The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

I wanted to find out why men who hurt women are so often protected and shielded by institutions.

The way the justice system repeatedly protects violent men, at the expense of women and children.

wasn’t until 1997 that divorce was legalised in Ireland, for example. It was illegal to be gay until 1993,

The last Magdalene Laundry, those abusive homes for pregnant girls, closed in 1996, although there was a mother and baby home open in Northern Ireland until at least 1998. And in 1992, the year before the first disappearance, a fourteen-year-old girl was placed under house arrest by the state, to stop her leaving Ireland to have an abortion. She had been raped by an older man who later went on to attack another young girl.

It was not just the Church that did this, but also the IRA and even the state itself.

But which is worse – one killer or several?

Think of the depths of hatred that invokes. To say, I want you, a stranger, to have to carry an unwanted baby or make the trip back from England, bleeding and sore, because I am angry a famous man I don’t know was accused, and not even convicted of rape.

In some ways this must be the cruellest thing of all – the terrible persistence of hope.

Not everyone wanted to live that way anymore, or put up with the hypocrisy of punishing women for straying, when men, even the men in charge of the Church, were allowed to get away with it.

This throwaway comment made me think about how we judge women, how we are blamed for our own rapes and murders.

though we’re not as bad as America, where thousands of rape kits have sat untested for decades due to backlogs in the system, lack of funding, lack of will. Imagine knowing your rapist was out there in the world, not because the conviction fell through, but because no one had even bothered to look at the evidence yet.

Indifference can be fatal. Until we treat every case, every unsolved murder and every suspicious disappearance as equally important, we can’t hope to build up a true picture of what killers are doing. That’s how they get away with it.

Yeats, wrote: ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart’.