of TCD, more than 30 years after she first attempted to join its hallowed and historic atmosphere. In the 1960s, Braiden wanted to go to TCD but, because she was Catholic, had to ask permission from the Catholic hierarchy, which was under the influence of John Charles McQuaid at the time. Her family were informed that there was a "perfectly good degree" to be had from UCD, so there she went.
Now that she is re-entering academic life, Braiden is leaving behind a career where she won important battles, but winning the war proved impossible. Not that she has become discouraged - merely realistic. "With everything related to sexual crimes, sexual offenders, sexual violence, rape, sexual abuse and sexual harassment, the services offered to people have expanded and improved beyond imagining. But the downside of that is, while there is great public awareness now, nevertheless there is still a stigma attached to somebody coming out openly and talking about these experiences. It is not something I would advise people to do. It labels a person - like the age thing does."
Society's refusal to pull itself out of victim-blaming mode merely fuels the stigma, she believes. When a woman is raped, people still persist in asking incriminating questions, such as "why were you there at that time of night? What were you doing there? Didn't you know it was dangerous?" All these questions imply that the victim in some way was responsible for what happened to them, which is wrong, Braiden points out. "Attitudinal change doesn't happen quickly. It is the area that disappoints me most. How ill-informed a lot of people are about how people are sexually assaulted and how it happens. There is a fundamental lack of understanding."
Children pick up on this tendency to blame the victim, which is why they still do not tell anyone when they have been sexually abused. "People say, `let the children tell', yet they don't realise that children are terrified of telling, and that is something that is not going to change quickly," Braiden says. "Irish society is not as open and as liberal as it likes to think it is. While it has moved on in leaps and bounds, the narrowness and the conservatism is still there. It is manifested in the way people comment on sexual attacks which happen to women who are are out and about at night. It is always implied that if they were at home, this wouldn't happen. The victims are always blamed. The question is never turned around, so that people say `Imagine a man doing a thing like that'."
Braiden believes that women who also blame victims are trying to protect themselves by believing that sexual assault only happens to other people. Men too are victims, and this year's statistics from the centre will reveal that the proportion of men seeking counselling has risen by an astonishing 60 per cent in one year.
People are intolerant towards victims of sex crimes, while remaining shockingly tolerant of physical violence and underage drinking, Braiden asserts. "The abuse and tolerance of Ireland's legal drug - alcohol - is related to both sexual assaults and violence, and is seen in court - and everywhere - as both an excuse for the perpetrator, and as a way of blaming the victim, as in `she should have known that would happen, she'd been drinking too'," says Braiden.
The "small-mindedness" of the Irish irks Braiden. "We are a small island and quite insular, and . . . our reaction to the refugees is showing up all our biases and prejudices."
Braiden has always had an open, expansive and sophisticated view of the world. She reared her five children while living abroad for 15 years, following her husband Sean, an airline consultant, to South East Asia, the Bahamas, France, Spain and Brussels. During these years she taught English, also spending some time as the principal of a private school in Bangkok that catered to the children of English-speaking diplomats and the Thai-American children of US soldiers.
"I saw first hand the heartbreak of prostitution in Thailand and was very aware of the fact that tourists came in and abused the Asian girls," she says.
Braiden's two brightest pupils, sisters aged 14, came to school in their tidy uniforms and studied English diligently. She had bright futures in mind for them as office workers. One day she saw the girls in a hotel, each hanging on to the arm of a white tourist. "They were so innocent that they weren't embarrassed to see me. I was sick. I realised that I had facilitated them to become prostitutes because they spoke such good English. I felt so powerless.
"It was a blow to a dream I had of improving the lives of those young women. In my own naivete I had never seen that this would happen. It's the same with work here in the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. It's always important to be realistic and accept that life is hard and all anyone can do is contribute in some way to helping somebody else, rather than believing idealistically that you can change the world," she admits.
As a result of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre's campaigning, in which she was involved prior to her directorship, Irish law was amended in 1990 to acknowledge rape within marriage; there was a lifting of the in camera ruling whereby rape cases were not heard in public; oral rape was changed from a minor offence to one of sexual assault and the DPP acquired the power to appeal overly lenient sentences.
"My biggest disappointment was that, after long years of campaigning for separate legal representation for the victim, we didn't get very far," she says. "Every victim of a sexual assault should have her own legal representative from the moment she makes a statement to the Gardai, right through the trial. It works in other countries. The experience of court is so punishing for victims that the majority of people who have been through the legal system regret they had anything to do with it."
No wonder women remain silent when they are assaulted, so that the reporting rate remains 30 per cent, and in 70 per cent of those cases the perpetrator gets away with it. "The majority of sex offenders are on the street. Even the best treatment will not work with the worst offenders, because by the time they get to court they have had a long career of assaults and it is too late," she says.
Since 1992, Braiden has worked in Bosnia to develop counselling programmes for women systematically raped by soldiers during the war. "Sex is a weapon," she asserts "It is the most intrusive, humiliating crime you can commit against somebody. Sexual assault gets into somebody's inner self and stays there because they cannot easily talk about it - they cannot say it out loud at a dinner party, for example, as they could if they were mugged. Victims pick up the way people talk about sex crimes and every word is like an arrow to their heart. What we learn from our work in Bosnia and Kosovo is the resilience of the human soul and how people can pick themselves up and get on with life."
As director of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (which was founded in 1979), Braiden has not been able to change Irish attitudes or the law as much as she would like, but she has helped many a victim - 15 per cent of them male - to pick themselves up. "We cannot take away the experience, but we can help them integrate the experience," she says.
The value of Braiden's work will remain in the hearts of those men and women who were once victims but who no longer define themselves as being victims of crime. "I hate the word survivor," Braiden says. "It implies that the crime is always a part of you. For me, the hope comes from knowing that people can assimilate the experience and put it behind them."
