The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) has removed a social media advertisement about consent featuring grandparents hugging their grandchildren.
The video depicted a young girl being uncomfortable receiving a hug from her grandparents.
Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan said the advertisement was “both inappropriate and demeaning” to grandparents and has been removed by the DRCC following engagement with his officials.
In the advertisement, a voiceover carries the message after the girl expresses discomfort at receiving a hug: “Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them.”
It added: “Awkward? Maybe. Important? Absolutely.”
The Department of Justice said We-Consent is a programme created and developed by the DRCC aimed at informing, educating and engaging the public about all forms of consent.
“Social media videos shared recently as part of this programme were produced by DRCC at a low cost using volunteers and are not part of a Government advertising campaign,” it said.
“The department understands that DRCC intends to review these videos. They are being removed from their social media channels to enable this review.”
DRCC said We-Consent is a long-term campaign as part of its prevention work to increase the awareness and practice of consent in Ireland.
The organisation said it created a video series for its social media channels based on feedback from over 20 consent workshops with younger and older people.
“Part of the workshops involved sharing participants’ own experiences of instances when they felt uncomfortable,” it said.
“The scenarios depicted in the video series came up very frequently in all the workshops. The videos were created with volunteers and staff and reflected these conversations.”
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DRCC said the series was made on a low budget and promoted online via its social media channels.
“The video was launched exclusively on social media in mid-September but we have removed it from our social media channels due to the negative attention it has attracted in the last 24 hours,” it added.
“We do not want that negativity to impinge on and distract from the vital work that we as a centre do in supporting victims and survivors and improving awareness of these important issues across society.”
Earlier, O’Callaghan said the DRCC video “does not represent the views of the Government”.
The Fianna Fáil TD said: “It goes without saying that having loving grandparents in a child’s life is an incredibly positive thing to be cherished and not something to be campaigned against.”
He added: “While it is vital to ensure that people understand the concept of consent when it comes to sexual relationships, this video did not advance that aim and in many ways was counterproductive.”
Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill stressed the video “is not a Government campaign” and the Government “does not support” it.
Speaking in the Dáil she said there is “a broader question around consent, which is important”, but “that does not extend to this ad or to grandparents in any way”.
“Grandparents are an incredibly important part of family life, incredibly important part of every child’s life” and the advert was “both inappropriate and demeaning to grandparents”.
MacNeill said the video “was an error” and did not represent the views of Government. It should be clearly distinguished from an important body of work “around domestic, sexual, and gender violence more broadly”.
Aontú TD Paul Lawless claimed the video was Government-funded and conflated “issues of sexual violence on the one hand and affection exchanged by a grandmother to a grandchild on the other”.
He queried how much the video had cost and asked: “Why is the State asking grannies to second-guess themselves when it comes to hugging their grandchildren?”
Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín said the issue of consent in relation to sexual relationships was “very important”.
However, “for anybody to equate sexual relationships between people and a grandparent hugging their grandchild is absolutely inaccurate and completely wrong”, he said on RTÉ Radio 1’s David McCullagh show.
“Is the State now looking for grandparents to second-guess themselves before they hug their grandchildren or show affection to their grandchildren?”
Independent Ireland TD Ken O’Flynn said he believed the ad “goes too far”, adding that “a lot of decent families will find it insulting”.
Asked about the video on Newstalk’s Claire Byrne show, psychologist John Francis Leader said it was important for people to be able to communicate their specific needs and, as a society, it was important to be supportive of people with different needs.
“People have different norms and different expectations. From a psychological perspective, the key thing that we’re aware is everybody has different needs, and for one person, the hug represents comfort and empowerment and support, and for the other person, it may not represent that,” he said.
“So the challenge is how do you convey a message that suits everybody? To be fair to the video, if you look at it, it does have both. It has a hug and somebody appreciating it, and then it has somebody not appreciating the hug. So I suppose that’s what we all have to grapple with as a society,” he said.