Debate contribution: Violence against Women and Girls: Deaths of Amy Doherty and Ellie Flanagan

Debate contribution by Mr Jon Burrows on 23 March 2026.

MLA

Mr Jon Burrows

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

23 March 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Matter of the Day

Heading

Violence against Women and Girls: Deaths of Amy Doherty and Ellie Flanagan

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5465206

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I extend my condolences to the families and friends of Ellie Flanagan and Amy Doherty. People have tired of slogans, straplines and hashtags about dealing with the epidemic of violence against women and girls. The Executive Office has a strategy that is clearly not working, but even the best strategies take years to take effect. Changing cultural and behavioural norms takes years. That is why, in the intervening period, we need a justice system that deals decisively with domestic violence and violence against women and girls. We do not have that. It is no coincidence that we have the slowest and softest justice system and the highest rate of femicide in the United Kingdom. Domestic violence perpetrators exploit the slowness of the justice system in particular. They put off pleading guilty until the very end, hoping that a vulnerable victim will pull out, because victims often do not have the resilience to carry on. Instead of providing an exemplary sentence for people who plead guilty at the last second, the justice system still rewards the last-minute plea. The system is not just slow but soft. Sentencing is not tough enough in cases of domestic violence. There is a revolving door of bail at court. The victim who needs to pluck up the courage to report someone who has controlled and abused them for years needs to know that, when the police turn up, that person will be locked away for a sufficient time for them to make a new life, but that is not the case. They live in fear that the person will be released on bail. There are big gaps in our legislation. It should be the case that, if someone is convicted of domestic violence, they cannot change their name. We have a system in which people will be repeat abusers. They will befriend new victims, and those victims will have no idea of their background. We need to better promote the law that gives victims the right to come forward and make a request of the PSNI to see whether their partner has engaged in domestic violence. The Department of Justice should be promoting that. It does not help when the perpetrator can change their name. The PSNI, for which I am an advocate, still does not do enough to publish the mugshots of convicted domestic violence perpetrators. If a woman in Northern Ireland meets someone, they may have a different name, the police will not have published their mugshot and she will have no idea with whom she is striking up a relationship. Instead of empowering and educating women about whom they might be getting into a relationship with, we withhold information that we could legally provide. For all the work on strategy, what we need is a criminal justice system that is on the side of victims and provides the space, once they make a report, for them to access the housing support that they need, to rebuild their credit rating and to have all the things that men have denied them in the first place. We need to get serious. The justice system is too slow, too soft and too often on the side of the suspect rather than the victim.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:06 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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