Kneecap Rap trio reawaken trauma for 'punishment' violence victims

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.

- Rory Carroll

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 council house and march her father, Peter, into the kitchen. One places a pistol against his leg, just above the knee. Jeanitta remains in her darkened bedroom upstairs with siblings - her mother is on the landing, corralling the children - but she can hear the shrieks of a sister who is downstairs and the shouts of the IRA intruders. Then she hears bangs. Then silence. After an interval - seconds, minutes, she's not sure - she is able to open the door and joins her mother on the landing. Her father is at the bottom of the stairs lying in a pool of blood. "Throw me a towel," he shouts to her mother. "Don't let the children see me."

Three decades later Peter McCabe, now 66, still walks with a limp and the family bears psychological wounds. The 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 this week. "That unsettlement has never left me."