[Translation: The International Day of Democracy was celebrated yesterday. Youth play a vital role in promoting democracy. We, as politicians, must listen to young people, as they will be the ones who will benefit or will bear the brunt of the laws that we make today. We need to ensure that the views of the next generation are at the heart of the laws that we pass today. If young people feel that politicians listen to them and that policymakers value their views, they will participate all the more in the democratic process. Therefore, I commend the great work that the Youth Assembly does here. It gives young people the chance to get a better understanding of our institutions. Democracy suffers many slights and attacks these days, from misinformation and disinformation online, to the populism that is on the rise across the world. Misinformation poisons our political discourse, it puts communities at odds with each other and makes people doubt democratic institutions. The more young people who participate in democracy, the more voices there will be to refute that misinformation. We need to encourage the next generation to get involved in democracy. We do this through projects such as the Youth Assembly, by listening to young people and by showing them that we fit our actions to their words.]

I hope that today is a significant day for women and girls — for women and girls who are victims of abuse, violence and femicide and for women and girls who inevitably will be victims of abuse, violence and femicide.

It is a shameful indictment of our society that we all anticipate the next news story where a women has been murdered by a man. We continue to have one of the highest rates of femicide in Europe. As a region of the United Kingdom, we have a rate higher than the national average. Last year, more than 33,186 domestic abuse incidents were recorded by the PSNI. That is one every 16 minutes. By lunchtime today, four more victims will have reported abuse to the police. It is a slight increase on the previous year, but it is certainly not going down and does not take into account incidents that go unreported due to lack of confidence in the criminal justice system.

I pay tribute to Rachel Simpson, the third woman to be murdered in Northern Ireland within four weeks, after the horrific murder of Montserrat Martorell in late August — the twenty-second and twenty-third women since January 2020. That figure should be alarming, and it should motivate each of us, as women, as men, as mothers, as fathers — as human beings — to genuinely want to address the issue of gender-based violence in Northern Ireland. That begins with hard truths, with calling it out for what it is and with recognising that we are not doing enough to prevent anyone from becoming a victim in this way.

It is not all men, but, when it happens, it usually is a man. Indeed, men are victims too, but, again, their perpetrator is usually a man. Yesterday, a young man of 21 was charged with murder — 21. What has happened in the lives of perpetrators that violence and murder comes too easily? They are not born bad. They grow up — barely grow up — to be aggressive, to abuse, to assault and to murder. They ruin other lives as well as their own.

There has to be a better way: one that recognises that it is a wider societal problem. It begins with tackling misogyny in boardrooms, on group chats and in classrooms. There needs to be a recognition that we do not encourage healthy relationships without there being age-appropriate relationships and sexuality education (RSE) and that, despite being a post-conflict society, we have never dealt with the trauma of our past, which is then passed on to the next generations.

I welcome the Executive strategy that will be launched later today. It will not stop the abuse overnight or lives from being taken, but I hope that, at a minimum, it begins a new and honest conversation, leading to action, about a crisis that women and girls have lived with, and died for, for far too long.