Urgent improvement is needed in how Ireland tackles gender-based violence, according to the Council of Europe's Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO).

GREVIO published its first report this week evaluating Ireland's implementation of the Istanbul Convention which said not enough is being done to combat violence against women here.

The Istanbul Convention requires member states to fully address gender-based violence and take measures to prevent it.

A Zero Tolerance Strategy was launched by the Government last year seeking to address many of the issues raised in the GREVIO report, but what drives people to commit acts of gender-based violence and is the problem getting worse?

Ashling Murphy's murder re-ignited a conversation about gender-based violence and the safety of women in Ireland yet a further 19 women have died violently here since and Gardaí have attended an average of 154 daily domestic abuse incidents during that same period.

While the Government has committed funds to tackling the problem, addressing why people commit severe acts of violence is also key to improving the situation according to Dr Ciara Staunton, the co-ordinator of the Diploma in the Psychology of Criminal Behaviour at University College Cork (UCC).

She believes, psychologists, psychiatrists and counsellors, need to be more direct in their interactions with men while in therapy or treatment.

"I would be really keen that as professionals working in this space, we get better at asking questions around homicidal thoughts because it's one of the biggest risk factors [facing women]," Dr Staunton told Katie Hannon on Upfront: The Podcast.

"The question, 'Have you ever thought about killing your partner?’ needs to be asked in order for that person to admit to it and to think about it and then talk through."

While Ashling Murphy’s murder was deemed a random act of violence, almost 90% of the 264 women killed in Ireland since 1996 knew their killer, according to Women’s Aid.

"If we could understand more about those men who do resort to that ultimate act of homicide, we could understand what has contributed to their thinking patterns."

Listen to Dr Ciara Staunton speaking to Katie Hannon on Upfront: The Podcast

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Common traits

Dr Staunton says that while factors like adversity in childhood, psychiatric illness or the influence of drugs and alcohol are often found to be common traits in people who engage in violent acts, there is no simple way to group those people who do together.

"When you start to boil it down into case by case, you get a clearer picture of the profile. But when you try and consider it as a topology of one group, it's actually quite hard to do," Dr Staunton says.

"We could be looking at things like personality traits, elements of narcissism, anti-social personality traits, perhaps even elements of psychopathy."

Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health condition that requires a psychiatric diagnosis.

"You have many people who have elements of narcissism. But that doesn't make the individual a narcissistic person," Dr Staunton say.

For diagnosed narcissists, they usually won't recognise that they have the disorder meaning their behaviours don’t seem strange to themselves.

"It is the person's personality. They don't know any different. Their lack of remorse is intrinsic to them."

Nothing new

The issue of gender-based violence is far from a new problem in Ireland, according to Dr Staunton.

"There has been no official sudden jump in the figures. Are we getting better at recording and recognising these incidents? I think we are. The debate around these issues is helping women come forward."

But while there has been an increase in the numbers of women who report violent acts committed against them, Dr Staunton says we're still not getting the full picture.

"This is all set in a context where even official records don't account for the vast majority of women who don't come forward. We have a mismatch here between what we know to be true versus the reality on the ground," Dr Staunton says.

The reasons women don’t always report such incidents are plentiful.

"It's complex. For the people living in it, it's very hard to project the level of threat that they may be under. Subtle behaviors might become normalised within a relationship and within a family. Even the women themselves don't recognise that."

Dr Staunton says that certain behaviours like coercive control and manipulation can often escalate to more serious acts of violence because of shifts in relationship dynamics or perceived power shifts.

"One of the biggest risk factors for women is the woman who indicates she's ready to extricate herself from the relationship. For the individual who has deeply entrenched subtle misogynistic views, that might be enough to drive them over the edge.

"We hear terms like power control and entitlement being used, which gives a top level, maybe explanation for motivation," Dr Staunton says.

Early intervention

Dr Staunton says she is concerned about the material available to young people via their smartphones and the effects it can have on their brain development.

"The most worrying part here is why are we allowing nine-year-olds to have smartphones? I think there's an age-appropriate time when children should have access to smartphones."

The murder of Ana Kriégel, Dr Staunton says, was influenced by what her killers were viewing on their smartphones.

"There is a complex developmental piece here in terms of access to the availability of what young boys are seeing [pornography] into what is then is normalised."

"It starts in childhood. Family practices, family rearing, reinforcing that through school. Our whole sex education curriculum needs updating," Dr Staunton says.

Better education around sex and the risk factors associated are badly needed here to address some of the problems raised by GREVIO with Dr Staunton saying, "a healthier rhetoric and conversation around masculinity and femininity," could help.

"I think we're giving out the wrong message to young men that somehow being masculine is problematic because that's what they're hearing. We also need to include men. By and large, most men are good men," Dr Staunton says.

"We need men to be part of the solution. We need to call out bad attitudes and bad behaviors."

Listen to Dr Ciara Staunton speaking to Katie Hannon on Upfront: The Podcast here, on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify.