Rattlesnake – addressing coercive control in intimate partner relations

14 Feb 2024

On 14 February the Sexual Violence Centre Cork Community Hub in collaboration with UCC Futures: Collective Social Futures   ISS21  and the Violence, Conflict and Gender research cluster screened Rattle Snake  followed by a Q&A with Mary Crilly and Prof. Maggie O’Neill UCC to honour ‘V-day’  which is “a global activist movement to end violence against all women (cisgender, transgender, and those who hold fluid identities that are subject to gender-based violence), girls and the Earth”.

Rattlesnake is written by award winning Catrina McHugh MBE of Open Clasp Feminist Theatre Company. Directed by Charlotte Bennett. Rattlesnake is an epic tale based on real-life stories of women who have faced and survived coercive controlling domestic abuse. 

Combining social science research and the impact of arts based research  interventions, the screening and Q&A consider the links between research, practice and arts activism.

Rattle Snake was funded by Durham PCC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It is based on the lived experience of survivors. Catrina McHugh MBE is an award-winning writer who co-founded Open Clasp Theatre Company in 1998, with the aim of ‘Changing the World, One Play at a Time’.  Keen to address research identifying gaps in Police understanding of coercive control by Professor Nicole Westmarland and Kate Butterworth (Durham University) and the impact of arts based research interventions by Professor Maggie O’Neil (UCC) Open Clasp were commissioned  by O’Neill and Westmarland to develop and deliver arts based training to all frontline police officers in County Durham, to better respond to sexual and domestic violence – coinciding with the change of law making coercive control in relationships a crime in (Policing and Crime Act 2015).

In the context of the Domestic Violence Act of 2018  and the new crime of Coercive Controlling Domestic Abuse in Ireland  we held a half day workshop in Nov 2019  followed by a day long training in early 2020 to  share the work with the Policing authority, Gardai, Cork Prison service and voluntary sector organisations supporting women experiencing and fleeing domestic and sexual violence. We also discussed the possibility with participants of developing a CPD course  to support the development of training on this important social issue  (in order to deliver and reinforce  training and to extend the learning).

We have done this and the CPD1779 Gender Matters: women’s lives and experiences in the Criminal Justice System ran for the first time in 2022. Led by Maggie O’Neill and Joan Cronin  in collaboration with Open Clasp Feminist Theatre Company, the  teaching team are committed to:

• the value and change causing nature of arts based research and theatre;
• the benefit of the such an interdisciplinary creative response to the  important social issue of coercion and control in intimate partner relations and sexual violence; 
• the impact of interdisciplinary scholarship on Irish society on local and national responses to sexual and domestic violence.

For more on this story contact:

Professor Maggie O'Neill (maggie.oneill@ucc.ie)