Both states love the language of tackling violence against women, while helping maintain the very conditions where it continues.
24,000 calls to Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in a single year. That is nearly 24,000 moments of fear, trauma, assault, abuse, desperation, or survival. Nearly half were repeat callers. Over 300 people explicitly cited homelessness.
Some reported being unable to challenge sexually abusive landlords or abusive housemates because speaking up could mean losing the roof over their head.
This violence cannot be understood as something separate from the society that produces it.
When your choices are shaped by extortionate rent, impossible housing waiting lists, childcare costs, precarious work, economic dependence, or simply whether you can afford to survive alone, “just leave” is not a serious answer. That is not freedom. That is entrapment.
It is not simply a question of why violence happens. The question is why society continues to be organised in a way that leaves so many women vulnerable to it in the first place.
Meanwhile, the exact conditions that make violence easier to endure and harder to escape remain firmly in place. By the time someone is calling a rape crisis centre, the political failure has already happened.
24,000 contacts is not evidence the system is working. It is evidence of the scale of what women are being forced to survive.
If we are serious about ending violence against women, then we must be serious about dismantling the structures that allow it to persist.
That means building something different.
Join us.
