In this episode, Dara is continuing the theme from last week – namely, male culpability in the Cornell 7 case and in male-perpetrated sexual assault in general. Behaviours and attitudes generally do not self-generate. They are handed down, observed, learned, and replicated. And when such behaviours and attitudes, even if problematic, are tacitly approved, they gain a legitimacy that becomes internalised.
So where do men create a proactive response to this in modern society? Where do they reclaim a mantle of guidance and responsibility that makes sense to the communities of which they are a part? And what is the pathway to dialogue with other stakeholders in society – primarily women, but also any group that feels disempowered?
And can it be argued that the machinery of capitalism and consumerism has no interest in the collective impulse that might create a social scaffolding of mutual care? And what does it look like when institutional structures finally deliver something resembling justice? And how would Larry McMurtry’s Augustus McCrae deal with these problems?
Chalkie White talks to The Irish Independent about the sentencing of his abuser, George Gibney: https://www.independent.ie/podcasts/in-the-courtroom-manipulative-predator-george-gibney-jailed-for-15-and-a-half-years/a/163030998.html