The bar is so low for violent men they are ‘to be given credit’ when they admit their guilt

Some families hand down ancient secret recipes. Others, fine china tea sets. My mum chose to pass down advice on how to deal with violent men, which she’d overheard from her friend’s mother at 16. When I was the same age, while giving me and my boyfriend a lift, she thought it was an appropriate time to impart this aphorism.

“You know, a man can come home and beat you all he wants. But at some point he’s going to fall asleep, and that’s when you get the iron out...” she said, locking eyes with my skinny, halfhearted goth boyfriend in the rear view mirror. Maybe as a warning. Maybe as a promise. But definitely a deterrent either way.

It was also at 16 that older women in my family started to pull me aside at functions and whisper suddenly to “always make sure you have your money, and never tell your husband how much you have or where it is”.

[ Natasha O’Brien didn’t go to court to hear Cathal Crotty’s guilty plea ]

“Just in case,” they would say, clasping their hands over mine in a classic ‘granny handshake’, pressing their fingers down into my palm to get me to pay attention. It was to let me know that what they were saying was important, even if they never elaborated on what “just in case” meant. They didn’t have to. We already knew in our teens what men could do to women if they felt like it, and what precautions we needed to take to get out alive – if we were lucky. All of this while we were, at the same age, practising drawing our signatures with our own first names and the last names of the boys we had crushes on for our future marriages.

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We are always giving advice to young women to prepare them for womanhood. How to boil an egg. How to stop cheap jewellery turning your fingers green by painting rings with clear nail varnish. How to soak underwear in hot water to get period blood stains out. How to always carry your keys between your fingers walking home alone at night in case a man attacks you. We treat violence from men as if it is one of life’s little inevitabilities. You will get ladders in your tights. You will get wrinkles. At least once in your life, a man will try to assault you either physically or sexually.

When speaking about her violent attacker receiving a fully suspended sentence, Natasha O’Brien told Newstalk that the “the most heartbreaking part is that I wasn’t actually surprised”.

Despite her assailant having bragged about the vicious attack that broke O’Brien’s nose to his mates on Snapchat – with the line “two to put her down, two to put her out” – his sentencing was filled with remarks about what jail time would do to his military career. The judge said he “must be given credit” for pleading guilty to a crime he was caught committing on CCTV. That’s after he had initially lied to gardaí that O’Brien had punched him first. This makes the bar so low for violent men “to be given credit” that I can see it all the way down here in Australia.

While O’Brien led protests in her native Limerick, keyboard warriors on social media opined that she was stupid to ask her attacker to stop yelling homophobic slurs as she walked home from work. She had brought it on herself, standing up to a man like that. Such people want to frighten women, to shut us up, to stop us from calling men out on their behaviour.

Less is being asked of the offender’s friends who were with him when the soldier reportedly landed at least four right hook punches on O’Brien. What were they doing? Why didn’t they stop him?

“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept,” the former Australian army chief, Lieut Gen David Morrison, memorably thundered when addressing his own soldiers after yet another Australian defence force scandal involving the ill-treatment of women in 2013.

That remark seems more relevant than ever as the Irish Defence Forces decides whether the guilty soldier belongs in their ranks. As Ireland’s military faces a tribunal of inquiry into allegations of bullying, sexual misconduct and abuse against women in their ranks, the whole country will have its eye on the ultimate outcome.

While it is true there are male victims of female attackers and they deserve our equal attention, the flow of violence overwhelmingly flows one way, from one gender to another.

Men are rarely pulled aside by their grandfathers to have instructions whispered to them to “always have their own money, just in case”.

I know, I know. “Not all men” hurt women. “Not all men” would have stood by and watched. But one is enough isn’t it? One should be where it stops.