Lavinia Kerwick’s brown eyes are blue with disappointment. Those eyes never could lie. “My trust in everyone is gone now. I am just so sad,” she told me the other day.
This is the fate of an Irish hero. Hailed as a courageous reformer one day. Looking on with despondency the next day as old habits die hard.
On Tuesday, the day she uttered those words, a man convicted of raping and sexually assaulting three of his children had his original 15-year jail sentence increased to life imprisonment after the DPP challenged it. The move was made possible only because of Lavinia Kerwick. In another courtroom that same day, a woman who was raped as a child by former national swim coach Derry O’Rourke told the trial judge that what he did to her influenced her decision never to have children. Her statement too was made possible only because of Lavinia Kerwick.
I call her by her full name because it was with those two words that she made Ireland listen and learn. The first survivor of a convicted rapist to dispense with her public anonymity, she picked up the phone in her Co Kilkenny home after her assailant’s nine-year sentence was declared fully suspended and he walked away a free man in July 1993.
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“My name is Lavinia Kerwick,” she introduced herself to Gerry Ryan on his RTÉ 2FM morning show. Then she proceeded to tell him she had been a 19-year-old virgin when William Conry raped her the previous New Year’s Eve, and how character witnesses were invited to eulogise him in court while she sat there bound to silence.
After the Gerry Ryan Show, she wrote to Pádraig Flynn, the minister for justice at the time, asking to meet him. By the time she left that meeting in his office on Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green, he had resolved to introduce legislation empowering the DPP to appeal lenient sentences and providing an entitlement for survivors of crime to make victim impact statements in court.
The legislative reforms were seismic for an area of criminal law that historically has preferred discretion to valour. Media requests for interviews poured in and she seemed incapable of refusing any of them. The longer the media spotlight remained trained on her, the harder it became for Lavinia Kerwick to find time for her own recovery. A group of women journalists who had been in contact with her informally agreed among themselves to stop interviewing her so that she could retreat into privacy.
Some people might think Lavinia Kerwick is an accidental hero. She is anything but. She chose heroism. She had no control over being raped. No victim has. She could have kept quiet. Nothing more was expected of her. Instead, she rose up and chased down justice, even when she came under local pressure to withdraw the complaint because, she was chided, a conviction would ruin Conry’s life. Her valour seemed magnified by her youth and physical slightness. She was, at once, as fragile as porcelain and as strong as a diamond.
Because of what she did, Ireland has learned about the deep psychological trauma caused by sexual crimes. She never got the opportunity to talk about her trauma in a court of law, but countless others have had their say because of what she did. They have described harrowing post-traumatic stress disorder, feelings of humiliation and powerlessness, nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, isolation and so much else never mentioned in the legal forum before.
Other women have trod the trail she blazed by coming out publicly to denounce the travesties of justice they suffered. Sarah Grace, a solicitor who was sexually assaulted by a night-time burglar in her bedroom in July 2019, exposed the barbarous practice of victims’ counselling notes being handed over to perpetrators’ lawyers for admission as trial evidence. No such liberties are extended to perpetrators’ records. Last year, Ciara Mangan waived her right to anonymity to recount how some of her colleagues in a McDonald's burger outlet had taunted her with “rape remarks” and “rape songs” after another worker raped her when she was 18.
Meanwhile, Lavinia Kerwick never went away. After regaining her own health, she quietly gave support to other survivors of sexual crimes. Her contribution to Anne Roper’s 2018 landmark television documentary, No Country for Women, was riveting; not least because her return to the public eye was as a flourishing woman in her prime. After Ciara Mangan went public, Lavinia Kerwick went on RTÉ’s Liveline and told Katie Hannon: “I mightn’t leave much behind me when I leave this Earth but to know women are not silenced in a courtroom . . . I’m incredibly proud of it.”
So what has changed to cause her disillusion? Not enough, is the answer. Despite the benefits of victim impact statements, the facility to challenge lenient sentences, and an increased number of women judges who show understanding of the protracted invasiveness of sexual and violent crimes against women, not enough has changed.
Lavinia Kerwick has never stopped pushing for more improvements. She has been advocating for the provision of separate legal representation for victims – not just when they are being cross-examined, as the law stands – and for State-paid health recovery services following a trial.
But within one week of each other this summer, Natasha O’Brien felt compelled to shed her anonymity to publicly deplore the fully suspended sentence given to Cathal Crotty, who beat her unconscious in a Limerick street, and Bláthnaid Raleigh told the media she had “lost five years” of her life waiting for Jonathan Moran to be convicted of raping her with a bottle. On Wednesday, Graham Dwyer scored another failed appeal of his conviction for murdering Elaine O’Hara. Twelve rape cases were listed in the Central Criminal Court that day.
Even the most indomitable heroes lose heart sometimes. When I win the Lotto and build a national women’s museum – if the Government doesn’t hurry up and build one first – Lavinia Kerwick will stand on one of its tallest pedestals. But it is when they are alive that a nation has its greatest duty to care for its heroes. Saying nice things and naming streets after them when they’re gone is useless if we have not listened to them in their lifetime.
What Lavinia Kerwick has proven is that it is not enough to unblock women’s voices. For change to happen, everyone else’s ears must be unblocked, too.