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JUSTICE FOR MAGDALENES (JFM)
IRELAND
Submission to the United Nations Committee Against Torture
46th Session
May 2011
Justice for Magdalenes (JFM) is a non-profit, all-volunteer organisation which seeks to respectfully promote equality and advocate for justice and support for the women formerly incarcerated in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. Many of JFM’s members are women who were in Magdalene Laundries, and its core coordinating committee, which has been working on this issue in an advocacy capacity for over twelve years, includes several daughters of women who were in Magdalene Laundries, some of whom are also adoption rights activists. JFM also has a very active advisory committee, comprised of academics, legal scholars, politicians, and survivors of child abuse. More information is available at
“In the Magdalene laundry it was a well-known fact that once you went in there you never came out. Because the locks – you couldn’t walk out, because all the locks would be on the doors. You couldn’t. Unless family of yours took you out. Say somebody claimed you, and took you out. Then that was the only way, or else you’d go out in a coffin, you know? You died there.”
Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries were residential, commercial and for-profit laundries operated by four Irish orders of nuns where between the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922ii and 1996, when the last institution closed, a number of girls and women, estimated in the tens of thousands, were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment.
The women and girls who suffered in the Magdalene Laundries included those who were perceived to be “promiscuous”, were unmarried mothers, were the daughters of unmarried mothers, were considered a burden on their families or the State, had been sexually abused, or had grown up in the care of the Church and State.
More information is available at