Sexual assault and fatal violence against women during the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921: Kate Maher’s murder in context

At the height of the Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921, 45-year-old Kate Maher was brutally raped. She subsequently died of terrible wounds, almost certainly inflicted by drunken British soldiers. This article discusses her inadequately investigated case in the wider context of fatal violence against women and girls during years of major political instability. Ordinarily her violent death would have been subject to a coroner’s court inquiry and rigorous police investigation, but in 1920, civil inquests in much of Ireland were replaced by military courts of inquiry. With the exception of medical issues, where doctors adhered to their ethical responsibility to provide clear and concise evidence on injuries, wounds and cause of death, courts of inquiry were cursory affairs in which Crown forces effectively investigated and exonerated themselves. This article adopts a microhistory approach to Maher’s case to compare how civilian and military systems differed in their treatments of female fatalities. Despite the fact that the medical evidence unequivocally showed that the attack was of a very violent sexual nature, the two soldiers directly implicated were not charged with rape or any other sexual offence. In her case, and in those of other women who died violently while in the company of soldiers and policemen, prosecutions of the men involved resulted in acquittal by military court martial. This was so both for women portrayed as of immoral character and for others assumed to be ‘respectable’. It also reflects on the wider question of sexual violence during the Irish War of Independence, concluding that while females experienced a range of gender-determined threats and actions such as armed raids on their homes, the ‘bobbing’ of hair and other means of ‘shaming’, rape, accepted as the most serious act of sexual assault, was regarded by all combatants as beyond the pale.