‘Our Darkest Hour’: Women and Structural Violence under Ireland’s 8th Amendment

Abstract

This article analyses women's stories of violence in the context of the 8th Amendment. Our analysis of 773 anonymous women's narratives from In Her Shoes reveals instances of rape and partner violence, health disparities, forced travel, barriers to care, and withholding of information by healthcare providers. Posts described the impact of structural violence on women's medical care and lived realities. While scholars have produced essential analyses of structural violence in twentieth-century Ireland, assessing how harm has impacted women and children in particular, most works focus exclusively on the institutions run by the state and Catholic Church: schools, asylums, laundries, and homes for unmarried mothers. Here, we argue for the expansion of the concept of structural violence, demonstrating that it also affected women and children who were not institutionalised. Anti-abortion policies, we contend, are part and parcel of gendered structural violence. In Ireland, the 8th Amendment enacted interconnected forms of violence on many of Ireland's women and, in some cases, girls. Despite the violence these women faced, their voicing of their experiences served as resistance, demonstrating how support and storytelling, in some instances, can help start the process of healing the individual and collective wounds of the past.