The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

I’ve always been a liberal and can see the damage long, punitive prison sentences do, especially when the initial crime was minor, like those serving decades in America for possessing weed, which is now legal in many states. Yet it strikes me that so many of these women and girls would be alive now if someone had paid heed the first time a man revealed his true self.

Why do some missing women get attention, posters everywhere, TV reconstructions, the FBI involved, and some get nothing? There is actually a term for this – missing white girl phenomenon. Not just race but class plays a role too.

That we write off women who are older, who don’t have children or have them when they’re not married, or who stay single; that perhaps we can’t understand how a woman who’s almost forty could be a victim of a sexual predator.

Secrets pervade Irish culture as we’ve seen, and I can’t help linking this damaging silence to the shame and guilt of the Catholic Church, the treatment of sexuality.

We tell young girls to look out for the stranger on the way home, hiding in the bushes or slowing down their car to offer you a lift, or, when you’re younger, sweets or a stroke of a puppy. We don’t tell them how to avoid getting into relationships with men who will break their bones and bite their flesh, leave them too terrified to escape.

It’s still a country that reflects deep hatred and contempt towards women, even as it worships them in the form of the Virgin Mary, the spotless mother.