Debate contribution: Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Debate contribution by Ms Kellie Armstrong on 15 June 2026.

MLA

Ms Kellie Armstrong

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

15 June 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Justice Bill: Consideration Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5614571

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the Member for giving way; I appreciate that you are giving way to a lot of Members. I appreciate that you have met a lot of groups, but I thought that it would be worthwhile to mention my experience at this point. I met a young man of 16 years of age through Include Youth. He had no faith in any adult because he had had 36 social workers in his 16 years. He was a lovely young fella, but he did not know how to manage his emotions; he found it difficult to do so. He was in a care home. When he was about 11, he got cross and threw a cup at the wall. The automatic reaction was, "Lift him and put him into custody". The reaction was not to deal with him, work with him, find out what was going on and train him on how to work with his emotions but, "Lift him and put him in custody". By the age of 16, his opinion was, "Sure the cops will just come and lift me, and I'll get put inside for a while. If I do time inside, sure what's the difference?". The Jay review that was done by Action for Children highlighted the fact that, if a young person does not have preventative measures and the support that they should have at a younger age and if we immediately go for a judicial approach and put them into custody, that becomes normalised and leads to harm. Action for Children talks strongly about adverse childhood incidents and how much they damage a young person throughout their life. Those children often end up in poverty, homelessness, addiction or so many difficult positions. That young man's case highlighted to me why we need to look at children and parenting, even if the state has to parent a child, and why we have to put resources into that child before saying, "Lock them up and throw away the key. Put them into custody". That young man felt that he was always chastised by being put in a room, locked away or put in a police car. If they had dealt with him earlier and treated the child, his outcome would have been so much better. The best way for the Government of Northern Ireland to do this is to make sure that we do not give social workers the opportunity to say, "Phone 999 and get the cops to come and lift him". Instead, we should say, "No, actually, it's your job to work with this child now and to try to stop him going into the criminal justice system". That way, we can make sure that the issues that such children face in their lives are dealt with there and then by the right professionals, as opposed to taking the approach of, "Throw away the key".

481 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:55 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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