Gary Gannon (Dublin Central, Social Democrats)

I extend the condolences of the Social Democrats on the death of disability activist, Jacqui Browne. Her loss will be greatly felt.

The details in today's Women's Aid report are deeply disturbing but not surprising. We know domestic and gender-based violence is insidious. It thrives in silence, shame and in the shadows but it is everywhere, in every parish, every institution and every workplace. Last year, more than 41,000 women contacted Women's Aid. The scale is staggering but it is only the surface. One in three women will experience physical, psychological or sexual abuse by a partner or ex-partner. That amounts to nearly 900,000 women affected by this type of violence in this country right now.

This did not happen by accident. We have allowed this violence to grow and I am fearful about where it is headed. We are living in a culture where perpetrators of abuse are not only tolerated but celebrated. They include the President of the United States, sports stars with multimillion euro contracts and influencers who poison our young men with misogyny packaged as self-help. The network of anti-women online communities, full of grifters, abusers and con men, is flooding social media with hate. As a State, we are doing almost nothing to stop it.

More than a decade ago, when Irishwoman Jill Meagher was murdered in Australia, her husband Tom wrote about the monster myth. In that work, he explained that abusers are often thought of as monsters - broken and unrecognisable - but they are not. Often, they are our colleagues, neighbours and friends. The monster myth lets us all off the hook. It is the man shouting at a woman in a bar, the hand on her back she did not invite and the so-called jokes about rape being shared in WhatsApp groups. That is how violence is normalised.

The epidemic of men's violence against women continues to be framed as a women's issue across all facets of society. Let us make no mistake about the truth, which is that men's violence against women is a crisis that men must be part of solving. We have created a society where there is such a pervasive sense of male violence against women that we have had to coin the word "femicide" to describe the epidemic. Even the very word allows men to evade accountability for this ongoing crisis. As men, we need to do more than shake our heads. We must call out violence when we see it because to be silent is to be complicit.

Violence against women is nothing new but social media is supercharging it. Big tech platforms are driving it straight into the phones of young men. Their algorithms reward misogyny, disinformation and abuse because they keep people scrolling and keep the companies making money. Last year, a study by DCU showed that violent, sexist content was delivered to male-identified accounts within 23 minutes of their owners logging on, even if the user showed no interest in such content. This is the scale of what we are up against. With the kinds of actors we have at the helm of the biggest social media platforms, we cannot afford to drag our feet.

Every hour the Government delays acting allows violence and hatred towards women to be normalised online and across society. My questions to the Minister are simple. When will the Government finally act to regulate recommender algorithms? When will it switch off the systems that are spreading hate for profit before more harm is done?

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