OUR CAPACITY to find controversy on side issues tangential to substantive problems is unbounded. There is a moral panic for a few days on the tangential issues and then nothing at all afterwards about the substantive issues.
This is what happened a few years ago with the release of a convicted paedophile from prison on the finding by the Supreme Court that the Act under which he was convicted was unconstitutional. A panic generated by an apprehension that a single paedophile was at loose, no focus on the reality that there are literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose and have always been at loose.
I think this has to do with denial. We think we have dealt with the issue by dealing with, or emoting about, a side issue and we can "move on" (in the parlance of the psycho-babble that informs our discussion on most matters).
This is what has happened about Kathleen Lynch's letter of appreciation of the parents of a convicted rapist in Cork. What Kathleen Lynch did was, at worst, unwise. But she did not ask for any leniency for the rapist, she did not interfere with the judicial process by writing to the judge in the case, as Bobby Molloy did in a similar case in 2002 (although that case was magnified out of all proportions as well). She simply stated in a letter addressed "to whom it may concern" that she knew the parents of the offender and they were fine, reputable people. I understand Kathleen Lynch had been friends with these people for many years.
Manifestly, her letter had no impact on the sentence imposed, which was for 13 years' imprisonment. She acknowledged in the letter that the case involved great hurt and trauma for "all" concerned, although a justifiable criticism can be made of the implied equivalence: that the hurt experienced by the offender and his family was anything of the same order as that suffered by the two young girls raped by this young man.
The controversy has been about Kathleen Lynch, not about the incidence of sex crime which is of epidemic proportions and by far the most serious incidence of serious criminality, although you would not get a hint of that from the over-excited security and crime correspondents.
If there is anybody who reads my columns regularly, they will be dismayed by me returning yet again to a recurrent theme about sex crime. The SAVI (Sexual abuse and Violence in Ireland) report published in 2002 showed that more than four in 10 women (42 per cent) reported some form of sexual abuse or assault in their lifetime. Ten per cent of all women were raped, another 21 per cent experienced attempted rape or other form of contact sexual abuse. And another 10 per cent experienced non-contact sexual abuse (for instance being shown pornographic pictures as children). Some 58 per cent of women experience no form of sexual abuse, but the other 42 per cent did.
Let's put numbers on this. Assuming there are in the region of two million women in Ireland (let's exclude the recent immigrants from these calculations for obvious reasons), 200,000 Irish women have been raped in the course of their lifetime (rape is defined as penetrative unwanted sex, whether by a penis or some other object). Another 60,000 have experienced attempted rape. Almost 400,000 experienced some other form of contact sexual abuse and yet another 200,000 experienced non-contact sexual abuse. Sexual crime has been committed against 860,000 Irish women.
The incidence of sexual crime against men is also shocking, although lower. Nearly three-quarters of men (72 per cent) reported no form of sexual abuse. But three per cent of men were raped in the course of their lifetime, (that is about 60,000), usually as boys. About 40,000 men experienced some form of attempted rape and a further 320,000 experienced some other form of contact sexual abuse. About 140,000 experienced non-contact sexual abuse. That is a total of 560,000 men experiencing sexual abuse in the course of their lifetime.
According to this survey, which involved a sample size of 3,120 respondents, about 1.4 million Irish people have been victims of criminal sexual abuse.
I read of a judge saying that he simply did not believe these figures and, certainly in my own experience in talking to people, I find the totals quite astonishing. But the study was conducted by the research department of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, it was commissioned by the Rape Crisis Centre and funded by the Departments of Health and Children, and Justice, Equality and Law Reform. The Catholic Hierarchy commissioned a similar survey of clerical sexual abuse, following on from that survey. (Incidentally, the 2002 SAVI survey showed that only 3.2 per cent of the abusers were clerical, a relatively high figure given the proportion of clerics in the total population but far lower than generally perceived).
So why don't we focus on this huge issue for a while, devise policies to deal with it and leave aside tangential issues for the moment?