Magdalene Sisters (2002), The

Journal of Adult Protection, The, Dec 2004 by Kennedy, Margaret

This was a land where women and girls were punished for so-called 'sexual sins'. In fact, the truth was that they were punished for being the victims of men's sexual sins and their fantasies, and almost entirely punished by male Catholic priests and fathers. They were incarcerated in slavery to nuns in Magdalen laundries or asylums - nuns who themselves had been corrupted by patriarchal messages. Most were single parents, rape victims, incest victims, victims of sexual assault, or had been transferred from an orphanage. You could be there because your mother was deemed 'unfit' (meaning something sexual) to care for you. You could land up there for being 'pretty', 'too beautiful', or simply being an embarrassment to your family: 'There was no trials, no inquiries, no nothing. The presumption that you were a sexual being was enough to condemn you. So the victims of abuse were guilty too, and, by bizarre extension, those in danger of corruption by their brothers, cousins, or just men in general also had to be saved from sin' (Fiachra Gibbons, in The Guardian, 7 February 2003).

For too long, women's lives have been submerged and the director, Peter Mullen, was right to keep the film close to the human experience. It depicts the grim lives of four women: Margaret, raped at a wedding by her cousin, Bernadette, an orphan who was found chatting to boys at the school gates, Rose, a single parent, and Crispina, also a single parent with learning disabilities, slowly going mad with the regime.

There is relentless humiliation, degradation, physical abuse, and all designed to break these girls, to subdue their spirit, to annihilate their identity, their humanness, and to create a woman who would never function as a relational nor a sexual being.

Needless to say the Vatican or Catholic commentators did not welcome the film. The Vatican branded Mullen a liar, and dispatched video-toting priests to film those watching the films. They told the audience they risked eternal damnation for watching such sacrilegious entertainment. Yet a bishop in Scotland urged everyone to go and see it. The Catholic News service said the severe living conditions in the laundries were 'sensationalised to the point of caricature' and called the film a 'problematical melodrama'.

But survivors of the system say that the film did not go far enough: 'It was worse in the Magdelenes, much worse than what you see. I don't like to say it, but the film is soft on the nuns' (Mary-Jo McDonogh in The Guardian, 7 February 2003).

In death the women were treated no better. Those who died in the Magdalene were buried with a number or a religious name (not their own name); some were not even registered as dead. Recently a Magdalene cemetery was dug up; the remains of 155 women were taken away and cremated. Why? So that the religious order could sell the land for development.

This film is an important contribution to the history of women in Ireland. What does it ultimately teach us? That inhumanity can be disguised as benevolence? That women's rights can be trodden on with impunity with spiritual sanction and patriarchal power? That power vested in a few corrupts? That religion may not always be good? That adults can be vulnerable even when there are no apparent cognitive difficulties? That women are still oppressed? That the silence of many allows abuse by the few? That institutions can ultimately corrupt and demoralise individuals?