Often, the bones of an issue are so dark and disturbing that it is best for sanity's sake to keep a distance. Here, in a small office in Dublin's inner city, the subject is battering males. What makes it slightly bearable is that the four people sitting around the table all happen to be men.
They are some of the faces behind a telephone service. The discussion is free-ranging but with a wholly practical purpose. Most domestic violence occurs between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. The rate rises at Christmas. So the talk is about whether they should change their current helpline hours of 7 p.m.10 p.m. or extend the service beyond three days a week.
Everything is up for debate, including the question of what they are doing here at all.
First Contact is new on the block - over a year old, though still a well-kept secret. In terms of the service it offers, it is among the first of its kind in the world.
Its premise is simple. If a man has just beaten his partner or child, is consumed with guilt and wants to communicate this to someone, to whom does he turn? Will he phone his GP, pour his heart out to the boss, turn himself into the Garda? Unlikely. Will he make a phone call to another man, to a helpline designed for the purpose? Maybe.
"We're dealing with the perpetrators instead of the victims," says Joe Kelly of the steering committee. "It's a risky area anyway, because the whole focus of the Department of Justice and the Garda is on the victims. But we think it's important that men be seen to be doing something about men, in the face of the onslaught about male violence in the media."
There are, of course, already initiatives in this area, pioneered by men. The Cork Domestic Violence Project is a model of its kind, with its rehabilitation groups for men and its insistence that its programmes remain accountable to women and the larger community.
In this sense, what First Contact has set out to do is peculiarly risky, as Joe Kelly points out. It is simply a helpline, albeit a challenging one, with no leverage over its callers. So the committee is acutely aware that the service could be perceived as a sympathetic ear, as colluding with a caller's natural impulse to distance himself from the crime, to minimise what he has done.
"The classic phrase is `I only pushed her' or `she was giving me a hard time - sure, you know what it's like yourself'," says Adrian Farrelly. "And they can very quickly see themselves as victims. You'll hear stuff like: `My grandfather beat my mother in front of me.'"
Finian Loftus cites a case to illustrate how easily a volunteer can fall into the sympathy trap.
"It was a pretty violent incident and the man was distraught. His wife was going to get a barring order; he would be cut off from the children. And the way it all started sounded so harmless. He takes his partner out for the day, meets friends, the two of them get very drunk. She insists on driving home and is all over the road. He says `I'll drive', gets out to change over and, while he's doing that, she drives off," he says.
The danger, they know, lies in a degree of identification with that man's humiliation and rage on foot of a long trudge home.
"When you get talking to these guys, at first, to your ears, they are perpetrators of something heinous, next they're regular guys telling their story, and suddenly they're human beings," says Joe Kelly. "But with professional training, you learn to keep that word `collusion' at the back of your mind. The very fact that we exist could raise the notion for men that we're a support organisation".
"But it always goes back to challenging and confronting, honestly and deliberately," says Tom Murphy, the group's new full-time co-ordinator.
Neither are the group so naive as to presume that every caller is a man in genuine torment, coming in with his hands up.
"Quite often, they're just trying to impress a court. There might be a barring order in prospect and they know that if they can go before a court and say `I'm doing something about it - I'm getting help', the judge might look more leniently at them. We have to be very careful," explains Adrian Farrelly.
"We don't like to say we're helping men; we are here to challenge them. But it's supportive too, in that we have to say: `Well done for picking up the phone,' " says Joe Kelly. "But what we're asking men to do is to open up, to talk about what they have done, and to take responsibility for what they've done. We're not a referral service. "The helpline itself is part of the intervention technique and in itself will play a role if the caller addresses the issue in some way. But down the road, if we become a part of a change in how society views perpetrators, maybe we could include that in the service."
They know that on a violence scale of one to 10, the perpetrators willing to phone a helpline will be at the lower end (it is unlikely, say, that they would hear from a man like the one before the courts recently, who beat his wife to death with a car-jack). The helpline will be used by men who already probably "have some consciousness and a sense of responsibility and guilt for the violence which they perpetrate", as the First Contact leaflet puts it. These men are the group's targets.
All those involved are well aware that despite a grant of £40,000 from the Department of Justice, their fledgling organisation is viewed with some suspicion, even disdain, by other longtime campaigners. But their motives for getting involved are clear. The group in the room today includes a community worker and veteran activist, a semi-retired hypnotherapist and lightweight wrestler, a civil servant, and a man who has worked with an AIDS umbrella group.
They know they face an uphill battle in a certain culture which increasingly seeks to deny the magnitude of the problem or to apportion it equally to both genders. One of those present recalls how a man from "a senior State organisation" told him a violent, anti-woman joke and, on seeing his shocked reaction, dismissed him with the words: "You wouldn't last five minutes in this job."
To illustrate the difficulties faced by many men immersed in what remains a macho culture, Adrian Farrelly quotes a mentor who has said that most men fall into two groups: perpetrators and heroic survivors.
"So I knew, for example, that when I chose to go and look at the flora and fauna on Bull Island instead of staying on at school for football training, that I could expect appropriate punishment to be meted out by the Brother next day. . . But I'm all right. I know that if I need to solve a problem, I can use my energy or talk my way out of it. But many men have been socialised into violence. And if they've seen violence working for others in the past and/or it has worked for them, who is going to change that pattern?"
Finian Loftus, a father of two daughters, was disturbed to find that if his partner went into the city at night, he always had to collect her; it was too dangerous for her to make her own way home. Joe Kelly is motivated by the need to see men being seen to do something about men.
"My fear is that men will be marginalised if they don't adapt. Would you take on a male babysitter in the current climate?" he says.
The problem for all of them now is that First Contact is still struggling to get on its feet and make its voice heard. The department's generous introductory grant isn't nearly enough to buy the kind of promotion and publicity such a helpline requires in its infancy. They've had 350 calls over the past year.
"Yes, I'd say I definitely have mixed feelings about the response so far", says Adrian Farrelly. "We still have the frontiers type of mentality, we're still breaking new ground. But now we've moved from wishful thinking to concrete form and institutionalised it by appointing a full-time officer.
"Whatever happens, we're just a small group of men who have worked out there in a way that's honourable and open, that's not aggressive or point-scoring. And I'm proud to be a part of it."
The First Contact helpline is open on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 7 10 p.m. at 1850 32 32 33.
E-mail: menshelp@eircom.net
