Case of the Kerry Babies

From Cork University Press:

To mark International Women’s Day, this introduction from a new book by NELL MCCAFFERTY plots how the ‘medieval’ treatment of Joanne Hayes in the Kerry Babies case acted as a catalyst for change.

A group of men put a young unmarried woman on the stand and questioned her about the exact circumstances of the conception and birth and death of her newborn baby. She came from a tiny village in the west of Ireland.

It was medieval, but it happened in 1985. The probing of the woman’s sexual history brought the men gathered around her to such a fever pitch that she collapsed.