Men and the mother and baby homes

pwurple

Great link above... Even the language used is illuminating in how people related to children. Can you imagine the irish times of today describing an adopted child as "mixed parentage coffee-coloured" or "slow".

Galwayguy35

My mother was in a boarding school in the late 1940s, it was run by the nuns and they also took in kids who's parents could no longer look after them.

She remembered one nun catching a toddler by the hair and lifting him clean off the ground.

Another time a man who's wife died for whatever reason had to leave his kids in to be cared for by the nuns, she said he was a broken man, chances are the priests talked him into making this decision.

SpaceTime

There are lots of stories of the authorities taking kids away from widowed or single dads too.

You'd also wonder if a teen in those days got a girl 'in trouble' would he have been despatched off to some hellhole of an industrial school?

It was a pretty horrendous period of very recent history.

Society also didn't really allow teen dads to stand up and take responsibility for their kids. They'd have been taken off them and the guy probably run out of town.

While there are undoubtedly rape cases and all sorts of nasty scenarios that would have lead to unwanted pregnancy, in a land where contraception was completely illegal, you can be 100% sure most of those babies were probably fathered by perfectly nice guys who given the chance may well have been great dads.

The whole thing was often hushed up and the father may not even have been notified.

I'm glad that things finally did move on though. At the end of the day people have babies... That's part of life! Sometimes they're not planned in ideal circumstances but, again... That's life - it's not anything that someone should be massively ashamed of.

laoch na mona

SpaceTime wrote: »

o.

You'd also wonder if a teen in those days got a girl 'in trouble' would he have been despatched off to some hellhole of an industrial school?

.

according to a lad I know doing his phd on stuff related to this it appears that me were not normally punished despite many women in these homes been underage.

also it was said on the news that most of the girls had been working in domestic service at the time they became pregnant, which suggests a fair proportion of them were raped. Remember this was a time when people went into domestic service after primary school (my grand parents all did)

Seriously?

laoch na mona wrote: »

according to a lad I know doing his phd on stuff related to this it appears that me were not normally punished despite many women in these homes been underage.

If there's a phd then there's research to back it up, care to provide some to back up the claim.

laoch na mona wrote: »

also it was said on the news that most of the girls had been working in domestic service at the time they became pregnant, which suggests a fair proportion of them were raped.

I'm not sure how you can conclude that a 'fair proportion' of these women were raped. Again perhaps some proof to back up this claim.

GalwayGuy2

How many women countrywide were put into these homes?

Henry9

Funny how the standard of proof required for speculative assertions has dropped a lot lately.
Not that any of those posters would require more evidence if they disagreed with the assertion or anything.

Pawwed Rig

Henry9 wrote: »

Funny how the standard of proof required for speculative assertions has dropped a lot lately.

It hasn't really. An assertion was made. A source was requested. I am sure LNM will post a source in due course.

Henry9

Pawwed Rig wrote: »

It hasn't really. An assertion was made. A source was requested. I am sure LNM will post a source in due course.

It's not the only assertion that has been made (not just on this forum).

Pawwed Rig

Henry9 wrote: »

It's not the only assertion that has been made (not just on this forum).

Different forums have different rules. Any queries please pm me as posting on thread is off topic. Cheers

SpaceTime

In general attitudes to sexual assault in those days were pretty backwards to put it mildly though.

Nothing about the era would surprise me.

I think though we need to be a little careful not to turn it into a gender war either. Both genders were treated abysmally by institutions.

It would seem thousands of men suffered severe sexual abuse, rape and extremity sadistic violence while in 'care' too and if they reported it they got nowhere either until relatively recently.

Also in a lot of cases the worst institutional abuses against women were actually carried out by nuns (who are also women).

Women definitely got a worse deal as they were directly caught up in the establishment's obsession with reproduction and wanting to keep them pregnant and in the kitchen at all times.

To me it looks like a horrible attempt at both social engineering and 'social cleansing' where anyone causing any degree of upsetting the ultra conservative social order was locked away or strongly coerced into exile.

There's a very strong overtone of classism or even a caste society to it too as if you were poor, you got the worst deal by a long shot.

Our economy collapsed and we sunk into deep conservatism. I think an awful lot of our best and brightest most liberal and entrepreneurial emigrated as the country was just so repressive and oppressive.

I'm also not convinced that your average Irish person was ever really that big a fan of the kind of puritanical regime that emerged here. There minute the oppressive establishment lost power, society became very much more open and liberal. There are almost exact parallels in Spain too after Franco disappeared.

That era definitely needs to be understood and lessons learnt from it.

There was a lot of very bad damage done to a whole load of Irish people. It needs to be absolutely never, ever repeated and it needs to be understood by the current generations much like the way Germans understand how bad their recent history was.

laoch na mona

Seriously? wrote: »

If there's a phd then there's research to back it up, care to provide some to back up the claim.


I'm not sure how you can conclude that a 'fair proportion' of these women were raped. Again perhaps some proof to back up this claim.

i haven't seen any of his research, we were talking about it and he said thats what it appears based on the documents he has looked at

if they were under the age of consent then they were raped, also there has to be questions asked as to why so many women working in domestic service ended up in these place's, considering domestic servants were often teenagers the logical conclusion is that many were raped.

unless girls working in domestic service had a higher sex drive than others I see no other way to explain away the correlation between working in domestic service and ending up in one of these homes then that this was how the state dealt with rape

Maguined

laoch na mona wrote: »

i haven't seen any of his research, we were talking about it and he said thats what it appears based on the documents he has looked at

if they were under the age of consent then they were raped, also there has to be questions asked as to why so many women working in domestic service ended up in these place's, considering domestic servants were often teenagers the logical conclusion is that many were raped.

unless girls working in domestic service had a higher sex drive than others I see no other way to explain away the correlation between working in domestic service and ending up in one of these homes then that this was how the state dealt with rape

What if the father was also under the age of consent? Was he then also raped? Would working in domestic services not have a higher frequency of interaction with men compared to other industries increasing the chance of sexual relations?

Pawwed Rig

laoch na mona wrote: »

according to a lad I know doing his phd on stuff related to this it appears that me were not normally punished despite many women in these homes been underage.

also it was said on the news that most of the girls had been working in domestic service at the time they became pregnant, which suggests a fair proportion of them were raped. Remember this was a time when people went into domestic service after primary school (my grand parents all did)

Mod note - if you are going to make claims such as this then a relevant source should be posted. Something your mate told you or your own conclusions with no evidence are not a credible argument. pm if any clarification needed.

laoch na mona

Maguined wrote: »

What if the father was also under the age of consent? Was he then also raped? Would working in domestic services not have a higher frequency of interaction with men compared to other industries increasing the chance of sexual relations?

obviously if a boy is underage it is rape as I have often said I don't get this man v women idea people have.

that could be part of it but as I said many domestic servants were only teenages so were not able to give consent

i've no link but in the letters to the editor in the irish times a week or two back there was a letter from a women who studied for a state exam in the home and again someone speaking on either rte or tv3 mentioned the fact these girls were underage

ancapailldorcha

The Guardian has weighed in as well:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jun/20/ireland-childprotection

Maguined

laoch na mona wrote: »

obviously if a boy is underage it is rape as I have often said I don't get this man v women idea people have.

that could be part of it but as I said many domestic servants were only teenages so were not able to give consent

You don't know the details but you feel strongly enough to assume that a "fair proportion" of the women were raped. You assume because a higher proportion of women worked in domestic services it means the pregnancy was caused by rape, you assume the father was automatically older than the mother so it is rape. You assume not that this meant some of these cases were rape but that a "fair proportion" of them are rape.

Why is it without any evidence your instinct is to automatically assume a fair proportion were rape?

iptba

laoch na mona wrote: »

I don't get this man v women idea people have.

You have expressed clear "man vs women" opinions of your own e.g. http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=86159926. All your posts I recall reading seem to come from a similar perspective to that post so I find your comment odd.