Lynn Ruane (Independent)

I thank the Minister and I broadly welcome the commission and the Minister’s statement.

It feels as though we are having the same conversation over and over again, which is incredibly difficult because language, processes and talk and the way we have to then package it, for example, in a commission or the steps we need to take, never fully feel like they match the reality of the situation of people's lives. It is as though we take either an academic language or political understanding and we layer on our own ways of talking about something that is actually quite sick. They often feel so far apart. We question how we can do justice to the experiences of people the moment somebody else who has not experientially had that experience tries to put language on top of it. It is incredibly difficult and it is something I always get quite nervous about discussing, because we often try to distance ourselves from the reality of what might have happened to someone so we can speak about it. However, to be human, we often then have to try to sit still with it for a moment and think about what that must have been like and what impact it must have had. When we let that in, our defences drop a little bit and then it is really difficult to come in and put that into the Chamber.

While I was thinking about it, I was thinking about how as an adult, I spoke about being raped in my 20s. That is obviously not the same as predatory child sexual abuse but I think about the human psychology in how I came to terms with my response to that. In my response to that, I was able to package it in a way of asking myself why I did not fight; why I froze. You berate yourself for freezing and not fighting, because that seems like it is more of an act of taking some sort of power, and that freezing is powerless. Over time you think that actually, since the beginning of time our systems and human make-up have particular ways to protect us and for us to survive. As an adult, I can take in that while experiencing something, my system decided in that moment the safest thing to do was to freeze, and that was going to get me out of the situation quicker and without any violence, potentially. I take that another step and imagine being a child, when one is told to respect teachers and peers and the church, and that they know best, and that they are there to mind you and to keep you safe. I cannot imagine layering that on to an experience.

Where I got really stuck over the past few days was imagining being in a special school and being a wheelchair user or non-verbal with an intellectual disability. What does the adult packaging in my head of my system choosing fly or freeze, mean for a child, especially a child with an additional set of needs who cannot even communicate in the moment, a way to understand what is happening, never mind when he or she is talking to his or her parents? We talk about the power and liberation of being able to give voice to your story and experience but what if you can never talk? What if you are part of that cohort of the 25% of allegations of abuse that happened in special schools? A large number of those kids with intellectual disabilities are approximately 4.6 times more likely to be abused within schools. Imagine being part that cohort, where so many of a person’s functions may already need additional support from the systems and people around him or her, and he or she never gains that voice or way to communicate what happened to him or her. You never get to actually say the words of the depravity and what was taken from you or what was done to you in that moment. That is why it is incredibly important that we listen to Inclusion Ireland when it talks about the terms of reference in relation to the commission and that when we look at where the abuse happened in special schools, those accommodation rights that may be needed for intellectual disabilities are recognised within the terms of reference to make sure that cohort of people can engage in a way that is going to meet that very particular set of needs.

Inclusion Ireland also spoke about the need for legal representation as a form of support for survivors and stipulated commission reports must be published in accessible formats. There are many recommendations and my question to the Minister is, how are we ensuring there is a very particular type of response to that cohort of people that already has certain abilities or disabilities in the world? Such a response is needed there to make sure we can support that cohort. Is the Minister open to amending those terms of reference to reflect that need?

The reason I walk back from my experience is I was an adult with a voice. I was able to create a frame in my head that allowed me to live with something and accept the decisions or non-decisions I made in the moment. However, if we walk back to being a child, and being a child with a very particular set of needs, it brings us to a whole new place of what is needed in terms of a response and a system.

Beyond the schools and in terms of boarding and day boarding, we even have to look at our current settings. When we think of historical, we sometimes think there will hopefully be a time when this is over. There is something about a point in history that makes it seem that this is gone and done. Abuse is still happening in places of detention, care facilities and in other ways. We need to acknowledge that. The Minister was Minister for Justice previously. When we look at the progression unit, there are men I work with in the prisons who have experienced sexual abuse, who will now be vilified for the lives they went on to live from that and denied their experiences of what happened beforehand that led to that. Some of the men were in the progression unit and it was taken over to house sex offenders. Can the Minister imagine being a man in there engaged in an Open University who has moved on to progression and is addressing the psychology, doing all of that, and then he is told his place in the progression unit is gone because sex offenders are going to be put in there?His school experience was completely marred, destroyed and his life was affected forever. He spiralled into addiction and criminality. He has finally engaged in school, albeit in a place where there is a deprivation of liberty - it is not ideal; of course you would want it to be in another way - and now he has been told that although it might not involve the person who abused him, his full-time school and the progression unit is being taken away and sex offenders are being put there, while he will go back to the main jail. It is beyond comprehension that we are looking at what has passed and we are not making sure our current systems are completely trauma-informed and survivor-led, regardless of whether someone is in prison for another issue. Lots of survivors of sexual abuse are currently in the prison system, as are children of those who have survived sexual abuse.

Over the years I have read about studies that say up to six people are affected by each suicide. That is a low number. It is not accurate, but I think that research is from the 1970s. Other researchers and academics came along and looked at the impact of suicide and found that it is actually much broader than that. It can affect up to 130 people in a community, which is evident in suicide clusters and such things. Imagine if we looked at a person who has experienced sexual abuse and we were able to map out how many experiences or lives had been affected by that person's experience of sexual abuse, by how it affected that person's relationships with other people, how it affected that person's children and how it affected how the person engaged with and trusted systems, teachers and so on. The experience ripples out and has a much wider impact than we can imagine. We need to make sure that where it is having those other impacts, we are including the other spaces where people end up.

A core driver of violence is shame and humiliation. One really good way of shaming and humiliating people is to take from them and use their bodies in a warped way. They have to feel that shame and hold it forever. That can often increase their likelihood of inflicting violence. It does not happen for everyone, but it happens in certain conditions. Shame and humiliation are a core driver of violence. When people commit violence as adults we lock them in prison and deny them the victimhood of what happened to them during childhood. We will never fully address what happened if we do not fully acknowledge all the different core drivers of how people's lives are impacted and how it manifests in the world.

I thank the Minister. I hope she will take on board some of Inclusion Ireland's recommendations on the terms of reference so we can address the cohort of people who are the most vulnerable in this conversation, that is those who went to special schools.