Though Cowards Flinch

An important article by Fionola Meredith highlights some of the troubles facing women in Northern Ireland, where 46% of students apparently believe that it is a woman’s fault if she flirts and is subsequently raped. This isn’t all: apparently one in ten of those same students feel that it is alright to hit your partner if she flirts with other men, nags or refuses to have sex.

In reality this abnormally high figure is probably a result of the survey being taken at the University of Ulster, which of the two universities in NI attracts the sport and agriculture orientated. One might be tempted to remark that such attitudes are reflected in the violence of women in the rural areas of Northern Ireland, however that doesn’t excuse such repugnant attitudes.

These attitudes persist (outside of those meat-brained thugs recruited for steroid laden courses) in the countryside largely because women have less opportunities than men. They are therefore more inclined to see marriage as a path to future security rather than seeking out independent income for themselves. This shouldn’t be surprising in one of the more economically depressed parts of the UK.

Northern Ireland has not proportionally kept pace with the decline in marriage and especially religious marriage across the UK.

The campuses of NI universities are not the only places where these attitudes prevail however – and on campus these are but tips of an iceberg. To a degree I’ve only ever seen in Oxford, the support networks for students (whatever their psychological ailment) is ridiculously dependent upon the support of religious institutions. Good natured though this may be, it’s not enough.

Students’ Union awareness campaigns are pathetic; the only thing the SU was good for at QUB was handing out free condoms – and even then, this was only for those people fortuitous enough to pass through the SU building. At least at English universities there are some very powerful non-partisan campaigning women’s groups which fight for better services.

While I was attending Queen’s, the Student Council sat in two sections: one half of the hall is filled by the DUP, UUP and other unionist lot, the other half of the hall is filled by the SDLP, Sinn Fein and any independent candidates – such as I was when I was elected in 2003/4. The motions submitted are regularly tribal triumphalist nonsense condemning one side or the other.

The sabbatical executive largely sat and listened in exasperated impatience but was powerless to do anything. In such an atmosphere, gender politics are unlikely to be given much of a hearing.

One can conclude that the problem for women’s issues in Northern Ireland is much the same as the problem for most issues of social progress: they get drowned out by the divided climate. Reading Fionola Meredith’s article you’d think that women themselves had some role to play in this:

“The strangest thing is the deafening silence on these issues from Northern Ireland women themselves. Why do we seemingly accept the brutish attitudes, the lack of support services, the absence of basic rights?”

While it is true that there aren’t many women’s organisations among students in Northern Ireland, we should remember that this was a country which spawned the Women’s Coalition between 1996 and 2006. In this area, meetings on women’s rights were likely to pull a good number of spectators for the Socialist Society. Yet those dates of 1996 and 2006 are important.

These are the dates during which progressive politics seemed for a while to take wing: the Labour Coalition and the Women’s Coalition acquired seats on the Northern Ireland Foru, Labour swept to victory in the UK and optimism seemed to be justified. Since then, events in Northern Ireland reflected events in the UK in their own way: polarisation and disillusionment killed off a promising beginning.

Since then it has been left to the Liberal Democrats to call for the expansion of Abortion rights to Northern Ireland.

Women in Northern Ireland do have opinions on all of these issues – and the seeming silence is a result of tribal politics, but not always in the most obvious ways. Some of the most effective women’s rights campaigners I knew were SDLP members who were socially progressive but who were locked into a political party with ties to the reactionary Catholic establishment.

Similarly, the Women’s Coalition never lived up to its initial declarations in favour of things like trade union rights – they never developed support amongst rank and file trade unionists. While refusing to take a position on Ulster sovereignty, every press release seemed to focus on how they were “bridging the divide” rather than on the issues they’d been set up to fight for.

The blame must therefore not exclusively be laid at the pre-ordained division of Northern Ireland, some of it can also be laid at the door of tactics. We should be aware that nothing inherent to the concept of women’s rights is harmful to the capitalist edifice – women as a fully equal part of society are entirely possible. The trick is to actually build a campaigning organisation that works.

If your aim is to secure better resources from the university, then you want a student campaign built around a combination of demonstrations, occupations and propaganda. In Belfast some ten thousand students live crammed together in shoddy accommodation. It doesn’t take much initiative or even much manpower to begin laying the groundwork to recruit some of them.

These basic tactics haven’t been used since the 1970s when being a student came with its own brand of radicalism. It may be time to dust off the old book of tricks and create an activist-led campaign for rape alarms rather than relying on existing politics or concerning onesself with academic hype about the changing textual representations of sexual politics and other such postmodernist fluff.