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Northern Ireland – a sexist’s paradiseUKWatch.net - 1 Oct 2008It’s normal to feel embarrassed when you come from Northern Ireland. Barely a week goes by without some new instance of our abject ignorance, our awful compulsion to behave like noisy, immature yokels, whether it’s rampant homophobia, crazed bible-bashing or sheer dumb political intransigence. But a new Amnesty International poll, which found that almost half (46%) of Northern Ireland students believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she flirts, is especially shaming, even by our usual standards. What’s more, it’s OK to hit your girlfriend if she nags, flirts with other men or refuses to have sex ? according to one in 10 local students. The fact that these are young people makes it even worse. They are supposed to be the ones skipping open-mindedly into the glad new post-conflict future, not shoring up benighted old rubbish like this. So it’s shaming, yes ? but not particularly surprising. Northern Ireland remains a sexist’s paradise. It is the land of the macho swagger, a defiantly unreconstructed outpost of bullish masculinity and aggressive heterosexualism, fuelled by a trenchantly politicised culture and ? of course ? the long years of violence. (It’s not a coincidence that there is a significantly higher proportion of adult women raped at gunpoint in Northern Ireland than in the Republic of Ireland or the UK, and rape crisis counsellors are familiar with the tactic where perpetrators claim that they belong to a paramilitary organisation, in an attempt to ensure their victim keeps quiet.) Add a dash of the local brand of thin-lipped social conservatism, and you have a recipe for the “blame culture” attitudes seen in the Amnesty survey ? whose respondents presumably included young women as well as young men. Women’s rights have long languished near the bottom of the political agenda in the North, constantly displaced by the constitutional tug-of-war. The situation is really dire. Earlier this year, government figures showed a 50% rise in reported rapes over the previous six years, yet Northern Ireland has the worst support services for the victims of sexual violence in the UK. Our one heroic rape crisis centre is woefully under-funded, constantly teetering on the verge of closure. Women here have no access to specialist domestic violence courts, and there are no support services for women seeking to escape prostitution, trafficking and sexual exploitation. As a society, we can’t even bring ourselves to have a proper debate about abortion ? which remains effectively banned in Northern Ireland ? and our (overwhelmingly) male representatives continue to piously kick the issue under the carpet. The strangest thing is the deafening silence on these issues from Northern Ireland women themselves. Why do we seemingly accept the brutish attitudes, the lack of support services, the absence of basic rights? Perhaps it’s because we have no place to find a collective voice. Tribalism has successfully divided us from one another, thrown rigid barriers across potential areas of common ground. It’s as if women have internalised the old hush-hush, lie-low maxim of the Troubles – “whatever you say, say nothing”- and applied it to our whole lives. But saying nothing changes nothing. If shouting is what gets you heard in this place, maybe it’s time to find our voices.
