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THE DUBLIN RAPE Crisis Centre is often the first point of contact for victims of rape and sexual assault.
According to its annual report, over 12,000 calls were handled by the organisation last year, the highest figure since the publication of various reports into clerical sex abuse in 2009.
The centre aims to give its clients support and information as well as empathy and a safe space to speak.
CEO of Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Ellen O’Malley Dunlop, said:
Rape and sexual assault are very difficult crimes for people to come forward and say ‘I am a victim of this crime’.
“It triggers off terrible shame and very often blame – the victim blames themselves – so it’s very good these people are coming forward and availing of the services.”
Service Findings
The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre offers counselling and psychotherapy services for clients.
Almost half (48%) of clients were victims of childhood sexual abuse.
In 21% of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) incidents – additional types of violence were also reported, predominantly psychological abuse and physical abuse.
The remaining 52% of clients were victims of adult rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment and 27% of those clients also reported additional violence, predominantly physical abuse, psychological abuse and harassment/intimidation.
Who avails of the service?
Almost a quarter of calls to the DRCC last year were made by men but less than half of the male victims availed of the centre’s counselling services.
Just 10% of DRCC clients were male while 90% were female.
Last year, 512 clients were seen for individual counselling – of these, 284 or 56% were new clients for that year.
Of the new clients – 129 (45%) disclosed 163 incidents which included other forms of violence, in addition to the main abuse.
The majority of clients (82%) were from the greater Dublin area, while 18% were from 12 other counties.
Crisis Appointments
The therapy team made 4,160 individual appointments available in 2013 and 3,211 of them were delivered.
Nearly a quarter (23%) were crisis appointments for men and women who had experienced recent rape or sexual assault within the past six months.
The remaining 77% were assessment appointments for past rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and CSA.
Funding
Angela McCarthy, Head of Clinical Services at DRCC said: “This has been a tough year in terms of delivering crisis counselling and long-term therapy, because of a reduction of 18% in therapists staffing levels in the first quarter of 2013.
It is very worrying to know how we are going to sustain these essential services when the grant from Government has been substantially cut on an annual basis since 2008.
“In 2013 the grant was further cut in the middle of the year which meant that we had to go back and revise the already depleted budget.”
CEO, O’Malley Dunlop, says funding has been cut by 30% in the past number of years adding that the DRCC needs the statutory funding to be reinstated.
“We are calling on the Minister to reinstate the funding that they gave us back in 2008, that would sustain us.”
Anyone affected by this story can call the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s national 24 hour helpline on 1800 77 88 88.
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20 years ago I was raped. I was a teenager then and still a virgin when it happened. After that harrowing experience I never could trust again. I adore men, I always have but intimacy remains a no go area for me. I hate to even be hugged/cuddled by an adult. In the last year or so I finally managed to find one man who I am friends with where I actually feel safe and warm in his arms. He lets me control the hugs and I appreciate that. After the rape the GP I met tore strips off me and blamed me for what happened. I was sober, innocent and dressed in a track suit when the stranger attacked. This has ruined my life. Constant thoughts of suicide, regular problems with anxiety and depression. For me the rape crisis center didn’t work but maybe I wasn’t ready for it. I also bizarrely feel safer to talk to men as I was my daddy’s girl and I rather men to women in all aspects of my life. Anyway the RCC I attended only had female counsellors. I think anyone who is raped and gets through it are true heroes to me.
Can’t believe how anybody could ‘ redthumb ‘ your heart-rendering story – haven’t the slightest clue how to express admiration for your honesty in your battle with such an experience.
I’ve always felt that any man that derives sexual pleasure on the petrified fear of a loved one/stranger needs to be removed from society for extraordinary lengths of time. Clearly they have an inhuman lack of empathy for another human being and to get a sexual thrill out of such perceived power warrants them as serious threat to society.
Demoralising to see the sentences some convicted rapists get.
Thank you John
Its hard to imagine , how much of a pathetic looser of a man you would have be to force yourself onto another person.Its ment to be magic when meet some one the rigth way..
Thank you Trevor.
Spot on Trevor , with rape my response is slightly medieval , string the f%ckers up and be done with it , anyone who commits such a savage act is an oxygen thief
Rape is less about sex and more about violence and dominance. There’s also a sense of entitlement to other people’s bodies. Sometimes the person doesn’t even realise that what they did was rape. Consent and healthy sexual relationships should be properly discussed in sex-ed classes me thinks.
I don’t fully understand this “entitlement to women’s bodies” that some men seem to suffer from. Probably because I am not male. How can a person feel such an entitlement? I’m not disagreeing that it exists just that it boggles my mind.
But as we all saw in Santa Barbara there are some men that feel this way. Such a thing must be so ingrained and habituated over years of video games (sorry mario your princess is in another castle: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/your-princess-is-in-another-castle-misogyny-entitlement-and-nerds.html), porn, naked private pictures of celebrities, and other events and activities that objectify women, ie treat them as objects for male use, view, and pleasure.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think a class in school will fix it. This is a deep ingrained cultural attribute that will take something much bigger to shift.
Mauvaise, I agree but it can help to some degree and can alter the perspectives of some people. With enough people in the right frame of mind there would be less tolerance for rape and abuse in our society.
Joanna, you make a fair point. I do think more is needed however.
I wish people would see, though, the connection between all the objectification of women that goes on in our society and violence against women. And I am vehemently against objectification of men, ie diet coke. I wrote to Irish cancer society to tell them how disgusted I was with their use of a topless man to promote their new initiative Paint it Pink. They will not be getting a Christmas donation from me.
P.s. if any men want to see what it’s like to be a woman in western society, watch this film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A
Using sex in advertising is always a cheap move…unless what they’re actually selling is related to sex. If you check out any of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos she does a lot to highlight these kinds of problems in the media. I do hope the media grow up soon and stop with this sex sells nonsense.
Why just men? You know that there’s women who rape people too, right?
‘Objectification of women’ is such a generalised term however – for example, the demand for women’s ‘modesty’ to be preserved in certain Islamic societies doesn’t alleviate the stomach-churning levels of misogyny and abuse that occurs in such countries. Is rape in western countries any worse now than decades ago or is it just that we are now made much much more aware of it now?
In fact,as more skeletons of our national history come out of the closet, misogyny and the treatment of women as mere chattel was more mainstream then than now despite the absence of sexual orientated environment of yesteryear.
Domestic abuse and rape ,especially drink induced , was just another dark secret of our and other societies so imo,the porn leads to rape link has always been more rhetorical than of any real substance.
I always had the idea that rape was the “stranger in an alleyway” type scenario so it took me years to realise it had actually happened to me and that it was done by my boyfriend who said if I’d just said yes it would have been easier. For years I felt guilty that I’d brought it upon myself.
I think education on all forms of rape is definitely needed and that it’s ok to take sex to a point that you are comfortable with and you can put a halt to it at any stage if it doesn’t feel right.
Same here. I was in a relationship where I was being psychologically abused and it was only after we broke up and I was talking to someone and I described how he behaved if I said “no” to sex (eg, he would throw a tantrum and scream and shout and demean me until I was in tears and would give in to make him stop) the person I was speaking with pointed out that this was rape.
I had figured that because I wasn’t kicking and screaming to get him off me that it wasn’t rape – but I didn’t want to have sex with him, he made me feel like I had no choice. I had said no and was bullied into changing my mind. He didn’t even seem to mind having sex with a crying girl.
Of course – there’s no way I would ever have been able to secure a conviction. It’s my word against his and that’s probably the worst part about it all – it’s the kind of crime where evidence is difficult to obtain *unless* it was a violent rape (and even then the evidence doesn’t count for much). How are you supposed to get a conviction without witnesses??
How funding to a group like this could be even considered is a joke. The work they do is fantastic, and they deserve all the help from the government they can get.
*funding to a group like this could be cut
There needs to be a change in society where talking about sex isn’t seen as taboo or inappropriate anymore. We’ve found ourselves at a stage where we’re becoming aware of rape as a larger scale issue than may have been previously believed. People are telling men what does and does not count as consent, women are telling people of their harrowing experiences with rape and sexual assualts of varying degrees, and the people listening in either case have often never been spoken to previously, by someone who knows, about not just the mechanics of sex (which is still given far too much attention) but about sex as an expression of love and trust or just as a form of pure enjoyment that two consenting adults can share. Its putting the cart before the horse in the most dangerous way.
A change in a society’s attitude towards rape and its approach to victims of that heinous crime will not change until that society becomes more open about sex and sexuality.
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