We will carry on... but right now, this is no country for young women
WHEN I was growing up, my mother had a well-worn phrase she liked to trot out by way of explaining why the girls in our family seemed to be kept on a tighter leash than my brother. ‘When you have sons you worry,’ she used to say, ‘when you have daughters you pray.’
I used to hate that phrase. To my teenage self, it suggested limitations, restrictions, unfairness and inequality. But honestly, half a lifetime after it wrecked my head, could there be a more resonant phrase to sum up what’s happened in this country over the past few weeks? Because right now, it feels like the only thing we can do for our daughters is pray.
Pray that when they go out with their friends, they will come home again. Pray that their normal teenage socialising doesn’t take a tragic turn. Pray they won’t be preyed upon.
Pray that they make it home from college or work. That an ordinary walk home from a bus stop in broad daylight doesn’t end with their broken body being found in a ditch. Pray that the strangers they encounter will always be Good Samaritans. Pray that they won’t meet monsters.
Pray that when they go for health screening, that they can trust the results. That they can trust the professionals to deliver those results. Pray that the people into whose hands they entrust their health and lives will be honest and accountable, and that nobody will ever try to spin their stories, their bodies, for their own advantage. Cross everything, and just pray.
What happened to Jastine Valdez and Ana Kriegel is the stuff of horror stories – the kind of tragedies that sometimes happen in other countries, that give us pause to shudder and give silent thanks that we live in safe Ireland. We know, in our rational brains, that the fact that these two abominable murders have happened just days apart is nothing more than awful coincidence – but right now, it just feels that this is no country for young women. Coming on the back of the still unravelling cervical smear scandal, these brutal murders are another reminder of the vulnerability of women, of the hopeless inequality in our society.
Think about the women currently dominating the headlines in Ireland – Vicky Phelan and Emma Mhic Mhathúna, two young mothers who have had to explain to their children that they are dying after missed cancer diagnoses – and now Ana and Jastine, tragic victims of horrific murders. Then add in the parade of photographs of young women still missing in Ireland, revisited in many of yesterday’s papers, as gardaí begin investigating any possible links between Mark Hennessy and these unsolved crimes, and it’s easy to wonder if there is any joy, any good news for women in Ireland at the moment. It’s exhausting, it’s depressing. All these years after my teenage incarcerations, it suggests limitations, restrictions, unfairness and inequality. It’s horrible. It’s heart-breaking.
IN spite of what the song says, sometimes it’s not so hard to be a woman. Sometimes, waking up female feels lucky, like a quiet privilege. We get to wear nicer clothes, we have closer friends, we have sisters, some of us experience the extraordinary joy of having children. And when those children are girls, there is another moment of pure joy: a daughter, a companion, a special relationship. Some days, ‘it’s a girl’ is the best sentence in the world.
And other days, it feels like a life sentence. On days like these, it feels as though we’re on the wrong side of the draw; the side with all the tougher teams and the trickier fixtures. We thought we could trust cervical smears. We thought it was okay to let our teenagers go out with their friends. We thought it was safe to walk home in a sleepy beauty spot in broad daylight. We were wrong about everything. And now we don’t know what to think.
We will get through this. Irish women. We even sound strong. And we will have better days, days that don’t involve us crying for our daughters, for our sisters, for perfect strangers whose lives were brutally ended because they were women. We will laugh and overshare and know those little exclusively female joys again. But right now, this is absolutely awful. And sometimes, all you can do is pray.