Good afternoon everyone and thank you for the opportunity to speak on this topic. My Office has already recognised the work of the EP’s Me Too movement through a special award at our 2019 Award for Good Administration event. I commend you for the continuing work that you are doing including this important survey.

We will later hear more about the current situation in parliament. I fully recognise that women too can be guilty – and are guilty - of workplace harassment - but in this contribution, I want to focus on the broader issues surrounding gender based violence and particularly on violence against women perpetrated by men.

And I want to do so because the killing and the physical abuse of women is not something that necessarily exists on a different plane to workplace harassment and other forms of abuse.

The harassment of women by more powerful men, the assault and killing of women by more physically powerful men resides, in my view, on precisely the same plane, just at opposite ends.

And this is implicitly recognised in this in your movement’s stated aim to combat gender-based violence, power imbalance and all kinds of abuse in the workplace and society in Brussels and beyond.

This does not mean that men who harass in the workplace would ever be physically violent towards any woman but the impulse to dominate, to control, to make women yield to male power is often a feature of workplace harassment just as it so tragically features in the deaths of women murdered by men who sought to control their lives.

• The EU’s recent Directive on violence against women goes some way to recognizing the scale of the problem.
• Commission statistics show that one in three women both in the EU and globally have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime.
• At least two women a day are killed in the EU by an intimate partner or family member.
• While 32% of perpetrators of sexual harassment in the EU come from the employment context. 

Last year in Dublin, I reflected on the deaths of over two hundred Irish women in the last few decades, trying to see in those statistics what lay beneath.

The vast majority of women were killed by men known to them, partners, former partners, husbands, acquaintances, but what was most shocking and puzzling to me was the manner in which they were killed.

Most if not all, were physically weaker than the man who attacked them yet, in so many cases, those women were subjected to what is legally called ‘overkill’.

It was not sufficient simply to kill them but rather to inflict levels of violence even on their dead bodies with a rage and a hatred that I, as a woman simply fail to comprehend. One woman was stabbed over 60 times, some of those wounds almost certainly inflicted after she had died.

And this failure of comprehension, women’s bewilderment at why men would wish to inflict harm on them be it psychological in the workplace or in the very place they should consider safe, their own home, their sanctuary, needs to find a resolution.

So what I ask you to consider is this, are there enough men in this conversation, are they sufficiently contributing and are we sufficiently open to them contributing to a movement that, yes, largely comprises women and is about women but is also by extension about men’s partners, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, daughters and friends?

This cannot be an exclusive debate because how can we possibly, as women, find relief from this violence unless we get to the real heart of why it happens and we cannot do that unless men are deeply – not passively - engaged.

I am not suggesting that any man could begin to understand why other men murder their partners but they clearly have insights into more general male behaviour and thought processes.

Some time ago, I watched a documentary about a biological male who had fully transitioned to female. Their story was fascinating for many reasons but what resonated most with me was how this person experienced herself and how the world treated her when she began to live her life as a female.

She was astonished by the difference, by the casual sexism, the lowering of her status in people’s eyes, how, essentially – lesser - she felt. 

She had never even thought about that before, never imagined how differently women inhabit the world and how differently that world treats them. She had even envied women, thought they were treated like princesses by that world, until she slipped into their lives and found out the truth.

It took that transition for her to see it, to experience life as a woman, stripped of her automatic male power status. So how are we going to create that level of insight for others?

The EU and many Member States are stepping up when it comes to dealing with gender based violence. Just this month, the Irish Government – and specifically its female Justice Minister – opened a statutory agency dedicated to tackling and reducing domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.

The agency aims significantly to increase the number of refuge places available to victims – mainly women – of domestic violence. While this is both welcome and necessary, I wondered at the irony of the women and children being forced to flee, their lives at best disrupted, at worst destroyed, while the abuser in some cases, continues to live life as normal.

In the workplace environment, how often do we hear of the person being harassed forced to leave their employment, rather than the person harassing them?

I wonder therefore whether the general direction of policy making in this area, more supports, wider definitions of abuse and violence, tougher sanctions, is sufficient.

Are we simply taking male violence as a given, as something endemic in our societies to be guarded against and punished, but not eradicated at its source? Imagine if we had just accepted COVID, tried to hide from it, without searching either for the virus or the vaccines.

And that is why we women need men to work with us. We need men in particular to reflect on what other men do, to see what we see, and with that awareness, to feed into a global conversation on this issue. We need men above all to talk to each other.

When I looked at the list of Irish women who had been killed, I tried to find explanations but in most of the court cases those accused did not testify.

Yet some reports indicated a loss of control underpinned by a raging fear of losing control over the woman they would then kill.

Frequently, the woman herself was blamed: “She provoked me”, they said. “It wasn’t that she attacked me, or threatened me, or stole from me, or put me in fear of my life, but simply that she had said or done something that I did not like. And so I killed her.” It was often the banality of the claimed reason that was so shocking.

So, as this Parliament reaches its end and you look towards the next one, it is important to engage even more actively with men as you try to develop a workplace culture of respect and safety, and one free from fear, a culture that subsequently broadens out into wider society. 

I understand that from the next legislature MEPs will have mandatory training on anti-harassment, and this is welcome. However you might also reflect on whether some of the measures put in place are simply too passive, a box to be ticked without gaining any real and sustained insight into this and other behaviours, treating the symptoms but failing to understand and attempt to eradicate the root causes.

A famous book from the 1990s, had as its title, ‘Men are from Mars, Women from Venus.’ In 2024, I think it’s about time all genders met on the same planet.