Urgent action needed to end Northern Ireland femicides, charity says

A leading women's rights charity has called for the establishment of a domestic abuse commissioner in Northern Ireland to tackle one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe.

- Lisa O'Carroll

An Alliance party MP, Sorcha Eastwood, has also urged the UK government to "start the conversation" about a reversal in attitudes to women being fuelled by online "throwaway misogyny".

With almost all of the victims of femicide dying in their homes, there is heightened concern that policies tackling domestic violence in Northern Ireland have been held back by decades of sectarian division dominating political resources.

Sonya McMullan of Women's Aid Northern Ireland said: "If you look at all the femicides in Ireland, 40% of those have been murdered in the north. We have a population of just 1.9 million compared to 5.15 million in the republic. So that is staggering to us."

In Northern Ireland since 2020, 24 women have been violently killed, all but one by a man, with 41 confirmed femicides since 2017 - the third highest rate in Europe, and the highest in the UK and the island of Ireland per capita.