Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 3, between lines 20 and 21, to insert the following: “(1B) Where a child is present during the commission of an offence under subsection (1), this shall be considered an aggravating factor for the purposes of sentencing.”.”.

It is lovely to have the Minister of State here today to take this. I thank the cross-party group for bringing this Bill forward.

Sometimes people forget that before we ever became politicians or got into politics, we have lived lives and had experiences. That shapes how we see the world and how we are in society, how we act and how we move. For me, this amendment is very important because in the last couple of weeks we have been talking about the survivors of residential abuse. We talked about intergenerational trauma and how that does not just affect the person who is the survivor but also boils down and filters through to different generations.

As strong as my mother is, and she is a fantastic woman, she has endured quite a lot in her life. She was a victim of domestic abuse, but that domestic abuse does not stop with her because the trauma passed on through the generations to me and my sibling. I want to acknowledge that sometimes children of abuse are not factored into legislation.

From the ages of four to seven, I lived in a home that was very violent. As a child, when you are developing through that stage, it shapes how you see the world, move through it and grow into that. Thankfully, my mother was able to get out of that situation but none of us got out unscathed, and that is the reality. The perpetrator never carries the shame when they commit an act of violence against somebody. The shame is always given to the victim, and that shame gets passed on. For me, it shaped how I saw the world and how I trusted people in regard to the most minute things in life.

For two decades I lived in the shadow of that shame of what had happened, and it was incredibly difficult. As a child, you learn how to see signs and read people and understand, even from something as small as knowing the kind of mood he would be in by the way his foot would cross the threshold of the front door. I would understand that laughing sometimes or playing too loudly could be a trigger, or that if the house was not clean enough, that would mean my mother would get abuse. Stuff like that carried through to me because I am very fixated, even now, about cleanliness and having everything perfect. That is still with me today and that will be with me forever. The shame I carried was really difficult in my formative and teenage years and into adulthood. It shaped how I trusted people and how I saw things. It makes you hypervigilant to every situation, which is really sad because it makes you untrusting even of love. You see everything as danger and you know how to read people, and that is not a great thing. I was always a woman before I was ever a child. I always wanted to just be a child, and that was not afforded to me, unfortunately.

After two decades of living in that shame and fear that people would know what had happened, I finally then was able to get help therapeutically, not for a want but more for a need because as a therapist you have to be able to help yourself before you can help others. It was the first time that I had gone to my therapist. A few months after I had met him, he asked me what I thought he thought of me. I said I thought he thought I would be strong, because that is what I have always had all my life: "You are so strong. How do you do it?" He said, "Actually, when I first met you, you looked so fragile that if I was to touch you, you would fall apart", and for the first time in my life, somebody saw me. Somebody saw what I had been through. Somebody saw the trauma it had caused.

This amendment for me is personal but equally, it is personal to a lot of children, families and mothers and men, who also experience domestic violence, to make sure that it is an aggravating factor. We were never hurt physically but emotionally we were, and we carry those scars. That does need to be an aggravating factor when it comes to sentencing somebody who is getting sentenced for domestic violence because I will still carry those scars with me for the rest of my life, and the only thing I can do to play my part in fixing this is to end it with me and try not to pass it down to future generations of children I might have. I am really thankful to the cross-party group for giving me this opportunity, and for giving that seven-year-old little girl a voice, the chance to share her story and the chance to stand up for all the other young children out there who are living in these homes at this time. I thank the Minister of State for accepting this amendment.