Crime & LawAnalysis

Northern Ireland has become a dangerous place to live if you are a woman

Femicide – the killing of women and girls – has dominated recent headlines, with four deaths in the last six weeks alone

Mary Ward (22) was found dead by police officers at her home on Melrose Street, Belfast on October 1st. Photograph: PSNI/PA Wire
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Seanín Graham
Wed Oct 09 2024 - 20:08

Northern Ireland has become a dangerous place to live if you are a woman.

Femicide – the killing of women and girls – has dominated recent headlines with four deaths in the last six weeks alone.

Latest figures from the Police Service of Northern Ireland show that 31 women have been murdered in the North over the past five years.

Mary Ward is the latest to have been killed.

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The 22-year-old’s body was discovered by police on October 1st in her south Belfast home after she hadn’t been seen for six days.

Her death comes a month after the Stormont Executive launched a long overdue strategy on tackling violence against women and girls in Northern Ireland – two years after the Irish Government announced a €363 million strategy to tackle domestic, sexual and gender-based violence.

A dedicated PSNI seven-year action plan aimed at addressing violent attacks on females is into its second year, while new stalking laws and legislation around non-fatal strangulation and domestic abuse have led to more than 3,000 arrests in a two-year period.

The plans has been welcomed by campaign groups – Women’s Aid launched a petition calling for the introduction of a Stormont strategy four years ago – but there is mounting concern at what has been described as an “epidemic” of gender-based violence in the North.

The statistics are unsettling, 26 years on from the Belfast Agreement, in so-called peacetime Northern Ireland.

Dr Katrina McLaughlin, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) who specialises in marginalised and at-risk populations, says she doesn’t believe there is just one reason to blame.

Risk factors linked to perpetrators abusing their partners include family factors – such as domestic violence in the perpetrator’s own home and being abused as a child themselves – along with psychological behavioural factors, including antisocial behaviour and increased alcohol and drug abuse.

However, misogyny and general “contempt” for women are becoming much more pervasive in Northern Ireland society, says McLaughlin.

“We’re see quite a lot of that unfortunately. This new strategy is coming to the fore but a lot needs to be done,” she said.

Kelly Andrews, chief executive of Women’s Aid in Belfast and Lisburn, agrees that Northern Ireland’s troubled past is an important factor in any discussion of femicide.

“This is an historically conservative patriarchal society because we live in a post-conflict society with intergenerational trauma,” she says.

“On the one hand, at governmental and statutory level, we appear to have these mechanisms and strategies being rolled out but the reality in wider society is the problem of how women are viewed in society and the misogyny that goes with it.”

Paramilitarism remains a threat – the Stormont Executive’s draft programme for government estimates that paramilitaries cost the economy a£750 million (€896 million) a year – with women fearful about engaging with police and social services because the power that their abuser, if a member of a paramilitary organisation, wields in the community.

“This is an added challenge that these women face,” says Andrews, “though we shouldn’t even call it paramilitarism, it’s organised crime gangs, they’re glorified paramilitaries.”

Education is the key – starting at primary school – but it will take a “generation” for change to happen, warns Andrews.