Neighbours and locals have said that the woman found murdered in her home in Gorey, Wexford, in the early hours of Thursday “lived for her thirteen year old daughter.” She wore an infectious smile and always had a big hello for everyone, devastated residents of the housing development where she lived have said.
As flowers and cards were left at the scene in Baile Eoghain by loved ones and strangers alike, photos of the young mum began appearing on social media feeds. Tributes to the 32-year-old have also rolled in in their hundreds with those who knew her remembering her as “friendly and kind,” and above all else, a devoted mum.
One tabloid newspaper reports that the victim, who has been named as Paula Lawlor, is “suspected to have been brutally beaten and strangled by a man known to her in her home.” It is horrific. Despite the outpouring of grief and shock in her local community, there have been complaints of relative silence around the woman’s murder, including on platforms like X where tragedies quickly gain traction. But then again, there is very much a wearied and helpless sense that another week in Ireland simply brings with it another violent murder. Could it be that we are slowly growing accustomed to such atrocities?
Ms Lawlor’s death comes not even a week after another woman’s body was found in a house in Banbridge, County Down, sparking a murder investigation. Karen Cummings was also a mother. She had two children and worked as a pediatric nurse at Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry. Colleagues of the children’s nurse said the ward would never be the same without her, describing her as “funny,” “caring” and “wonderful.” Two men have appeared in court charged with the 40-year-old’s murder.
She was the seventh woman to die violently this year and the 25th since January 2020 in the North, where the femicide rate is now the second highest in Western Europe, according to Eurostat figures. The statistics are grim. In the Republic, rates of femicide – the killing of a woman by an intimate partner or on account of her gender – are also shifting upwards, according to data which shows that more than 100 women have been murdered in Ireland since 2012. Nine were killed in the State last year, according to Women’s Aid, with a further four-profile murder cases being probed since January.
Homicides of women referred to the Office for the State Pathologist increased from 19 per cent between 2012 and 2020 (1 in 5) to 29 per cent from 2021 to 2023 (3 in 10), researchers said this year. The thing most cases have in common is that most were domestic incidents, and the majority of victims were killed by a current or former intimate partner or family member. Sharp force injuries were present in 75 % of femicides associated with a history of sexual violence.
The headlines and the NGOs and the commentators ask: How many more women will be murdered at the hands of men? When will it finally end? Candlelit vigils once again hear calls that it all needs to stop and something must urgently be done to end the spiralling problem of domestic violence. Women’s Aid update their femicide tracker once more, as calls for action are made in the form of tougher sentencing, stronger policies and harsher consequences. But there is a clear failure to really break through the buzzwords and tackle the factors driving such tragedy.
Two of those factors, I am convinced, are the role of pornography and separately, the use of drugs. Both are widespread and their use has increased in line with murder rates.
Forget about the patriarchy, pornography is rampant. Despite its hold on our ever-deteriorating society in recent decades, there remains little clear understanding of how porn acts on the brain. We’ve instead been habituated to porn use and blinded to the rewiring that has taken place in the minds of a staggering amount of men. These are the men women meet in bars and clubs and through friends and whom they embark on romantic relationships with – without ever really thinking about the cost of these men having consumed such degrading and sometimes violent content for years on end.
We hear so much about violence against women from Amnesty International and People Before Profit and the National Women’s Council. Headlines promise solutions and answers. But none of the political parties or NGOs so prominent on this issue ever mention how pornography, now so easily and commonly available, normalises violence against women.
In France, for example, where the world has been gripped by the incredibly awful Gisèle Pelicot mass rape trial, a report was published last year revealing that up to 90 per cent of online pornography featured violence towards women. It was simultaneously reported that more than half of 12-year-old boys in France view porn every month.
The jarring but crucial report from 2023 noted that women, through violent porn popular with users on the internet, “are humiliated, objectified, dehumanised, assaulted, tortured, subjected to treatment that is contrary to both human dignity and French law […] the women are real and the sexual acts are real and the violence is real. The suffering is often perfectly visible and at the same time eroticised.”
And in the UK, a recent report from the Chidren’s Comissioner found that 36 per cent of young people who viewed porn sought out violent pornography through content which involved at least one act of sexual violence. “A lot of it is actually just abuse,” the review carried out last year concluded. I could go on and on, because the research is vast.
The bottom line is that pornography normalizes violence against women by packaging it as entertainment, and has been shown to eroticize the very acts of violence women have been victimized by. If men objectify, even through non-violent porn, women to such a degree that they merely exist for their sexual gratification, then we have a major problem. The consequences to this are endless. You only have to look at the heinous “rough sex” defences given in so many murder trials by men to see evidence of the profound impact of pornography.
If we are truly serious about ending violence against women, we need to talk about culture, and a key part of that is pornography. Yet I fear we are so determined to create a morality-free liberal utopia where just about anything goes in the name of sexual gratification that this conversation will be off-limits. For it will be seen as too prudish, too conservative, for those leading the charge to talk about the wrongs of pornography.
Secondly, where is the conversation on drugs? I can think of three relatively recent cases where women were murdered in this country and drugs were a contributing factor. No doubt as cases make their way through the courts, we will learn of many more.
James Kilroy, who was accused of murdering his wife Valerie in 2019 was suffering from drug-induced psychosis due to cannabis use, the High Court heard in July. The second case is that of Deana Walsh, 27, who was killed in Cork in August. She had been stabbed to death and her home had been set alight – the newspapers reported that the man accused of her murder suffers with a long history of addiction issues.
There was the horrific case of Fabiola Camara De Campos Silva, who was murdered and dismembered by her husband who said he had to remove her head “to make sure the serpent was dead.” The murder trial heard that he was suffering from cannabis-induced psychosis. It’s worth remembering in light of such cases the recent warning from the College of Psychiatrists that certain drugs are causing “severe psychosis in young men” – including a seemingly cannabis substitute drug often marketed as a safe alternative and sold in vapes.
The drug factor ties in with research. A National Police Chiefs’ Council report in the UK, published last summer, found “high levels of drug use in domestic abuse offenders.” The pilot research, which saw offenders undergo drug testing, highlighted cocaine as an exacerbating factor in domestic abuse incidents.
The research found: “In one area, nearly 85 per cent (127/150) of domestic abuse offenders arrested and drug tested, were positive for cocaine and/or opiates and overall across the pilot forces, 59 per cent of those tested were positive for cocaine and/or opiates.”
“The high percentage of offenders testing positive was more than we had anticipated,” the NPCC said. “We know there are many reasons behind domestic abuse offending, and drug use, while not a causal factor, can make it more extreme or frequent.” Police bosses said that while it wouldn’t be right to say that drug use turns anyone into an abuser, it is the case that it can make existing offenders behave in a more extreme and aggressive manner.
While drug use accelerates increasingly out of control here in Ireland, and mainly among males, our political leaders have outrageously promised to crack-down on criminalisation for illicit drugs all the while cheer-leading for the opening up of a drug injection centre in already socially deprived inner city Dublin. It reads somewhat like a death wish.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow for a nation so intent on out-liberalising the rest of Europe, but the socially liberal, anything goes attitude we have collectively adopted as a culture – on all things from pornography to drug use – is not making women safer. It’s time to face up to that fact.