Our name is dirt': how stigma of kneecapping haunts one Northern Ireland family

"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 and she is a 10-year-old at home in bed in Newry, County Down, when Northern Ireland's Troubles come barrelling through the family's front door. Six to eight men in masks storm into the two-storey council house and march her father, Peter, into the kitchen."

"Jeanitta remains in her darkened bedroom upstairs with siblings her mother is on the landing holding the door, corralling the children for their own safety but she can hear the shrieks of a sister who is downstairs and the shouts of the IRA intruders. Then she hears bangs, like a door slamming. Then silence. After an interval seconds, minutes, she is not sure she is able to open the door and joins her mother at the top of the stairs."

At age ten, Jeanitta McCabe awoke to masked men storming her family home in Newry on 13 September 1990. Paramilitaries marched her father, Peter, into the kitchen and placed a pistol against his leg, just above the knee. Jeanitta hid upstairs while she heard shrieks, bangs and then silence before finding her father lying in a pool of blood. Peter still walks with a limp three decades later and the family endures ongoing psychological wounds. Republican and loyalist paramilitaries carried out thousands of punishment shootings and beatings during the Troubles, with official counts of over 6,000 and scholarly estimates far higher.

Read at www.theguardian.com