I was off on leave and cleaning my bathroom last Thursday when the Assembly reconvened to discuss the recent violent intimidation, sporadic rioting and rampant racism.
I had the debate playing in my earbuds as I tackled the tile grout and, about an hour in, I let out a shout of joy mixed with relief: Claire Sugden had finally named the elephant in the room.
Until that point, some representatives had remembered to remember the three girls, Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar, but nobody had really put the pieces together.
We have yet to hear more details on their killer’s motivation, but we do know that it took place at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, where little girls learned dances, practised yoga, and made beaded friendship bracelets to swap with each other, a trend associated with Swift.
Taylor Swift herself had barely finished issuing a statement on the horrific events before several of her concerts scheduled for Vienna were cancelled due to a terrorist threat.
Within hours of the incident, and with depressing predictability, people had forgotten the little girls at the heart of this, and were looking for someone to blame, so much so that they invented a name and a back story that turned out not to be true at all.
Long after those myths had been busted, people still took to the streets to protest… against what, exactly? Immigration, the mythical notion of open borders, Muslims generally. In the same Assembly debate, these were framed by some as “legitimate concerns”.
Here’s a legitimate concern: these victims were girls. Taylor Swift concerts, too, are overwhelmingly attended by girls and women.
This week, a girl was stabbed in broad daylight in London’s Leicester Square, a fact that was framed by some on the cesspit formerly known as Twitter as another example of how “enough is enough”, a racist narrative that was dropped faster than you could say “stop the boats” when it transpired that the alleged attacker was white.
Many of the people who engage in far-right activism, north and south of the border, like to claim that they are concerned about violence against women and girls, loudly proclaiming their concerns about our safety.
Last week a protest locally sparked violence against counter-protesters and then against the Muslim community of south Belfast.
The violence and terror and intimidation involves making victims of women and girls, whether in Belfast or in asylum accommodation. In addition, they talk and shout about everything but safety, pivoting from housing to public services to a lack of consultation, depending on what they think might land.
Most tellingly of all, though, is how they speak to people who counter-protest their hate, including politicians and journalists who spoke about it. Many of the messages I received for posting about the counter-protests I attended are far too foul to be reproduced in print.
Many of the messages I received for posting about the counter-protests I attended are far too foul to be reproduced in print
Some went for personal insults, but the really sinister ones were wishing, in fact actively fantasising, about the violence they think I will face in the future when their imagined “invasion” happens.
The thing is, like almost every woman I know, almost every woman any of us knows, I have already experienced men’s violence. I work in this area, and I know this will ring true for many of us; it’s not men on dinghies most of us fear, because we don’t need to imagine a monster.
Too many of us live with that threat, too many of us die by their hands. It’s a massive percentage of all calls to the police, a huge chunk of the crime statistics. Our figures for murdered women are utterly shameful.
We don’t need to imagine, we need action. We need the Executive to approve the violence against women and girls strategy, we need police to reconsider their dismissal of crimes that target women and girls as not a form of terrorism.
We need to listen to Claire Sugden’s words: “If there is any protest that we should all join, it should be to address the persistent violence against women and girls.”