‘It was murder of the soul’
A terrible legacy is born. What emerges from the publication of the Ryan Commission’s report on the penal system in which thousands of Irish children were incarcerated for long periods of their lives, is that Church and state are still one, still arm in arm, and that they will protect each other, no matter what.
There are many ways in which violence is perpetrated on humans by humans. As Oscar Wilde said, some do it with a kiss, some do it with a sword.
The Irish state does it with a report. Silence is violence, because in that silence is the hurt and the stress caused by denial. The unacknowledged impact of what happened to the children of Ireland will not rest and we will further traumatise generations to come with what the Irish state has done by failing to honour the universal code of natural law.
People will frenzy obsessively, as they have in the past, around the sordid details of sexual abuse. They will look for extreme examples to measure the extent of its brutality.
Sexual assault is merely a term employed to describe parts of the human body and human biology. It belittles, to some extent and, to another extent, sexualises violence for the onlooker and the reader. But for the victim there is no sexual aspect; there is just the extreme violence of the act perpetrated on them. The act is immeasurable, as its impact ebbs and flows and bashes against the coast of the individual’s life, gnawing away at personhood and spirit forever.
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