For Jeanitta McCabe, the word kneecap conjures not a rap trio on stage but a memory that plays in her head, unspooling again and again in a loop. It is the night of 13 September 1990 when she was 10 years old and Northern Ireland’s Troubles came barrelling through her family’s front door in Newry, County Down. Six to eight masked men stormed in and marched her father, Peter, into the kitchen, where one placed a pistol against his leg just above the knee. She heard bangs and then silence; her father lay at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood.
Three decades later, Peter McCabe, now 66, still walks with a limp and the family bears psychological wounds. The rap group Kneecap have reclaimed the word, but for the McCabes and many other families affected by so-called punishment violence, kneecapping retains its original meaning, connoting pain, terror and stigma. “What happened to daddy is still alive to this day. I feel trapped inside my own mind, of still being that 10-year-old child,” Jeanitta, now 45, said.
Republican and loyalist paramilitaries inflicted more than 6,000 punishment shootings and beatings from 1973, according to police figures, but scholars estimate the real figure is between 10,000 and 20,000. The practice tapered off after the 1998 Good Friday agreement but incidents still occur. Most victims were alleged petty criminals targeted by the IRA, UVF and other groups in the guise of policing their own communities. Victims typically were teenage boys or young men shot or bludgeoned in the ankles, wrists or knees.
There is a stigma attached to victims of these attacks, said historian Liam Kennedy, because the label “punishment” suggests they “deserved” what they got. Peter and Jeanitta McCabe feel this stigma is reinforced by their exclusion from the Troubles Permanent Disability Payment (TPDP) scheme, which offers compensation to those permanently disabled because of the conflict. They have appealed, saying the Victims’ Payment Board unlawfully deemed them ineligible because the shooting was not defined as Troubles-related. Their lawyer, Kevin Winters, argued that punishment shootings were a byproduct of the conflict and cannot be written out of history.
