Why did Ballymena become the latest site of anti-immigration riots?
There have now been five consecutive nights of ongoing violence and disorder on the streets of Northern Ireland, with Ballymena at the focus of the unrest following a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town on 7 June.
Two 14-year-old boys were arrested and charged after the incident, and police in Northern Ireland said the pair used a Romanian interpreter to plead not guilty in court.
After that, calls for “peaceful protest” from the victim’s father were amplified online. Those protests took on an anti-immigration angle and erupted into riots and clashes with police.
Analysis of social media messaging has shown there were already rising tensions in the town before the latest incident, following a decade of rapid demographic change.
Before the protests
On 30 May, eight days before the 7 June incident in the Clonavon Terrace area that triggered this week’s violence, police released a statement regarding a different sexual assault in Ballymena, this time of a 13-year-old girl.
The offence was alleged to have taken place on a public footpath near the Ballykeel housing estates, during daylight hours on Saturday 24 May.
Local media at the time reported the suspect as having “dark-coloured skin, dark brown eyes, and speaking in a foreign language”.
On 31 May, a far-right news aggregator on messaging platform Telegram was already sharing information related to this incident, saying “Ballymena said to be at boiling point”.
But the online chatter remained relatively contained until after the police announcement on the evening of Sunday 8 June, that they had arrested the two 14-year-olds charged with the Clonavon Terrace incident.
Analysis of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, shows that there were 114 mentions of Ballymena per day from 3-7 June.
It was mentioned 142 times on 8 June, then surged up to 10,300 on 9 June and 78,300 the following day. The majority of posts originated outside of Northern Ireland.
Rapid demographic change
The descriptions of the alleged perpetrators of the two incidents have contributed to the anti-immigrant sentiment of the violence.
Sky News has seen Union flags and signs saying “British household” or “Locals live here” left outside homes of people keen to avoid being targeted, and has also spoken to Bulgarian nationals in Ballymena who say that they are “terrified” and “scared to get out of the house”.
Speaking in the House of Commons, Jim Allister, MP for North Antrim, which includes Ballymena, said he was “appalled” by the violence. “However”, he said, “the government must be aware of underlying tensions produced by uncontrolled and often undocumented immigration.
“None of that excuses violence, but it is a matter of concern to many.”
Analysis of census data shows there has been rapid demographic change in the town since 2011. No other part of Northern Ireland has seen a bigger increase in people who don’t speak English/Irish as a first language.
At the time of the 2021 census, three in 10 residents of central Ballymena said their first language was something other than English or Irish.
One in eight listed Romanian, with a similar number listing other Eastern European languages like Bulgarian, Polish and Slovak.
That figure is almost seven times higher than the average across Northern Ireland, and amounts to a trebling over the course of the decade.
Almost three-quarters of the total foreign-born population of central Ballymena arrived in the country since 2011.
The average is significantly lower for Northern Ireland as a whole, and England and Wales, where the rate of change has been more gradual.
Of 621 primary schools in Northern Ireland where data is available, Ballymena Primary and Harryville Primary, both in central Ballymena, had the 7th and 8th highest share of “newcomer pupils”.
“Newcomer” is the term used by the Northern Irish Department for Education to refer to pupils who don’t have satisfactory language skills to participate fully in the school curriculum.
How, and when, will the violence end?
Sky’s Connor Gillies, who has been in Ballymena reporting on the violence and talking to locals for the past few days, said on Wednesday that “the talk here is that this unrest is only just beginning,” adding that “it could go on for weeks”.
Meanwhile, locals have expressed that they don’t like the talk from police and politicians that taking to the streets following an alleged sex attack on a teenage girl equates to them being “racist thugs”.
Police have responded to rioters’ petrol bombs and bricks with rubber bullets and water cannon onslaughts of their own. There have been tens of arrests, as well as injuries to more than 50 police officers since Monday evening.
Violence and disorder in Ballymena raged across Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, appearing to have largely abated in the town by Thursday. However, the unrest has spread to other areas including Larne, Coleraine, Portadown and Belfast.
A senior police officer insisted to Sky News that he did have “a grip” on the unravelling situation when questioned by Sky News, but officers from Scotland, Wales and England have been sent to bolster the forces of their Northern Irish colleagues.
Anti-migrant rhetoric
From 7-12 June, 39,000 Ballymena-related posts on X mentioned “migrants”, with around 95% of them deemed to be negative by social media analysis tool Talkwalker.
Well-known far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who thanked X-owner Elon Musk for his support when he was released from prison four months early on 27 May, was the most influential poster.
His 14 X posts about Ballymena between 7-12 June reached an average of 1.3 million accounts each.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
In 2019, nine men were jailed for raping and abusing two teenage girls living in a children’s home in Bradford.
One of the victims, Fiona Goddard, says more than 50 men raped her.
When the government began to talk about offering councils money for local inquiries, Fiona hoped Bradford would be one of the first to take up the offer. But there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm.
The council was quick to point out that there had already been an independent case review into Fiona’s case, along with four other victims.
This, then, was Fiona’s first reasoning for wanting a national inquiry: The council felt it had done all that needed to be done. Fiona didn’t.
The Independent review, published in July 2021, found that while in the children’s home, Fiona “went missing almost on a daily basis”. The police attitude was that she could look after herself – she was “street-wise”.
There was “agreement by all agencies that Fiona was either at risk of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) or actively being sexually abused and exploited”. But “this was not addressed by any single agency”.
And “when Fiona became pregnant at the age of 15, there was little curiosity or enquiry who the father was”.
So, obvious failings were discovered.
The predictable response was that lessons had been learned and new processes put in place. But no one seemed to be held accountable.
Grooming gangs timeline: What happened, what inquiries there were and how Starmer was involved
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Grooming gangs: What happened?
Ms Goddard told Sky News: “In my serious case review she [Jane Booth, the independent chair] found seven incidences at least, in them records that she found, of them not reporting sexual abuse or rape or assault, from as young as eight years old, and one of the incidences I literally turned up covered in blood and they didn’t report it.
“That is not just misunderstanding a crime, that is making intentional decisions not to report the sexual abuse of a child.”
She adds: “Let’s not forget, these people still work within social services and the police force.”
Not only did this Independent review not satisfy Fiona, but it also didn’t begin to reflect the levels and scale of abuse Fiona had experienced outside of Bradford.
‘I literally turned up covered in blood and they didn’t report it,’ Fiona says
Asked where she was trafficked to, Fiona rattles off a list of cities.
“Blackburn, Rotherham, Rochdale, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Oldham – never Telford, I’d never even heard of Telford until it all came out if I’m honest – Nottingham, Oxford.”
Then she remembers she didn’t go to Oxford – men from Oxford came to her – but the point is made.
Local enquiries can’t possibly begin to explore the networks of men who traffic women, often down routes of drug trafficking being done by the same gangs.
Bradford Council told Sky News it contributed to the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) and published more than 70 reports where child sexual exploitation was discussed and has implemented findings from the independent local review which included Fiona’s case.
Fiona believes there are numerous connections leading back to Bradford – but victims from each city often believe their abusers are at the centre of it.
We’ve spoken to grooming victims across the country, and in 2022, a case was reopened in Humberside after a Sky News investigation, where we found diary entries, texts, photos, and school reports all indicating that teenage victims had been abused.
Read more on this story:
Telford child abuse victims speak out
What we know about grooming gangs, from the data
The women who blew whistle on Rotherham
One of them was “Anna”, who also wants a national inquiry. She believes there is a national pattern of police forces not believing victims or even criminalising them instead.
Obtaining her own police records using a Subject Access Request (SAR), Anna found officers’ attitudes towards her were similar to what we heard with Fiona in Bradford, blaming her abuse and injuries on “lifestyle choices of her own”.
Anna said: “Every time I look at my Subject Access Request, I still think it’s shocking.
“It was the same sort of terminology – lifestyle choices, liar, attention seeker, and the majority of it was negative.
“It was really rare that I’d come across something where they were actually listening or they were concerned.”
Humberside Police told us: “As the investigation is active, it is imperative we protect its integrity; as such are unable to comment on aspects of the investigation as this could impact or jeopardise any criminal or judicial proceedings.”
But it is years now since Anna first reported her abuse, and she believes the police have left it too late to gather evidence.
She told Sky News: “I think it’s either happening everywhere, or young people have been taken everywhere.
“I think the attitudes of the professionals, the police, social services, from what I’ve heard and seen, they seem very similar in every area.”
The government-commissioned rapid review by Baroness Casey is due to be published next week and is expected to call for a national inquiry into grooming gangs.
Like Anna and Fiona, many victims will welcome Sir Keir Starmer’s early response accepting the recommendation.
They will want the inquiry to probe into the operations of the perpetrators – who they are and how they are connected.
But they will also want clear accountability of the people and organisations who failed to act when they reported their abuse – and an understanding of why, so often, authorities fail to protect these vulnerable girls.
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