Signs of the Times . . .

Back in the mid-nineties a detective told me that there were 400 barring orders in Dundalk.  The number absolutely flabbergasted me, though I imagine it has increased exponentially since then.

The feminist explanation, of course, was that it was simply a consequence of dragging into the light something that had been long hidden.

The problem is that when I went to think about it, I really couldn’t find any substantial evidence in my own experience to back it up.  That is not to say that it wasn’t going on, but if it was it was not in numbers of likely to have been significant, otherwise it would have been quite definitely known and talked about.

The only example I could come up with, and going back over fifty years, concerned someone I briefly worked with when I was seventeen.  It was generally accepted then that he was guilty as rumoured.  Yet I have to say that my personal experience of him was quite positive.  I found him to be a very nice fellow and still think of him fondly.  And, in any event, you have to allow for people as you find them.

Of course, this may be to do with the fact that from my earliest days I tended to have an intense dislike of those cardboard cut-outs of virtue and villainy that used be, and still are, in different form, popularly presented to us, either for emulation or to throw stones at.

Indeed, even in childhood, I hated what passed for respectability, especially as preached by those nearest to me.  In fact, on those few occasions when I became aware of someone being locally out of favour, I always made a point of deliberately saying hello to them.  Rather along the lines of Churchill, who famously said: ‘If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House . . .’

But all this is beside the point.

What I am intending to say is that the huge increase in what is called domestic abuse is not primarily the result of some historical precedent, but is rather the result of something peculiar to our times.  It is just another symptom of the internal prolapse of the organs of western civilisation and society.  Arguably made worse by the progressivist tendency to redefine domestic abuse increasingly in a ‘he looked crooked at me’ direction.