Dr. Clíona Saidléar:

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I also thank the Deputies and Senators. I am delighted to be here on behalf of Rape Crisis Network Ireland. We endorse almost everything that Ms Scott has just spoken about in detail. I do not propose to repeat what she said. I want to focus on what is important and additional about looking at domestic, sexual and gender-based violence, DSGBV, through the lens of gender equality in particular because, for once, it is quite a busy landscape. The national strategy is imminent. The audit to which the Government committed has been conducted and is being woven into the national strategy and there are significant changes coming. In sexual violence terms, we also have the public outcry around the Belfast rape trial. We have the O'Malley report and Supporting a Victim's Journey and a significant number of other undertakings are in motion.

What is it about gender equality and what is the reason that the citizens' assembly focused in on this issue? We should not take it for granted that we are here today. We were not on the agenda for the assembly to begin with. That was a hard-fought conversation to add DSGBV on to the agenda of the assembly. That linkage between gender inequality and domestic, sexual and gender-based violence is not something we should take for granted. That was an argument that was made and that was won, but it is one that we can lose again. We are very grateful to be here today, and we are very grateful for the attention that the citizens paid to this issue in their deliberations. The reason I say it is important is that for us, and it comes through in all of the submissions that the DSGBV organisations made, we all understand that this type of violence is both cause and effect of gender inequality. It is impossible to talk about it, address it and to mitigate against gender inequality unless we talk about the violence that supports it. That violence is primarily in the area of domestic and sexual violence. That is why that focus is critical, because it gets that prevention and the long-term prevention and if we are not connecting those two, we are not connecting the dots.

We are also doing a piece of incrementalism without looking at structures. In terms of gender inequality, that big structural cultural change needs to happen for the long-term sustainable changes that we are all looking for here. The first place we go to when we talk about that sort of cultural change in terms of gender inequality and DSGBV is our culture and society, which brings us to focus in on children and the largest institution we have engaged in the reproduction of our culture, if one likes, which is our education system, as it gets loaded with this task over and over again. That is the location where we have that capacity. The citizens' assembly made a number of recommendations regarding our education system and the curriculum and what is happening in the system. We endorse those but we also add the political choices that are made because this is a space of activity as well. A new curriculum is being written as we speak. That has been a long journey, but we will see the new curriculum imminently. There are a number of things that we are concerned about and we must pay attention to them. What I mean is that it requires us to stay actively engaged and actively attentive to what is happening, for example, in informing the curriculum within schools and how that is meant to create the change we are looking for in gender equality.

One of the areas that needs attention in the curriculum is where we lose the aspects that are about the structure of how sexual violence is the violence that supports gender equality. What I mean by that is sometimes we end up not talking about issues such as sexual exploitation, pornography, prostitution and we need to add to the list today. We have rehearsed the list a few times and we need to add to it the normalisation of violence and begin to talk about it, in particular men's violence against women in normal sexual activity where sexual violence is now a function of sexual pleasure and that having become normalised in our culture in how we understand sexual violence.

Unless we are talking about those aspects of the structure of misogyny, we will not be dealing with gender equality in our curriculum. For much of our curriculum, many important, powerful tools have been developed that focus on individuals' self-development. While these are incredibly important and progress should be made on them, we should also pay attention to when structure and misogyny fall off the table and when we essentially move the labour of the prevention of sexual violence on to individuals, particularly individual children, essentially recycling the cultural message that we have given people the tools and that they should now go out and not get raped. That is essentially the cycle we will be repeating if we do not talk about gender equality as a structure of violence.

I believe I have exceeded my time.