Mary Crilly receives honorary doctorate from UCC

19 Dec 2023

As part of UCC’s ongoing work in the Ending Sexual Violence and Harassment Framework, Dr Mary Crilly has been awarded an honorary doctorate.

A number of high-profile activities and events have been organized over the course of 2023. These include three events to honour the work of Dr Mary Crilly, the founder member and Director of the Sexual Violence Centre Cork.  The first involved a lunch held on 13 June 2023 to celebrate the 40 years work of the Sexual Violence Centre as part of the conference, Building a Transnational Feminist Coalition Against Gender Violence and the last when Dr Crilly was presented with an alumna achievement award on 16 November. Finally, warm congratulations are due to her for the award of Honorary Doctor of Laws by the National University Ireland, presented by Professor Nuala Finnegan, at a ceremony in the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin. She was nominated by UCC Professor of Sociology, Maggie O’Neill.

Also in November, we welcomed world-renowned theatre collective, LASTESIS from Chile. Their globally acclaimed performance, The Rapist is You has been performed all around the world and has led to their featuring on Time Magazine’s list of the world’s most influential people in 2020.  UCC has been engaging with the work of LASTESIS for some time and in 2020 and again in 2022, multilingual flashmobs against gender violence were staged, an energetic collaboration between staff and students across campus. LASTESIS participated in a public conversation at 3 pm in the Granary Theatre to a capacity audience with many more attending online. They subsequently delivered a workshop to more than 70 students and staff illustrating their celebrated methodology of/involving making theory into praxis through creative processing in and through the body using graphics, music and movement.

The Ending Sexual Violence and Harassment: Sexual Misconduct Policy and Procedure were approved by Governing Authority on 5 December 2023 and will be launched in 2024.

Bio

First located in the Quay Co-Op in Cork, the Sexual Violence Centre was established in 1983 and Mary initially gave it 6 months. Raided by the Special Branch, the Centre commenced its work during a period in Ireland when working to support victims of sexual violence was seen as a profoundly anti-family gesture. Since then it has gone from strength to strength fulfilling its mission to educate, advocate and provide counselling care for victims of sexual violence with survivor centred, holistic and humanistic care at its core. The first person in her family to finish the Leaving Certificate, Mary went on to graduate with a Diploma in The Psychology of Criminal Behaviour from University College Cork and subsequently, an MA in Women’s Studies. She is most noted for her tireless campaigning for policy and legislative change in the fields of sexual violence, sex trafficking, domestic violence and she advocates for a radical re-imagining of our adversarial legal system. Mary Crilly was awarded the Freedom of the City by Cork City Council in June 2022 and on that occasion poet, Paula Meehan, paid tribute to her “magnificent wildness”.  The honorary doctorate of laws is a fitting tribute to her achievements.