Few people will have noted the recent imprisonment of Andrew Cox of Athlone for the anal rape of an 11-year-old girl. He was sentenced to five years' jail, two of them suspended: since he is now 18, this means he will probably be out of jail when he is 20, or even sooner, and long before his victim leaves school. Marvellous; absolutely bloody marvellous.
What is this? What's going on? How can his little victim's bodily and mental integrity be of such little value to this society that a man who has violated her so totally is able to walk free even before he reaches the age when he can buy wine in many supermarkets? As terrible as this injustice is the sense that the machinery has worked, the culprit disposed of and so the world can move onto the next item in the agenda. And that's it.
Only it's not it. The culprit hasn't been disposed of, not for his victim.
Her young body was violated unspeakably. She is 13 and has to make sense of a world where such an evil thing can happen, with such little consequence for her assailant. The current consequences for her are that she is terrified of being alone, is inflicting harm on herself and is suffering at school as a result of what Cox did to her; but what of her future? Is it right that the young man who did such a thing should suffer so much less than she did and does? Is it right that the courts of this State apparently think that the punishment of 18 or so months in jail is both proportionate and appropriate for what he did to her? And is it right that our judicial system apparently places so little value on what she has endured?
Yes, he was 16 when the attack happened; but youth offers no mitigating circumstances. I recall no time when anally raping little girls was in vogue. There are no television programmes extolling its delights, no peer pressure encouraging young males to do this. This little girl was being minded by his mother in their home. He knew what he was doing. He should have been punished very, severely indeed.
But is there any point in damaging his life, merely because he has damaged another's? Yes, yes, yes, emphatically yes; and not as an example to other young men, not as a disincentive to society generally, but as a statement to his victim, which goes: We do this to him, possibly ruining his life, because we think so much of you and of your right as a child to live inviolately.
The issue here is not punishment but vindication: the vindication of all of our rights to bodily integrity. And those, no matter their age, who wish to deprive us of our bodily integrity - no matter our sex or how it is done - must know that in doing so they enter a scales. Those scales weigh neither the finer measures of jurisprudence nor the heftier matters of deterrence. They weigh something else: the victim's bodily and mental inviolability, which can only be assessed by the severity the State is prepared to show anyone who assails it.
Does the victim emerge from this ordeal with the assurance that the State regards her rights more highly than it does the rights of culprit? The answer is clearly: No. If the man who has abused her so is free to walk the streets before she is 16 and while he is still the age of an undergraduate, then quite clearly the State does not place an especially high value upon her essential rights.
But do you not get a certain sinking feeling that the case of this little 11-year-old is not unique? That the courts of this State simply do not see as a primary duty the vindication of the rights of the victim, to be measured in the severity with which it confiscates the rights of the culprit?
To be sure, there is no easy solution to the appalling vista now opening up before us. We must recognise the terrible truth that very many thousands of men in this country are sexual perverts, and we haven't the prison spaces, nor the counsellors, to cope with all the men who use child pornography.
But merely because we cannot cope with the whole of the problem doesn't mean we should despair and cope with none of it. And where we have a clear-cut case of violation such as happened this little girl, the punishment that we inflict should assure his victim for all the days of her life, that yes, this State is concerned about her; yes, it cherishes her inviolability; yes, her childhood is a temple which is defiled only at a terrible and unforgettable cost to the defiler.
The patriarchy is a much reviled institution today, largely because it is misunderstood. Abraham devised the patriarchy not to make women submit to male authority, as feminists so idiotically declare, but to protect women from the violence of young males. Patriarchy is good. Patriarchy knows that when its social authority over males fail, the only recourse is systemic punishment.
We all know that Ireland is losing control over its young males: the conventions and the norms which once upon a time compelled social conformity are almost dead. There is only one way to go: punishment condign and terrible - not just as reminders to young men of the consequences of their deeds, but even more, as declarations of the importance of their victims.