Listening to RTÉ Radio One this morning, one of the typical State-sponsored advertisements caught my attention. A woman in a nervous, condemnatory tone read chapters out of a book, detailing what the listener is led to understand as predatory, unwanted sexual advances in her office by a male colleague.
At the end of the advert, put out by Cuan, the Government agency “dedicated to tackling and reducing domestic, sexual and gender-based violence (DSGBV)”, I was told to visit the initiative’s website, which I promptly did, where I was told that “The stories that are hardest to tell, need to be told”. It goes on:
“From Oscar Wilde to Edna O’Brien, we pride ourselves on being a nation of storytellers. But there are some stories no one should have to tell. Stories of harassment, abuse, rape; stories of violence. These stories are hidden in plain sight across our country, more being created every day and we’re shedding light on them now. Showcasing the humanity behind the statistics and encouraging people to join in stopping these stories.
“Let’s stop domestic, sexual and gender-based violence being a part of anyone’s story.”
Curious to hear more of these stories, I scrolled to the bottom where, alongside tabs containing information for victims of DSGBV and details of Cuan and its work, was one titled, “Telling Stories of DSGBV”.
Clicking into it, I found only a set of four made-up stories: Emer’s Story, Orla’s Story, Paul’s Story and David’s Story. I don’t claim “made-up” – they say so themselves.
Each comes with the disclaimer that they are a fictional character developed for the Hardest Stories campaign “to represent a victim of sexual violence”.
“Telling a story in a campaign using relatable characters is a proven way to carry important messages to viewers through fostering empathy and compassion. While her story is a work of fiction, there are thousands of women in Ireland who have a similar story of sexual violence,” it says under Orla’s story, the others bearing similar messages.
Emer’s and Orla’s stories are accompanied by 30-second videos depicting a shaken woman holding a book and recounting her story, before putting the book down atop a pile of similar books containing the stories of other women who’ve been in similar situations. Paul’s and David’s stories are in audio form only. The “story” I heard on the radio wasn’t available, meaning that I don’t currently know how many of these fictional stories were produced.
The obvious inference is that taxpayer funds were used to support a project that sees people on the Government payroll making up stories of domestic and sexual violence. Why anonymised accounts of actual cases of DSGBV couldn’t be used, I don’t know, but it strikes me that they would have been, one, more emotionally effective, and two, more cost-effective.
Lest the reader think my suspicions of financial wastefulness are baseless, to give an example, the Cuan YouTube channel currently has 24 videos posted, all of which are just variants and repeats of Emer’s and Orla’s stories. I appreciate that a campaign requires different versions of clips and materials to release, but when you’ve posted the 30 second version of Orla’s story three times in the space of a week, I can’t help but think it’s likely representative of the degree of organisation behind the scenes.
Whether rightly or wrongly, I like to assume that a charitable interpretation will be applied to my various writings, and that’s no less the case here. Obviously, domestic, sexual and gender-based violence are things worth tackling, reducing and punishing. That is not in contention.
What is up for debate here is whether the Government funding “creative” projects related to this topic is the most effective way to go about addressing it, and I feel equally importantly, whether it’s an entirely responsible endeavour, given our powerful fear of stereotyping and scapegoating.
Because this campaign, like the ‘Serious Consequences’ campaign targeting intimate image abuse – another worthy cause – unambiguously portray men as sleazy and unscrupulous, if not outright dangerous. We know that the vast, vast majority of offenders in both of these cases are men, previous Garda figures telling us that when it comes to incidents of the DSGBV variety, the “offender is male in the majority of incidents with a female victim (74%). When the victim is male, the offender is also male for the majority (88%)”. There’s also a clear sex-disparity when it comes to intimate image abuse.
But none of this changes the fact that far-reaching, dramatised campaigns that do portray men in a sinister light are obviously more likely to increase people’s linking of men with negative emotions.
It’s a cumulative effect. Even as I write the hit Netflix show, Adolescence (which I admittedly have not watched), is making waves, and prompting discussions about “toxic masculinity and the manosphere,” as The Journal put it. There’s apparently much more to it than that, but that’s the take away: Men are dangerous and need to be dealt with.
I acknowledge, perhaps unpopularly, that these campaigns do not arise from nothing, and that they are attempting to address something. But I can’t help but think that they often engage in the same sort of stereotyping and scapegoating that’s rightfully decried when it targets other people, based on their immutable characteristics. The best use of taxpayer money? Highly doubtful.