In January 1934, 33-year-old J.W. was convicted of incest with her half-brother, 47-year-old J.N. After leaving her husband and children in 1928, J.W. moved in with J.N., an ex-British soldier and laborer, and they proceeded to live in Tipperary as man and wife until their joint arrest on 27 November 1933.Footnote 1 The relationship came to the attention of An Gardaí Siochána (Irish police) after the christening of a child that was born of the association, the paternity of which J.N. openly admitted. The prosecution was “delayed by the fact that proper evidence of relationship was difficult to obtain,” but both parties were subsequently convicted.Footnote 2 J.N., who was regarded by the police as a “low moral character and a potential criminal,” was sentenced to 4 years penal servitude, while J.W., who had not previously “come under unfavourable notice by the Police,”Footnote 3 was sentenced to one year imprisonment, with hard labor.Footnote 4 The case—“in which local feeling in clerical circles was very strong”Footnote 5 —was notable for a number of reasons. First, the case does not appear to have been exploitative—a joint charge of incest between a consenting adult half-brother and half-sister—and is arguably the only case in this sample where “the intervention of the criminal law did not seem appropriate.”Footnote 6 In fact, the Garda report indicated that “the actions of both parties indicate their anxiety to re-join each other when this is possible.”Footnote 7 Secondly, this was one of only four offenses in the sample where it could be established that a woman was convicted of incest as a “co-partner.”Footnote 8 As O’Malley notes, “It is rare of a woman to be charged with incest and even rarer for a custodial sentence to be imposed if she is convicted.”Footnote 9 Thirdly, this case—like many of the offenses in this sample—came to the attention of the Gardaí after information was received that a girl or a woman (usually unmarried) was pregnant.Footnote 10 It remains a point of conjecture among lawyers and historians whether the basis of the Punishment of Incest Act 1908 was in fact eugenic,Footnote 11 but it is notable that half of the offenses in this sample involved pregnancies. Finally, this case was one of only two in the sample to involve “half-siblings.” Section 3 of the 1908 Act enacted that the expressions “brother” and “sister” include half-brother and half-sister, and J.N. and J.W. were related to each other as “half-blood” in that they shared the same mother. As Justice Sealy noted, the offense was “committed between a half-brother and half-sister and not a step-brother,” observing that consensual sexual intercourse between step-siblings would “not be a criminal offence.”Footnote 12 Finally, J.N. was also the illegitimate child of their mother in common, but the 1908 Act applied whether or not the dramatis personae were traced through lawful wedlock. In other words, the incest prohibition applied whether the blood relationship was legitimate or illegitimate.Footnote 13 As Bailey and Blackburn crudely put it, “incest between bastard relations” was also “criminal.”Footnote 14
Incest was an ecclesiastical offense, rather than a criminal offense, until 1908.Footnote 15 The movement to make incest a criminal offense had become inextricably linked with the crusade by the National Vigilance Association (NVA), feminist bodies, and other social purity organizations to amend the deficiencies of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,Footnote 16 but when it became clear that all but the incest clauses in the draft Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 1892 were encountering hostility in the House of Commons, a distinct incest bill was drafted.Footnote 17 The passage of the bill through parliament proved, nonetheless, to be protracted. Following unsuccessful attempts to carry the bill in 1889–1900, 1903, and 1907, the bill was eventually passed into law after a 16-year hiatus.Footnote 18 Both the title and the construction of the 1908 Act are noteworthy. First, the Punishment of Incest Act 1908 was “styled” as an enactment for the punishment and not the prevention of incest.Footnote 19 Indeed, a Department of Justice memorandum would later observe that it was “redressed to reasonable persons who were likely to obey it and who realise that they run a serious risk of being detected and punished if they do not.”Footnote 20 The memorandum also naively claimed that the legislation “largely achieve[d] its object without considerably increasing the number of offences committed,”Footnote 21 but it seems reasonable to surmise that the low figures were more attributable to the reluctance to report such offenses than the instrumental impact of the incest statute. In fact, only 3.2 percent of convicted sex offenders (1924-29) in the “statistically rich”Footnote 22 submission furnished by the Garda Commissioner, Eoin O’Duffy, to the Carrigan Committee in 1930 were convicted of incest,Footnote 23 while statistical material presented in an extant Department of Justice memorandum—based on the Annual Returns of An Garda Síochána—reveals that there were only 42 incest offenses reported to the police between 1927 and 1934.Footnote 24 Indeed, the extant archival material not only captures the reluctance of victims to report sexual offenses committed by family members, but also the extent to which the young victims and their relatives were often economically dependent on the very persons who were perpetuating the abuse.Footnote 25
Incest is a restrictively defined crime, but the “narrow construction”Footnote 26 of the 1908 Act is interesting in several respects. The offense of incest is concerned with “carnal knowledge” between certain close and fertile blood relatives.Footnote 27 In other words, if it was not sexual intercourse, it was not incest. One prisoner, W.R., in 1945, even unsuccessfully put forward the absence of intercourse as a defense: “I pleaded guilty to touching my daughter’s private part with mine but not guilty of sexual intercourse. There was no sexual intercourse whatsoever …”Footnote 28 Sections 1 and 2 of the Act created two distinct incest offenses—a male version and the female version—but it is evident that “the male is conclusively seen as the dominant party with the female being the passive party” irrespective of the offense charged.Footnote 29 Section 1 set out that any male person who has carnal knowledge of a female person who is, to his knowledge, his granddaughter, daughter, sister, or mother commits an offense. However, it was not incest for a male person to have sexual intercourse with his grandmother, because it was perceived that there was no risk of conception.Footnote 30 Section 1 contained no age qualification, and it was irrelevant, as seen above, that both parties were adults.Footnote 31 A female person could also be guilty of incest under the 1908 Act, but only upon attaining the age of 16 years (17 after 1935).Footnote 32 Section 2 set out that any female person of or above the age of 16/17 years, who with consent, permits her grandfather, father, brother, or son to have carnal knowledge of her, knowing him to be her grandfather, father, brother, or son, shall be guilty of an offense. The 1908 Act conclusively regarded girls under the age of 16/17 as victims,Footnote 33 although the extant archival material reveals that there were cases where the girl was allegedly “equally to blame.”Footnote 34 The age qualification, however, was gender-specific, and there was no such age exemption for males who could have been charged with the offense once they reached the age of criminal responsibility.Footnote 35 Yet, while it was not incest for a man to have sexual intercourse with his grandmother, it was an offense for a woman to have sexual intercourse with her grandfather due to the pregnancy factor. This, of course, seems to suggest that the basis of the law was eugenic—children born of an incestuous union would be deleteriously affectedFootnote 36 —although it has been observed that empirical evidence reinforcing such eugenic considerations was sparse at the time of the passing of the 1908 Act.Footnote 37 Four of the children that were born of incest in this sample died after birth, but it seems reasonable to surmise that this may be more a reflection of high levels of infant mortality in early decades of the state rather than any indication of genetic risks of abnormality in the offspring of an incestuous relationship.Footnote 38
Consent was no defense to a charge of incest under the 1908 Act. Section 1(2) states that “it is immaterial that carnal knowledge was had with the consent of the female person,” while if a woman over the age of 16/17—with consent—permitted one of the abovementioned male parties to have sexual intercourse with her, she would be guilty of incest under section 2. This was demonstrated by a 1934 trial involving another joint charge of incest between an adult brother and sister. Prior to her arrest, M.H. allegedly made a voluntary statement outlining that she had been living with her married brother for the previous twelve months and that they had engaged in intercourse almost every day, resulting in her pregnancy. Footnote 39 M.H. and her brother, T.H., were charged and tried separately, with the upshot that certain evidence, including her own statement, was not admissible against her brother during trial.Footnote 40 M.H. was convicted and sentenced to three years’ penal servitude in Mountjoy Prison and later gave birth to her daughter in the Rotunda Hospital in April 1935.Footnote 41 T.H., who had reputedly kept his sister “in his house for immoral purposes,”Footnote 42 was also convicted, solely on circumstantial evidence, and he too was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. However, T.H. appealed his conviction and was successful in having the sentence quashed. An Irish Independent article reported that the appeal was on the basis that “there was no evidence at the trial upon which the appellant should have been convicted” and further stated that “the Circuit Court judge in his charge had not told the jury to give the accused the benefit of any reasonable doubt.”Footnote 43
On the foot of the decision of the Court of Criminal Appeal that there was “insufficient evidence to go to the jury” and that “the trial judge misdirected and did not sufficiently direct the jury,”Footnote 44 T.H.’s solicitor petitioned for M.H.’s release, and the views of the trial judge, prosecuting counsel (at the direction of the Chief Justice), and the Attorney General were solicited. While the trial judge, Justice Gleeson, wrote that he had “no doubt whatever about the guilt” of M.H.,Footnote 45 and prosecuting counsel, Richard McLoughlin, privately opined that M.H. “should receive some punishment,”Footnote 46 the Attorney General held contrasting views. On 20 May 1935, he wrote that “the trial was very unsatisfactory,” that if M.H. had appealed the verdict, the conviction would be set aside, and thus it would be “absurd to keep her in prison.”Footnote 47 Accordingly, M.H.’s sentence was remitted in June 1935.Footnote 48 The case demonstrates the importance of the consent of the female for the section 2 offense. If M.H. did not consent to the sexual intercourse, then she would have been deemed to be a victim rather than a “partner in the crime,”Footnote 49 and the matter would then essentially have been one of rape, while if she were under 16Footnote 50 and consented to the incest, she would not have been liable for any offense whatsoever. In any event, she was released unconditionally and expected to return to her mother’s house, where it was presumed that she would be “exposed to the same immoral life as heretofore.”Footnote 51
Three other notable aspects of the incest offense also merit comment. First, the mental element, in both the section 1 and section 2 offenses, comprises an intent to have sexual intercourse and knowledge of the relationship between the parties.Footnote 52 Knowledge of the blood relationship, as defined by the Act, was key to both formulations, and suspicion was not enough.Footnote 53 In other words, if there was no such knowledge that the relationship was within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, then there was no offense of incest. Secondly, section six of the 1908 Act stated that proceedings for incest could only be commenced with the consent of the Attorney General. Sarah Anne Buckley, in her seminal work on the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPPC), has argued that this provision had serious implications with respect to “the actual detection of incest and the charging of persons alleged to have committed the crime,”Footnote 54 but equally it seems that the practical impact of section six was rather limited given that it was unlikely that there would be a prosecution for incest during this period unless the Attorney General brought that prosecution. Thirdly, all proceedings for incest were held in camera Footnote 55 in an endeavor to protect the identity of the victim (who could also have been identified if the defendant was named, considering the nature of the offense). It would be almost 100 years before the reporting restrictions were lifted in Ireland, and it has been argued that the “subsequent dearth of reported prosecutions in the newspapers reinforced the silence around incest” as it seemed that no such offenses were “in fact being committed.”Footnote 56 This article aims to shed light on these “most extraordinary and heinous of transgressions,”Footnote 57 and examine hitherto restricted archival files on thirty-seven offenders who were convicted of incest in the independent Irish state under the Punishment of Incest Act 1908.Footnote 58
The article focuses primarily on the “motivations and modus operandi” of perpetrators who were convicted of incest under the 1908 Act,Footnote 59 and a number of explanations can be offered for this selection. First, there has been a considerable amount of research conducted on so-called historic child abuse cases that have been recently reported—most of which involve the “persistent abuse of children, typically by fathers, over a prolonged period”Footnote 60 —but notwithstanding a few notable exceptions, the topic of incest has attracted little attention from historians.Footnote 61 However, sexual offending against children within the family has not only been neglected by scholars but also by legislators throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 62 In fact, the “1908 Act remains in force in Ireland, though with some amendments, long after being repealed and replaced in England itself.”Footnote 63 Secondly, throughout the early decades of independence, a gender ideology prevailed in Ireland that was rigidly hierarchical and subordinated women, particularly in terms of their role outside the domestic sphere. As Maria Luddy has pointed out, “Church and the state constructed the sexuality of young women as dangerous” and “attempted to impose standards of idealised conduct, particularly on women, that would return the nation to purity.”Footnote 64 Put otherwise, a double standard prevailed whereby women transgressing sexual norms were considered especially deviant.Footnote 65 Yet despite the fact that much of the contemporary concern about sexual morality in this period was focused on women, incest in this period was “essentially a male crime.”Footnote 66 The importance of focusing on male offenders, as opposed to female victims, was set out by Bourke, who persuasively argued that it “would be wrong to explore the violence carried out predominantly by men” by focusing on the women and girls that “they wound.”Footnote 67 In this context, a legal history that “sets out to recentre the root causes” of incest “within the figure” of the male perpetrator is vital.Footnote 68
The overlapping concerns of gender, sexuality, and morality in the formative decades of independence arguably reached an apogee with the report of the Carrigan Committee, which sat in 1930-31.Footnote 69 The legislation that stemmed from the committee’s findings—the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935—dealt with the sale of contraceptives, the age of consent (including for incest), and prostitution, among other concerns. Yet, the evidence heard by the committee was such an indictment of the state of sexual morality in Ireland, particularly in the area of sexual crime, that the report was deemed unfit for public consumption and was not published. As Mark Finnane has observed, “The portrait of Irish society which emerged was less than comforting to the committee and to the privileged few who were given the opportunity to scrutinise it.”Footnote 70 The government, in their suppression of the report of the Carrigan Committee, joined in a coordinated effort to uphold the myth of national purity.Footnote 71 This fixation with portraying post-colonial Ireland as a morally superior nation to its colonial predecessor,Footnote 72 combined with the obsession with visible manifestations of sexual immorality outside the home, “not only permitted a blind eye to be turned towards the social scars that disfigured the face of Ireland,”Footnote 73 it also let “fathers,” and to a lesser extent grandfathers and brothers, “off the hook.”Footnote 74 The surviving prisoner records thus afford the historian an opportunity to address “the historical reluctance to understand and address this form of offending”Footnote 75 and “re-situate perpetrators at the heart of sexually coercive behaviour” within the family.Footnote 76 Finally, “there is a huge gap in the historiography of child sexual offences from the 1900s to the 1970s.”Footnote 77 Drawing on these “extraordinary files,” “painful stories,” and “intensely private experiences,”Footnote 78 this article will constitute the first comprehensive analysis of convicted incestuous fathers, grandfathers, and brothers during the formative decades of the independent Irish state.
Sources and methodology
Research examining historical responses to child sexual abuse is a growing field,Footnote 79 but the historiography relating to child exploitation, including sexual offending against children within the family, during the first half of the twentieth century has attracted limited attention from historians.Footnote 80 This gap in the historiography can be explained by “problems of access to public archives, where materials involving children are invariably closed or strictly controlled,” frustrating scholarly efforts to assess the scope and detail of the law’s response to domestic child sexual abuse.Footnote 81 Research on child sexual abuse should be “empowering for those involved in its writing(s) and reading(s),”Footnote 82 but the “very nature of sexual violence makes the gathering of source material very difficult.”Footnote 83 Although archival sources tend, for the most part, to be “at best random, at worst non-existent,”Footnote 84 court and prison records, if available, can be an “extremely useful body of material,”Footnote 85 and for this reason, “many scholars have turned to the criminal justice system when writing histories of child sexual abuse.”Footnote 86 Locating this evidence in certain jurisdictions has proved to be “more challenging than it might first appear,”Footnote 87 but this article is unique in terms of the wide-ranging research access obtained to previously restricted and untapped Department of Justice H234 and 18 Series prisoner files (granted by the Department of Justice Information Unit) that are “filled with the voices of victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse.”Footnote 88 These files include, inter alia, Garda reports, judges’ observations, petitions (usually by family members, solicitors, or the prisoners themselves), medical reports, and synopses of the aforementioned material prepared by senior civil servants.Footnote 89 These sources are essential to understand “how sexual violence is perpetrated”Footnote 90 as well as to get “some sense of how sexual crime impacted on individuals and communities, the language used to express what was experienced, the vulnerability of victims and a sense of what went on behind closed doors.”Footnote 91
It should, however, be acknowledged that the surviving prisoner records are of little use in assessing the actual incidence of incest during any era in Irish history. As Stevenson points out, the “true incidence of sexual violence in the home will always be concealed.”Footnote 92 This reality was also captured by the English Committee on Sexual Offences against Young Persons, which stated that “it is readily admitted by officials and other witnesses that the number of incest cases reported to the police can only be a small proportion of those that actually occur.”Footnote 93 In this context, it is important to recognize that incest is “one of the family secrets most silenced in family life narratives”Footnote 94 and that these files provide us with a rare and partial glimpse into ordinary people’s “negotiation of what was usually buried within the confines of the private life.”Footnote 95 Reading these records thus adds “another layer of complexity to the historian’s task”Footnote 96 and places the researcher “in a somewhat delicate position.”Footnote 97 The historian must not only be conscious of “the suffering that is spelt out”Footnote 98 but also of the degree to which one is “a privileged eavesdropper on statements sometimes made in periods of extreme stress.”Footnote 99 Negotiating these experiences, as well as giving a “voice” to the victims “and their stories,” is a key challenge for this article.Footnote 100
Having set out the legislative framework, the rationale for the study, and the source material upon which the article is based, it is now necessary to “look in greater detail at the cases themselves and the context in which they emerged.”Footnote 101
Rumor, reporting, and pregnancy
The way in which these offenses came to the attention of the Gardaí varied, but the prisoner files reveal that 18 of the 36 offenses resulted in pregnancy. Incestuous relations do not inevitably give rise to pregnancy,Footnote 102 but a significant number of these offenses came to the attention of the Gardaí “as a result of information received,”Footnote 103 or because the suspicions of the Gardaí had been stimulated by rumors that an unmarried girl was pregnant.Footnote 104 In Tipperary in 1929, Gardaí in Tipperary were “investigating rumours” that W.F. was “the father of three illegitimate children born to his daughter” when she presented at the local police station to make “a statement concerning the relations between herself and her father.”Footnote 105 Similarly, Gardaí interviewed 17-year-old E.F. as a “result of information received,” and here, it was immediately “obvious from the girl’s appearance that she was in advanced pregnancy.”Footnote 106 Furthermore, in the case of E.K. in Dublin in 1945, the Gardaí “received information” that 19-year-old A.K. was pregnant, and “that there was suspicion that her father … was responsible for her condition.”Footnote 107
The Garda Commissioner, Eoin O’Duffy, informed the Carrigan Committee that victims of sex crime—“innocent or so shrouded with the shame of the act”—rarely reported these offenses to the Gardaí,Footnote 108 but there were a small number of incest cases where it appears that the victim reported the offenses directly to the police.Footnote 109 The charges against J.R. in Limerick in 1949, for instance, arose “out of complaints made to the Garda by the two injured girls who ran away from their home … due to the acts of misconduct committed by their father.”Footnote 110 By contrast, other cases of incestuous abuse appear not to have been disclosed voluntarily,Footnote 111 and one of these complaints seems to have been extracted by the police against the victim’s own volition. As M.D. put it, “I never made a complaint of my own free will. I did not complain because I did not want to get my father in trouble.”Footnote 112 Finnane and Smaal have noted that it was typically to their mothers that the victims of child sexual abuse first turned, and this was the case in a number of the surviving prisoner files.Footnote 113 In Dublin and Meath in 1940 and 1947, respectively, the victims were “accompanied” by their mothers to the Garda station to make a complaint,Footnote 114 while in Carlow in 1938, another mother reported that her husband had “beaten their daughter” because she had told her and “her brother that her father had sexual intercourse with her.”Footnote 115 Moreover, in a Tipperary case in 1929, the police were worried about the safety of one particular mother in the event that the accused was released early, as “he believed that she was responsible for urging the daughter to make known the facts to the Gardaí.”Footnote 116
In other cases, victims appear to have confided in other relatives. In March 1947, C.D. reported that his 14-year-old sister was pregnant and their father was “responsible for her condition,”Footnote 117 while in another case, the victim went to live with her aunt, but when the latter threatened to send the girl home, she exposed that “her father was having illicit relations with her.”Footnote 118 Conversely, in other incest cases, the Gardaí had to rely on “medical or other non-familial personnel” to come forward and report the offense.Footnote 119 In a Kildare case in 1941, the matter, for example, was “reported to the Gardaí by the local dispensary doctor,”Footnote 120 while in Dublin in 1944 A.B. reported that her unmarried employee, who had recently come to reside with her, was approximately 7 months pregnant.Footnote 121 She also revealed that she had received an anonymous letter divulging that the girl’s father was responsible for her condition.Footnote 122
Many of the girls who were sexually abused by relatives in this sample became pregnant, and some of those ended up in a county home, a hospital, or a mother and baby home for the period of their confinement.Footnote 123 The appearance of these women in institutions provided an opportunity for the Gardaí to question them and subsequently pursue the fathers, grandfathers, and brothers who had sex with them.Footnote 124 In 1948, for example, the Gardaí interviewed 18-year-old J.F. in the county home in Rathdrum, County Wicklow, where she revealed that her father was “responsible for her condition” and the “father of her child.”Footnote 125 Analogously, 17-year-old E.F. was delivered of a fully developed child in Sean Ross Abbey (a mother and baby home in Roscrea, County Tipperary), where she was subsequently interviewed by the Gardaí and admitted that her brother had a “connection with her on three occasions during 1939.”Footnote 126 Another case came to light in 1935 as a result of information received that a girl had given birth to an illegitimate child in Bessboro convent in Cork.Footnote 127 The 20-year-old victim, in the latter case, initially claimed that an unknown man was the father of the baby, but subsequently confessed that her father was “the father of the child.”Footnote 128 Confinement was also a factor in bringing another case to the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court in 1943 after the Gardaí received information that a 16-year-old girl had “given birth to an infant at the Coombe hospital about eight days previously and that the father of the girl was also the father of the infant.”Footnote 129 The baby, like other offspring from an incestuous relationship in this sample,Footnote 130 subsequently died in the Hospital when just a month old.Footnote 131
Gender and age
Incest, by virtue of how the offense was defined in the 1908 Act, was always heterosexual and “almost exclusively a male crime.”Footnote 132 35 out of 37 convicted incest offenders in this sample were male. The age of the 37 convicted incest perpetrators—35 male and 2 female—ranged between 18 and 74,Footnote 133 with the majority, 81 percent of the total sample, aged over 21 years. The oldest convicted offender, 74-year-old J.C., was charged with committing acts of incest with both his daughter in 1918 and his granddaughter (who was also his daughter) in 1934 after an interval of 16 years. In August 1918, it was alleged that he had impregnated his 17-year-old daughter, who subsequently gave birth to a baby girl as a result of his conduct.Footnote 134 The child, M.C., grew up, and when she was 15 years old, J.C. gave her sixpence, asked her to lie in the bed with him, and had a full connection with her. Studies conducted in other jurisdictions reveal that it was not unusual for incest victims to be rewarded for their silence,Footnote 135 but the girl, like her mother less than two decades before her, became pregnant and gave birth to a child on 30 October 1934, which died a few hours afterwards.Footnote 136 Charges were preferred against J.C., but owing to M.C.’s illness, a nolle prosequi was entered, and J.C. was sentenced to three years’ penal servitudeFootnote 137 on the charges solely relating to her mother.Footnote 138
It was also possible to identify an approximate age for 26 of the female victims of incest in the extant prisoner files between 1924 and 1950. These figures inevitably underestimate the ages of the victims given that the age recorded in the extant files relates to the time that the incest was reported,Footnote 139 but excluding the females who were convicted as “co-partners” under s. 2 of the 1908 Act, the age of the sample female victims at the time the offense became known to the police ranged between 10 and 23. Some of these cases involved persistent abuse—typically by fathers—which started at an earlier age and continued over an extended period of time. B.O’C., for instance, was 18 when the offense came to the attention of the Gardaí, but at the “commencement of this practice the girl was aged 14 years.”Footnote 140 Similarly, M.O’C. was 18 when she reported to the Gardaí that her father had been assaulting her,Footnote 141 but these offenses had occurred “on various occasions during the preceding four years.”Footnote 142 In other words, some of these offenses began before the girl had reached the age of consent.Footnote 143 On the whole, the average age of the female victims of incest across the prisoner files was 16 years, which reinforces the contemporary finding that “teenage girls are more likely to be the victims of incest than any other group.”Footnote 144 Furthermore, the mean age differential between male offender and female victim, insofar as it could be calculated, was 29 years, which not only reinforces the fact that incest cases almost always involve a sexual relationship between an older male and a younger female but also the “appropriateness of considering this type of incest as coercive.”Footnote 145
Relationship, location, and duration
It had been assumed that the conviction of a Roscommon woman for incest in 2009 was “the first female to be convicted in the state,”Footnote 146 but the surviving prisoner files reveal that at least four women were convicted under section 2 of the Punishment of Incest Act 1908. However, in contrast to the 2009 Roscommon case, where a mother forced her 13-year-old son to have sexual intercourse with her on four occasions, the females in this sample were convicted of incest offenses with their father and brother, respectively. One of the earliest convictions of a female for incest in the state appears to have been in 1927 when 18-year-old K.C. pleaded guilty to permitting her father, allegedly with consent, to have sexual intercourse with her.Footnote 147 There is very little detail on the background to the case in the extant prisoner file, but as incest generally continued for a sustained period, it seems reasonable to surmise that she was younger when the abuse commenced and that it extended into adulthood.Footnote 148 The prisoner was heavily pregnant during her sentenceFootnote 149 and was removed to the Rotunda Hospital in December 1927, in accordance with s. 17(6) of the Criminal Justice Administration Act, 1914, due to the onset of labor.Footnote 150 Her child was subsequently placed in the care of the Sisters at the Sacred Heart Home, Drumcondra,Footnote 151 but there was concern about releasing her from prison at the same time as her father, who was also serving a 12-month term. As the secretary of the General Prisons Board observed, “It is most desirable that this unfortunate girl … should not return to the home.”Footnote 152 Analogous to other older victims of incest who were sent to Magdalen asylums during this period,Footnote 153 the Chaplain of Mountjoy Prison made arrangements for the early release of the prisoner to the care of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge in High Park Convent in DublinFootnote 154 in order to allow her to avoid the “evil companionship” of her father—her “partner in crime”—who was due to be released at the same time.Footnote 155 Ironically, it was sometimes the victim that was sent away, deprived of her family,Footnote 156 while other family members petitioned for the release of the assailant back to the home due to economic necessity. Dependent on the perpetrator for survival, certain wives could not cope economically without their husbands and had little alternative but to take them back upon release.Footnote 157
Excluding the two cases where females were convicted, the remaining cases involved 35 male offenders who were convicted of offenses against 35 female victims, albeit at least four of these perpetrators were suspected of additional offenses against other female relatives. In the majority of these cases, the father was convicted of abusing his biological daughter. Of the 35 cases, 24 arose where the father had effectively raped one or more of his daughters in their own home, 10 were cases of sibling incest, one was a case of grandparent incest, and the other involved the abuse of both a daughter and a daughter/granddaughter. Writing in 2023, Bassanaver asserted that sexual abuse “mainly takes place within a family or home setting” that the child shared with the male assailant,Footnote 158 and unsurprisingly, this was borne out by the archival evidence in this study. The offenses perpetrated by P.C., for example, occurred in the offenders’ own home or in one of the outhouses,Footnote 159 while the acts of incest perpetrated by P.O’C took place in the bedroom of the house, in which they resided, and “where circumstances permitted in the kitchen.”Footnote 160 The Garda report also documented that these offenses generally occurred when “the wife and the older sister were absent from the house,” with the accused occasionally “resorting to a ruse to get them out of the place.”Footnote 161 The absence of the girl’s mother or other family members from the home—whether father-daughter or sibling incest—rendered the young female vulnerable to sexual exploitation.Footnote 162 In Wicklow in 1949, J.F. revealed that the “sexual acts were usually committed in the home during the absence of her mother,”Footnote 163 while 16-year-old K.G. alleged that her father would take her to his bedroom and “have connection with her during the temporary absence of her mother from the home.”Footnote 164 Comparably, J.J. O’S. had carnal knowledge of his 19-year-old daughter when other members of the family were absent, the other children were playing in the garden or beyond earshot where they could not hear her cries, or while their mother was absent shopping.Footnote 165 The Garda report revealed that “[s]o great was the girl’s fear of her father” in this particular case that “she never even informed her mother of the name of the man who was the father of her child.”Footnote 166 For these girls, the home was a dangerous place, and these offenses appear to have been committed whenever the perpetrator could find an opportunity.Footnote 167
All of these prosecutions involved one complainant and a male offender acting on his own, but the case files include suspected offenses against other children. The latter include the “peculiar” case of J.C.,Footnote 168 discussed above, who had committed incest with his daughter and illegitimate daughter (and granddaughter),Footnote 169 and the cases of J.R.,Footnote 170 L.N.,Footnote 171 and P.O’C. which involved suspected offenses committed against different daughters.Footnote 172 Two of the perpetrators were also recidivist sex offenders, having been convicted of offenses against other girls. Most of these cases involved persistent abuse—only two were “single occurrences, moments in which a man’s ability to repress his sexual desires temporarily broke down.”Footnote 173 The offenses, which took place on “divers” datesFootnote 174 or “various occasions,”Footnote 175 can be classified into two categories: offenses that occurred over a period of time—ranging from 6 weeksFootnote 176 to 6 yearsFootnote 177 —between the same complainant and the same offender, and a case in which the same offender committed several offenses against a daughter and a granddaughter two decades apart.Footnote 178 Incest “can last over a period of several years,” and the frequency of the offending included “four or five different occasions,”Footnote 179 “five or six occasions in all,”Footnote 180 “several occasions,”Footnote 181 “on an average of three times a week,”Footnote 182 to “off and on since” the child was about 14 years of age.”Footnote 183 Sibling incest appeared to follow a similar pattern. In Galway, S.C. told the Gardaí that her brother, P.C. had “copulated with her about twice a week from May 1946 to December 1946,”Footnote 184 while the “immodest acts” between J.M. and his sister “took place about four times each month from the time she was going to school” until a week before she gave birth to a baby girl.Footnote 185
Living conditions and overcrowding
Incest had traditionally been presented as a problem that was rooted in overcrowded homes both in Ireland and beyond,Footnote 186 and sleeping arrangements appear to have created an opportunity for exploitation in some of the sample incest cases. It was “not unusual, given the overcrowding, for parents to sleep in the same beds as their children,”Footnote 187 and the link between inadequate sleeping arrangements and sexual offenses was supported by evidence given by the Garda Commissioner, Eoin O’Duffy, to the Carrigan Committee.Footnote 188 Indeed, O’Duffy claimed that the cause of such offenses could be “found in wretched housing conditions such as where large families sleep in one or two beds in a common room, clothes barely sufficient to cover their nakedness, and no consideration possible as regards dressing, undressing, sleeping with the demands of nature.”Footnote 189 There is insufficient evidence in the surviving prisoner files to definitively substantiate this claim, but there were certainly cases in this sample which arose in such circumstances.Footnote 190 M.B., who was convicted of incest in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court in 1945, admitted that he and his daughter “slept in the same bed for about four years and while in the bed he had carnal connection of the girl on two occasions.”Footnote 191 Similarly, in a Meath case in 1947, “the accused and his daughter slept in a single bed in a separate room to the rest of the family, and that is where the offences had been committed,”Footnote 192 while E.K, who was described by the prison governor as a “better type than those usually committed for this type of offence,”Footnote 193 also admitted to “pawing” his daughter in the bed in the weeks before he “had connection and penetrated” her.Footnote 194 Class-based assumptions about overcrowding may have been regularly offered as an explanation for domestic sexual abuse, but most of these offenses were “calculated and premeditated, not a result of a sudden loss of control.”Footnote 195 For instance, the victim in a Dublin case in 1943 told the court that “she resided with her father” and that he “made her sleep with him in the bed in the kitchen.”Footnote 196 Likewise, the segregation of sexes did not always ensure immunity from an involuntary sexual relationship. 20-year-old J.M., for example, used to go to the bed occupied by his younger sister in the girls’ room and have sexual intercourse with her before her parents retired for the night.Footnote 197
Such sleeping arrangements also meant that children occasionally had to witness sexual abuse or were at least in close proximity to it.Footnote 198 14-year-old C.D. and her father, 51-year-old C.D., for instance, occupied one end of a bed, while her 17-year-old sister occupied the other end of the same bed.Footnote 199 In such circumstances, it seems hard to fathom that the older sibling was not aware that her sister was being molested in her presence, but the extant evidence states that “It was here that intercourse took place at night unknown to B. who merely felt her father and sister wriggle for a time every second night or so after going to bed.”Footnote 200 It can also, at times, be difficult to determine whether mothers knew of the incest,Footnote 201 but in a Dublin case in 1948, a mother revealed that her husband would insist on having his daughter in the room, with the light on, when he was having sexual intercourse with her, and that on another occasion he had sexual intercourse with her while having his hand on his daughter’s private part.Footnote 202 The Garda report also documented that “at least on one occasion he had sexual intercourse with M. in the bed in her (the mother’s) presence.”Footnote 203 At one level, it seems remarkable that the mother in question failed to intervene to stop her husband regularly raping their daughter over a period of 4 years, especially considering that her daughter “complained of her father’s conduct several times,”Footnote 204 but such an assessment would fail to acknowledge the power dynamics in familial child sexual abuse.Footnote 205 Indeed, the surviving evidence reveals that the girl’s mother was not exempt from the prisoner’s abuse—he had previously been convicted for assaulting her in 1936.Footnote 206 It appears that this particular mother was powerless to defend her daughter.Footnote 207
Widows, alcohol, and remorse
Diarmaid Ferriter has written that it was not unusual for “widowed fathers to begin sexually abusing their daughters,”Footnote 208 and there is evidence in this sample to intimate that daughters were susceptible to sexual exploitation where the mother was deceased. Nine of the perpetrators were widowers at the time of the offending. In Offaly in 1928, P.M. was tried and convicted of having sexual intercourse with his 17-year-old daughter. This harrowing case of persistent abuse resulted in two pregnancies. After giving birth to her first child in the county home in Tullamore in 1925—the father of the child was reputed to be a strange man that she met one night on a country road—the victim, bereft of maternal protection and entirely dependent for support on the very person who was perpetuating the abuse, returned to the family home where she was abused over a “protracted period.”Footnote 209 As the Garda Superintendent put it, “The little girl was entirely in her father’s hands without protection of any kind from his unnatural conduct.”Footnote 210 By the time of the trial, the girl was back in the county home, pregnant with her second child. The perpetrator, whose treatment of his daughter was described as “callously calculated and deliberate,”Footnote 211 was sentenced to four years penal servitude. Two years later, M.A.M. was still in the county home—the “chief refuge for many women who found themselves pregnant outside marriage” post-independenceFootnote 212 —with her two children.Footnote 213 Tragically, this was not the only incest case involving successive pregnancies. In March 1929, N.F. made a statement to the Gardaí that her father had continuously committed incest with her between 1925 and 1928, “as a result of which three children were born.”Footnote 214
In 8 of the other cases, the perpetrators were widowers, and alcohol featured in some of these cases. P.M., discussed above, was believed to be “in the habit of overindulging in intoxicating liquor,”Footnote 215 while in Limerick in 1930, P.K., who was sentenced to five years penal servitude for sexually abusing his daughter, claimed that he began to drink heavily after the death of his wife, and attributed his crimes to his excessive consumption.Footnote 216 His daughter, like other victims of sex abuse during this period,Footnote 217 was placed in Good Shepherd Convent in Limerick.Footnote 218 The accused wrote multiple letters to the Department of Justice requesting permission to correspond with his daughters as he was “worried and fretting about them day and night,” but unsurprisingly, such requests were declined due to the “heinous nature of his Crime.”Footnote 219 Notably, a government document revealed that many convicts imprisoned for incest wanted to keep in touch with the girls involvedFootnote 220 —one prisoner even received letters and visits from the victimFootnote 221 —but very few incest offenders appeared to show genuine remorse or regret for their actions or concern for their victims.Footnote 222 P.C., for instance, “displayed a callous disregard for the injured girl’s welfare and protection over a period of six to seven months,”Footnote 223 while W.R., albeit claiming in a petition that he regretted what he “had done,”Footnote 224 previously stated in a letter to the Circuit Court judge that “it was better to have his daughter interfered with by himself rather than by some other person.”Footnote 225 Equally, the prison governor stated that he was certain that E.K. “genuinely regrets his offence” and was “thoroughly ashamed of himself,”Footnote 226 but the perpetrator initially blamed his daughter for the sexual activity. In fact, he wrote that his daughter “encouraged” him in his “downfall”Footnote 227 and informed the Gardaí that she “often appeared in his presence provocatively dressed—or undressed” and that she “attempted—and succeeded in arousing his passions.”Footnote 228 This, of course, was not the only case that involved victim-blaming or the portrayal of the victim as “the tempter or temptress,”Footnote 229 but these perpetrators were “reluctant to accept responsibility for their actions and attributed disproportionate power to the girls.”Footnote 230
Petition letters are a “particularly rich source” for this type of historical research,Footnote 231 but there are obvious limitations in taking letters written by perpetrators solely as the basis for determining whether they were remorseful or not. Offenders such as P.M. may have retrospectively expressed “heartfelt sorrow” at his “foolish act,”Footnote 232 but such petition letters “cannot be assumed necessarily to have reflected the honest views” of the perpetrators.Footnote 233 Rather, it seems reasonable to surmise that these prisoners wrote whatever they believed was necessary to secure mitigation of punishment.Footnote 234 This was perfectly captured by the case of L.D., who claimed in his letter of petition that he “fell for his daughter … over taking some drink” and that he was “very sorry” for what he had done.Footnote 235 The 53-year-old widower also proclaimed that he would “never drink again”Footnote 236 and that he was petitioning for time off his five-year sentence as he was worried about his son and daughters being “left out on the ways of the world.”Footnote 237 These sentiments can, however, be juxtaposed with the various other documents contained within the file which offer a contradictory narrative of the case, and reveal that L.D, like other incestuous men, was “remarkably non-parental.”Footnote 238 Indeed, the Chief Probationer revealed that his children “cordially detest him” and felt that he was “a self-righteous old blackguard who is not being kept under lock and key half long enough.”Footnote 239 Moreover, an Inspector of the NSPCC, to whom the children previously made complaints about their father, described him as “a mental case.”Footnote 240 In this context, the Prison Governor understandably recommended contacting the victim, who continued to live in the family home during her father’s imprisonment, in advance of his release as “she may not wish to remain in the house when he returns.”Footnote 241
Consent, force, and threats
The notion of consent is particularly problematic in the context of sexual relationships within the family.Footnote 242 Consent, like age, was no defense to a charge of incest under the 1908 Act, but there were a few cases in the surviving files where it was alleged that the sexual misconduct was either consensual or there was no evidence of resistance. In Dublin in 1945, it was stated that 18-year-old J.B. “offered no objection to the behaviour of her father on the occasions mentioned,”Footnote 243 while in Sligo in 1947, it was claimed that 16-year-old S.A.C. “did not object to the petitioner’s conduct with her.”Footnote 244 The failure to appreciate that a child—who is entirely emotionally and economically dependent on the parent—was incapable of freely consenting to sexual activity with that person was also evidenced by the case of P.O’C. that came before the Central Criminal Court in 1936,Footnote 245 where it was stated that “In every case the daughter consented to the act.”Footnote 246 However, the veracity of this claim is brought into doubt when it is juxtaposed with the subsequent statement of the victim, which revealed that “she made no complaint because of fear of her father, and from a sense of shame to the person to whom she would naturally complain—her mother.”Footnote 247 Conversely, there were other cases in the extant files where it was stated explicitly that the intercourse was non-consensual, and it appears that some of these offenses—at least insofar as can be distilled from the surviving evidence—could have potentially been prosecuted as rape. In Cork in 1934, 57-year-old J.C., while in a state of inebriation, attacked his daughter and had “connexion [sic] with her against her will.”Footnote 248 The latter revealed that she struggled and screamed during the offenses, but none of the neighbors took any notice or came to her assistance.Footnote 249 Correspondingly, in Dublin in 1948, M.O’C. stated that she “was not a willing party to the acts, having acted under duress.”Footnote 250 The victim also observed that when she refused to submit to her father’s advances, he “assaulted her by striking her and pulling off her clothes.”Footnote 251 These two daughters certainly did not enter these relationships “willingly or even with resignation,”Footnote 252 and it is clear that these experiences were both “noxious and traumatic.”Footnote 253
In addition to the use of force, other perpetrators used threats to coerce their victim into sexual intercourse. J.F., for instance, revealed that she “protested and resisted,” but that her father “bullied her and threatened to beat her unless she consented.”Footnote 254 Moreover, on another occasion, “as she resisted him,” the emotional impact of the offense became too much. The victim became “hysterical and collapsed in a fit on the floor and was in such a condition that the doctor had to be called to attend her.”Footnote 255 Four of the offenses were also accompanied by threats to kill. In Dublin in 1932 and 1933, M.D. threatened to kill his daughter as “if she told anyone he would be liable to five years’ imprisonment”Footnote 256 —the threat of punishment doing little to deter him from molesting his daughter, but rather galvanizing him to reinforce the fate that would befall her were the offense disclosed.Footnote 257 Similarly, in Kildare in 1941, J.F. threatened to murder his daughter if she stopped meeting him,Footnote 258 while E.McG. threatened to kill his daughter if she complained to anyone, deprived her of her clothes to prevent her from leaving his lodgings, and vindictively told her future husband of what had taken place in an endeavor to prevent him from marrying her.Footnote 259 This was not the only case where a father was “jealous” of another man keeping company with his daughter,Footnote 260 but such threats were not solely the preserve of father-daughter incest cases. In Tipperary in the late 1920s, J.R. threatened to kill his half-sister if she told her father or employer.Footnote 261 Other cases included evidence of some objection or resistance by the victims at the time of the offense, but these victims appear to have submitted to the sexual acts due to parental authority, blackmail, and fear. In Cork in October 1935, for instance, 19-year-old L.O’S. gave evidence to the court that she “cried and tried to push him away,” but that “he ordered her to stop and not to inform anyone of what had taken place.”Footnote 262 She also outlined that she “did not inform anyone because of fear of him.”Footnote 263 Moreover, in Cork in 1945, it was reported that W.R. “used his authority as her father to prevent her going to dances etc. unless she first or subsequently consented to have illicit intercourse with him.”Footnote 264 Gordon has written that the very definitions of “acquiescence and resistance” are “challenged, blurred, and perhaps reformulated” when examining incest cases,Footnote 265 but most of the perpetrators in this sample persisted with their demands despite the obvious reluctance of their female relatives, who were clearly coerced into these incestuous relations.Footnote 266
Conclusion
Writing in 1972, Lukianowicz claimed that incestuous relations were a subcultural “phenomenon” in certain parts of Ireland,Footnote 267 while La Fontaine observed in 1988 that incest only occurs in poor living conditions or backward areas such as rural Ireland.Footnote 268 The growing evidence of incest in other jurisdictions has called for a reappraisal of these myths and demonstrated that the problem of familial child sexual abuse is “remarkably widespread”Footnote 269 for what was once perceived to be one of most universal social and cultural taboos.Footnote 270 In fact, incest is now accepted not only to be the “most common” form of sexual abuse, but also “the hardest to uncover” and the “most damaging to victims.”Footnote 271 The historical sources that form the basis of this article thus provide a partial glimpse of exploitative sexual practices within Irish families in the decades after independence and reveal that there is nothing new about convictions for incest, that intrafamilial sexual abuse is an enduring “everyday” problem,Footnote 272 and that incest was the “behaviour of very ordinary people.”Footnote 273 This was perfectly encapsulated by one police report which stated that the defendant gave the Gardaí and “the public the impression that he was a quiet, inoffensive type” and “a harmless character,” but “of course he did not parade his sexual tendency.”Footnote 274 These files also disclose that incest was effectively a male preserve and that the perpetrator was the “familiar face” of a father, brother or grandfather.Footnote 275 Moreover, victims were invariably younger than offenders, most of the abuse took place in the home over an extended period of time, many incest offenses resulted in pregnancy, some involved violence and threats, drink was sometimes a factor, motherless children appear to have been vulnerable, and the vast majority of these crimes were premeditated and non-consensual. Put otherwise, incest was “virtually always an abusive relationship.”Footnote 276
The contemporaneous archival material, upon which this article is based, may have the benefit of not being “subject to later interpretation by memory,”Footnote 277 but given how incest was defined in the 1908 Act and the relationships within which intercourse was prohibited, these files only tell part of the story of intrafamilial child sexual abuse in the formative decades of Irish independence. Although beyond the scope of this article, the extant prisoner files include cases where offenders were convicted of rape, unlawful carnal knowledge, and indecent assault for sexual offenses committed against immediate family members, relatives, stepchildren, and stepsiblings during this chronological period.Footnote 278 The narrow definition of incest in the 1908 Act has frequently been the subject of criticism,Footnote 279 but one of these cases—which was outside the degrees of consanguinity necessary for a charge of incest—particularly captures the limitations of the 1908 Act in neglecting to cover sexual acts other than vaginal intercourse and embrace a broader range of family relationships.Footnote 280 In January 1931, M.D., a 23-year-old laborer, was convicted of the attempted buggery of his 10-year-old stepson and the indecent assault of his 11-year-old stepdaughter in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. M.D. pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude (ironically the maximum punishment available under the 1908 Act at the time)Footnote 281 but avoided the stigma of being convicted of incest because the relationship was outside the range of relationships within which the offense could be committed under the 1908 Act. The “gendered and heteronormatively biased”Footnote 282 construction of 1908 legislation may have reflected the fact that most incest cases concerned fathers abusing their daughters, but the case of M.D. serves as a reminder that “males as well as females” are subject to sexual abuse within the family.Footnote 283
Open access
