South Belfast is routinely presented as the most cosmopolitan part of the city. Centred on Queen’s University, Botanic Avenue and the Holylands, it is younger and more ethnically diverse than most of Belfast. Its restaurants, cafés and international population are repeatedly invoked as proof that the city has become more modern and outward-looking. The language is almost invariably celebratory from the mainstream.
The Precautions Women Take
There is another side to the area which is discussed rather less confidently. Women alter their routes, avoid walking alone and share their locations with friends. Students arrange to travel home together. Queen’s University now provides a free late-night shuttle from city-centre nightlife venues to the Holylands and has expanded its specialist drink-spiking kit scheme to around seventy Belfast venues.
Most strikingly, female students established an entire society around the principle that women feel safer walking in groups. Walkie Talkie Girlies began as an informal walking group before becoming an official Queen’s society with more than 480 members. A university district in which hundreds of women have organised so that they need not walk alone cannot congratulate itself on being safe.
The wider figures do little to dispel that unease. Across the Belfast policing district, recorded rapes rose from 263 in 2019 to 431 in 2024. Recorded sexual assaults rose from 352 to 592 over the same period. These are Belfast-wide figures, not figures for South Belfast alone and an increase in recorded offences may partly reflect greater willingness to report them. Even with those qualifications, rises of approximately 64% and 68% respectively are difficult to dismiss as statistical noise.
Drink spiking presents a similar problem. It became a major public concern following the end of the lockdown period. A March 2026 PSNI response identified 606 offences recorded under potentially relevant classifications between January 2016 and December 2025. Yet the Constabulary said that producing a proper annual and district-level breakdown would require manually reviewing hundreds of individual records, and that the true total may be higher where rape or sexual assault was instead recorded as the principal offence. The result is an issue serious enough to justify testing kits across Belfast, but apparently not recorded consistently enough for the public to establish where, how often or by whom it is occurring.
That absence is significant.
The Cases Behind the Concern
South Belfast has undergone considerable demographic change. It would be dishonest to pretend that immigration, cultural background and the concentration of young migrant men are never relevant to women’s safety.
While criminal responsibility belongs to individuals, public policy must nevertheless deal in patterns. It cannot protect women if every attempt to identify those patterns is confused with collective punishment. Neither should local offenders disappear from the discussion whenever immigration becomes politically convenient. The point is not to assign inherited guilt, but to refuse enforced blindness.
Several cases illustrate why the demographic question cannot simply be ruled irrelevant.
In October 2024, Somali nationals Mohammed Ibrahim Hassan and Abdiqani Abdulkadir Muhaiden were sentenced for raping a university student at a flat on Ulsterville Avenue. The woman had been supplied with further alcohol and cannabis before losing consciousness. She awoke naked while being raped, told both men to stop and was ignored. Hassan received a six-and-a-half-year sentence and Muhaiden five years. Both were placed on the Sex Offenders Register for life.
In January 2026, another Somali national, Sharmarke Warsame, was jailed for sexually assaulting a vulnerable woman at his home in Annadale Flats. The woman recorded part of the incident on her telephone and could clearly be heard saying “no” and asking him to stop. Warsame nevertheless continued. A probation report assessed him as having a high likelihood of reoffending.
Perhaps the gravest unresolved case remains that of Mary Ward, the 22-year-old mother found dead at her Melrose Street home in October 2024. Ahmed Abdirahman, originally from Somalia, has been charged with her murder and is due to stand trial at Dublin’s Central Criminal Court on 11 January 2027. His guilt or innocence is for the court to determine. What is already established is that Ward had reported being the victim of a violent crime in the preceding weeks, prompting a Police Ombudsman investigation into the RUC/PSNI’s response.
Other nationalities also appear in the area’s recent history of sexual offending. In 2019, Orhan Kibar, originally from Turkey, received a thirteen-year sentence after being convicted of raping two young women whom he met outside Queen’s Students’ Union and enticed to his Claremont Street flat with the promise of a party which did not exist. Kibar died in prison in 2023.
The cultural element in that case was not invented by hostile commentators. Kibar reportedly spoke to probation about the way women here “dress and behave and drink”, while his defence referred to cultural differences. The trial judge instead identified his “deluded
thinking about women” and his determination to have sex regardless of consent.
It would be dishonest to say that imported crime is the whole story. In 2026, Eoin McKervey was convicted of non-fatal strangulation and common assault after subjecting Queen’s medical student Clíodhna Martin to hours of violence in Holylands accommodation. McKervey, an Irishman, was acquitted of separate rape and sexual-assault charges. His case is nevertheless a reminder that no serious discussion of women’s safety can reduce male violence to nationality alone.
A different but related uncertainty surrounds the former Queen’s student Zhenhao Zou. Zou came from China to study mechanical engineering in Belfast between 2017 and 2019 before moving to London. He was eventually convicted of eleven rapes involving ten women in England and China, many of whom he drugged and filmed while unconscious. He received a life sentence with a minimum term of twenty-four years. Police believe that he may have had dozens of further victims.
The Constabulary appealed to anyone who encountered Zou at Queen’s because victims of drug-facilitated assault may not even know that an offence occurred. It later stated that it had completed its enquiries and identified no offence in the North of Ireland. His case therefore cannot be counted as a South Belfast rape. It can, however, hardly be irrelevant to questions of institutional safeguarding in an area now distributing drink-spiking tests to its bars.
What Women Say Privately
Not all unease takes the form of a reportable incident or even a defined allegation. On three separate occasions, otherwise broadly liberal women remarked in unrelated private conversations with me that Somali men regularly met in a particular Caffè Nero in South Belfast. The observation was plainly disapproving, although none alleged an offence or identified any particular threatening behaviour.
This is evidence of ethnic suspicion, not in itself evidence of any crimes. Its significance lies partly in the contrast between public and private speech. Three women who would probably have avoided making such a remark publicly independently attached negative social meaning to the same gathering. Their assessment may have been fair or unfair, but suppressing its expression would not remove the underlying suspicion. It would merely ensure that public discussion offered a misleading account of what people privately thought.
Denominators Without Numerators
What the existing evidence cannot establish is a reliable per-capita offending rate for any nationality or ethnic group. Census data can tell us approximately how many members of a community live here. The RUC/PSNI has released some broad figures through freedom-of-
information requests. Between 2022 and 2024, it recorded 2,435 British or Irish nationals, 215 EU nationals and 203 non-EU nationals arrested and processed through custody for sexual offences. Of these, 691, 73 and 56 respectively were subsequently charged.
A separate response covering 2024 listed Somalia and Sudan among the nationalities represented, but withheld the number attached to each. These are Six Counties-wide figures, divided into broad categories and concerning arrests rather than convictions. They provide no South Belfast breakdown and no means of identifying Roma as an ethnic group. We therefore possess population denominators without corresponding numerators using the same geography, period and definitions.
The available figures nevertheless suggest overrepresentation. Non-British and non-Irish nationals accounted for 14.6% of sexual-offence arrests and 15.7% of subsequent charges between 2022 and 2024, while 4.9% of residents recorded in the 2021 census held only passports other than British or Irish. It must be said however that passport possession is not identical to recorded nationality or ethnicity, arrests are not convictions and the respective populations differ considerably in age and sex. It is evidence warranting investigation, rather than a reliable per-capita offending rate.
Raw totals will naturally be dominated by members of the established population because they remain the clear majority. The proper question is whether particular groups offend at a higher or lower rate relative to their population, age and sex profile. If there is no disparity, transparent figures would help dispel suspicion. If there is one, concealing it does nothing to protect women or preserve social cohesion within Irish communities.
South Belfast is neither the uncomplicated advertisement for diversity that it is often presented as nor is it a district in which every danger can be attributed to immigration. It is an area in which a large student population, a heavy night-time economy, transient accommodation and rapid demographic change meet within a few streets. Those conditions alter social relations and patterns of risk. An honest politics must be willing to determine how and why.
Women should not be expected to suppress or falsify what they observe in order to preserve an attractive account of diversity. Migrants should not be subjected to collective punishment for crimes they did not commit. Local offenders should not disappear from the discussion whenever immigration becomes politically convenient. These principles do not contradict one another.
The purpose of recording crime is not merely to count offences after women have been harmed. It is to identify patterns before more people are harmed. South Belfast does not need rumours or wholesale racial retaliation. It needs reliable data, a police service rooted in and directly answerable to the people it serves rather than a constabulary embedded within the political and security structures of the British state, and public discussion in which women’s safety takes precedence over the protection of political slogans.
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