What Boys Are Learning Is Killing Girls
Northern Ireland’s refusal to confront porn, male violence, or speak plainly is costing lives
Over the last five years, Northern Ireland has witnessed a relentless pattern of male violence against women, violence so frequent it risks becoming background noise. The institutions built to protect women have stalled. The systems that should raise the alarm have looked away. And the policy language meant to address the crisis has been reduced to acronyms and abstraction.
From 2020 to 2025, at least twenty-seven women in Northern Ireland were murdered by men they knew, many in their own homes. This is the highest femicide rate in Western Europe, despite a population of just 1.9 million. Nearly every case followed the same trajectory: an ex, a boyfriend, a man in the woman’s life. Yet our institutions continue to treat these killings as isolated. They are not. They are evidence of a systemic failure to act on warning signs, implement existing recommendations, and treat male violence against women as a national emergency.
We know the names of some: Chloe Mitchell, a 21-year-old from Ballymena who went missing in June 2023. Her remains were later found near the River Braid. Two men were arrested - one charged with murder, one with assisting offenders. Her death devastated her family and reignited calls for action. Katie Simpson. Jennifer Dornan. Natalie McNally. Karen Cummings. Marie Green. Mary Ward. Mary was twenty-two. She had reported a violent assault to the PSNI days before she was killed. Her blood was visible on the windows of her west Belfast flat, but it was Halloween, so some passersby thought it was decoration. She was one of four women killed in just six weeks. By October 2024, twenty-four women had been murdered. By mid-2025, the number had risen to twenty-seven.
The Femicide Census confirms that 92% of women killed were known to their killer. A current or former partner killed 61%. Between 2009 and 2018, more than 2,000 women in the UK were murdered by men. Nearly 70% were killed in their own homes. Almost 30% were strangled. This is not a tragic anomaly; it is a pattern. One that repeats. One that our institutions refuse to name.
The census was founded by Karen Ingala Smith, whose work is a public act of resistance. Her dedication to documenting these deaths, to naming the women, and refusing to let them disappear into statistics is extraordinary. She is doing what governments and NGOs will not.
And while this happens, pornography is shaping boys' understanding of sex long before any trusted adult has the chance to intervene. It scripts dominance and submission, aggression and compliance, into the expectations of adolescents still too young to understand what real intimacy means. It is not sex education, it’s a distortion of it, delivered by algorithms and designed for profit. And still, we do nothing.. A 2023 submission to the Northern Ireland Education Committee by the Youth Work Alliance cited internal research showing that over 60% of boys aged 12–17 in Northern Ireland had viewed pornography, many starting as young as 11. This wasn’t casual experimentation. It was routine and increasingly violent. Boys reported seeing choking, slapping, spitting, and coercion. Many didn’t understand what they were watching. But they assumed it was normal.
What do you think this teaches them? That dominance is sexy. That pain is part of sex. That women exist to endure. For girls, it means being treated as disposable before they even know what they want. Many feel shame, fear, and pressure. Many don’t realise they’re allowed to say no. Because porn doesn’t teach consent. It teaches conquest.
Choking has become so widespread that some don’t even think it needs consent. This is not a coincidence, it’s the direct result of porn normalising violence. What boys see on screen is shaping what they do in real life. The message is simple: hurting women is not just acceptable, it's expected. And this message filters into bedrooms, classrooms, and sex ed slideshows without resistance. In her Guardian article, Ann Olivarius wrote: "Sexual choking is now so common that many young people don’t think it even requires consent. That’s a problem."
It is. And it gets worse. A Guardian investigation this week revealed that one council-funded sex ed programme for Welsh schoolchildren included “safe choking” guidance like: "It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first…" and "Consent should happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time." Fiona Mackenzie of We Can’t Consent To This said she was "furious but not at all surprised."
And honestly, so am I. This isn’t safeguarding. It’s surrender. Instead of challenging porn, we’re institutionalising it. Giving girls a script to be strangled politely. Girls now enter relationships where porn has already scripted the terms.
Parents have no idea what their kids are watching. Schools barely mention it. RSE in NI is inconsistent, unregulated, and often outsourced. Some schools teach nothing. Others give vague presentations about “respect” that don’t touch what boys see online. There’s no porn literacy. No space for girls to say, "This happened to me." No language for fear. No clarity about harm.
This isn’t hysteria. It’s data. And it is death.
In 2020, Leila Mickelwait exposed Pornhub for hosting child abuse, rape, trafficking. The site only changed under pressure from credit card companies. Not from the state. Not from women's organisations. In Northern Ireland, that same silence is lethal.
Naomi Long, our Justice Minister, has had the Gillen Review. She’s had reports, petitions, and data. England, Wales and Scotland have moved on to standalone strangulation laws and statutory homicide reviews. Northern Ireland hasn’t. Here, we still avoid gendered language. Porn isn’t even mentioned in strategy documents.
Northern Ireland does have a Domestic Homicide Review Board, but it is non-statutory, under-resourced, and relies on the persistence of a small number of individuals rather than being embedded in law. In England and Wales, homicide reviews are mandated. In Scotland, similar structures are funded and supported at government level. Here, they depend on the goodwill and capacity of burnt-out professionals. A friend and former colleague of mine works on this board. She tracks what the state won’t. She carries the weight of these deaths because no one else will.
Stormont MLAs post statements when women die, then do nothing. After the murder of Chloe Mitchell, there were tributes and public outrage, but no legislative action. After the Gillen Review’s recommendations, implementation stalled. And while England, Wales, and Scotland enacted standalone laws against non-fatal strangulation, Northern Ireland did not. These are not just oversights. They are choices. And they have consequences. When the Assembly collapses, these issues vanish. The inaction is not passive. It is political. And it is killing women.
The PPS should be held to account too. Survivors wait years for trial. Cases collapse. Bail is the norm, even in rape cases. Sentences are short. Conviction rates are prioritised over justice. Women are told, again and again: don’t report it.
And we are too bloody polite about it. We say “harm” instead of saying “men.” We say “abuse” but don’t name abusers. We talk about “people affected.” But women are being killed. By men.
I’ve sat in meetings where every sentence was wrapped in euphemism. I’ve watched survivors contort their stories to avoid offending anyone. Professionals avoid naming men, as if polite language will save us. It won’t.
And while this happens, activists who claim to speak for women sometimes seem more concerned with gatekeeping than safeguarding. Take what happened at Pride Talks Back in 2023: then Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug Beattie was cut off mid-sentence and his mic switched off after audience members objected to his past comments on trans issues. Yet Beattie has been one of the few politicians in Northern Ireland to consistently raise concerns about lenient sentencing in rape and domestic violence cases. He continues to be targeted online, not for dismissing women, but for daring to speak up about male violence and justice reform. This is what happens when ideology trumps outcomes. If your priority is excluding people who disagree with you, rather than stopping violence against women, you’ve lost sight of the goal.
We are witnessing the banality of evil, not just in the institutional cowardice that avoids naming men, but in the dull repetition of statistics that should rip the air out of the room. Twenty-seven women were murdered. Again. And again. And again. Each time it’s shocking, and yet somehow no longer surprising. The outrage fades. The count grows. The system carries on.
During the Troubles, Northern Ireland became used to violence. People turned off the news. They tuned it out. Alan Clarke’s 1989 film Elephant captured this atmosphere with brutal clarity: a string of silent murders filmed without context, without dialogue, without music. Just one shooting after another. The violence became banal - precisely because it was constant. That was the horror.
Today, the same deadening effect is taking place with male violence against women. This is the banality of evil in peacetime: not car bombs, but bail decisions; not explosions, but euphemisms. Not silence from fear, but silence from fatigue. And still, the count rises.
And somewhere along the way, safeguarding women became secondary to affirming identities. Strategy documents now use acronyms like VAWG - violence against women and girls - but avoid saying the words out loud. Euphemisms like “gender-based violence” or “people affected by gender-based harm” blur the reality of what’s happening. They strip away urgency, reduce murder to policy jargon, and turn trauma into a line item. This language disempowers public understanding and obscures the lived reality of male violence.
If the language doesn’t name the problem, how can it ever solve it? It is male violence against women and girls. But even stating that, plainly and factually, is now treated as controversial. The politics of affirmation have replaced the politics of protection. Public discourse has begun to resemble student politics: vague, coded, and hollow. Trans ideology is now so deeply embedded in these conversations that naming women, safeguarding, or sex-based violence is seen as provocative. And in that silence, women suffer.
Some campaigners have attempted to break the silence around male violence with new public initiatives like the #HerVoiceMatters social media campaign, which urges women in Northern Ireland to share their experiences online to push for legislative change. Since 2020, 27 women have been murdered by intimate partners here. That number alone should be enough to demand action. Yet women are being asked not just to relive their trauma in public, but to do so within the strict bounds of acceptable speech - no “transphobia,” no “homophobia,” no “racism.” These disclaimers, while well-intentioned, have become so rote that they now function more as ideological gatekeeping than safeguarding. What if a woman’s experience involves the failure of gender-neutral services? What if she wants to say “men”? What if she wants to criticise the political culture that has elevated inclusion over protection?
Telling women what they can’t say in a campaign about violence silences many before they’ve even begun. It narrows the terms of debate to a pre-approved script. And while it claims to centre survivors, it flattens their diversity of thought into one sanitised, activist-friendly message. I do not believe this serves the cause. We need to tell the truth about who is hurting us, how, and why the system fails to stop them, not perform performative unity while women keep dying.
I must also bring in the work of Professor Jane Monckton Smith, who has studied the timeline and patterns of intimate partner homicide. Her eight-stage homicide timeline has shown again and again that these murders are not random. They are predictable, escalating acts of control and possessiveness. The evidence is there. The patterns are mapped. Policymakers and police forces have the tools to intervene. When they don’t, it is not because they couldn’t see it coming, it is because they chose not to look.
Meanwhile, accounts like @Wommando are doing the work. Naming the men. Case by case. Trial after trial. The ones who walk free. The rapists who go unpunished. That account is doing what Stormont, the PPS, and our legal system refuse to do: keep count.
We need change. Now.
Legal reform. Honest education. Porn literacy in schools. Statutory domestic homicide reviews. A standalone strangulation offence. Proper sentencing. And the political will to say what needs to be said: men are killing women. And porn is teaching boys how.
If we can’t say that clearly, then we will never break this cycle. Mary Ward and Chloe Mitchell didn’t deserve to vanish into silence. Their deaths must mean something.
If the state will not name the men who harm women, then we must. If schools will not tell the truth, then we will. If Stormont will not act, then shame them until they do.
Support:
Femicide Census – Led by Karen Ingala Smith
We Can't Consent To This – Ending the ‘rough sex’ defence
The Maggie Oliver Foundation – Support for survivors
Traffickinghub Campaign – Accountability for the porn industry
Women’s Aid NI – Advocacy and refuge for women at risk