Call It Rape: Sexual Assaults against Women in Ireland since 1945.

摘要

Much has been written about the role of the Catholic church in repressing sexuality in Ireland, particularly regarding the effects of such repression on marital relationships and the sexual abuse of children. Did the “containment culture,” the name that James M. Smith has given to the church-and-state policy of repressing sexuality and denying the existence of widespread sexual deviance in all its forms, play a significant role in facilitating sexual assaults against Irish women? My dissertation uses the court records in the State Files of the National Archives in Dublin to assess the effects of the containment culture on the treatment of rape victims and perpetrators by the Irish criminal-justice system.;Analysis of these records and significant scientific studies of rape reveal that rape has been and continues to be widespread throughout Ireland. The court records demonstrate that the repression of sexuality through the 1960s deprived Irish women of the knowledge needed to prevent rape and of the language with which to describe their own victimization; moreover, the containment culture also punished those women who could describe the sexual assaults by labeling them as “immoral” by virtue of their supposed sexual knowledge.;In the 1960s and 1970s the impact of television, the raising of levels of educational achievement, the popular reception of Vatican II, and the Irish Women’s Movement all advanced the process by which the ideas of liberal individualism gradually took the place of Ireland’s communitarian culture. Along with this new ethos came the demise of the containment culture. Sexuality moved into the mainstream with the legalization of contraceptives and the end of formal censorship. Yet as my research shows, the incidence of rape did not decline in Ireland, and the overwhelming majority of victims still do not report the sexual assaults committed against them.