As anti-migrant demonstrations continued in Canary Wharf in London at the weekend, one group stood out: women dressed in Barbie pink. Holding cardboard signs drawn in bright felt-tip pen (“save our kids”), the “pink protest” marched under the banner of protecting women and girls.
The crowd may have looked a novel sight, but it points to a rationale that is increasingly gaining ground this summer: asylum seekers are a danger to British women and girls.
While the hundreds of protesters across the country – both peaceful and violent – share different motivations, there is a consistent sense that “foreigners” are a threat at best economically and culturally, and at worst physically and sexually. The ongoing unrest outside the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex was first sparked after an Ethiopian asylum seeker was charged with the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl, an accusation he has formally denied. Look at any of the towns and cities that have since seen protests – from Newcastle to Ballymena – and the far right, already having hijacked anger over the Rotherham grooming gangs scandal, are organising online under slogans such as “For our children, for our future”. Within days of the first Canary Wharf march, a group in Hampshire announced their own “pink protest” for – as they tweeted – “the safety of women and children in the community”.
Such ideas are not consigned to the fringes of the far right or a few local groups: they are being employed – and encouraged – by mainstream news outlets and politicians. As the new wave of protests kicked off, the Mail on Sunday ran an investigation into the number of asylum seekers who “have repaid the generosity of British taxpayers by committing serious offences”, including rape and sexual assault.
Such exposés have quickly widened from targeting men on “small boats” to migrants generally, with the two groups often blurred. The Times recently ran a front page warning one in eight prisoners are now born overseas, with the number convicted of sexual and violent crimes increasing. That the data shows that one in six residents of England and Wales are born outside the UK – and therefore migrants are actually underrepresented in prisons, despite being more likely to be held on remand – was, funnily enough, not mentioned.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives and Reform UK are increasingly confident in linking immigration to crime. On Sunday, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said asylum seekers with “medieval attitudes” coming to Britain mean he is afraid for the safety of his three young daughters. Last month, Nigel Farage explicitly claimed increased migration was responsible for a rise in the number of rapes and sexual assaults in the UK, pointing to arrivals from – as he put it – “countries in which women aren’t even second-class citizens”. It seems those so-called legitimate concerns now include the fear that asylum seekers are coming over here to rape our women and girls.
It would be easy for the government to dispel such myths by making the facts around sexual violence clear. But when I asked the Home Office if it collects data on criminal offences by asylum seekers, it declined to provide any formal comment. When I asked the Home Office if it would like to put on record that – as was confirmed to me by several refugee and women’s charities – there are no official figures that show asylum seekers are more likely to commit sexual offences than British nationals, it did not respond. It was, however, keen to stress it has just released data about foreign nationals (a term that includes many others who are not asylum seekers) in prisons.
This ambiguity – and outright radio silence – is unhelpful to say the least, but it is also a choice. Tim Naor Hilton, the chief executive of Refugee Action, outlined the facts in black and white. “There is no clear or credible evidence that people seeking asylum commit more crimes, and any data suggesting that must be viewed in the context of systemic bias, including in policing.”
Ministers could say the same, but they do not. The net effect is a vacuum that bad actors are left to fill with bigotry and misinformation, conflating asylum, migration and criminality to falsely portray asylum seekers – many of whom will be victims of abuse and torture themselves – as a potential danger to the British people. Just look to Warwickshire, where the leader of the Reform-led county council is accusing police of a “cover up” over the immigration status of two men charged with the alleged rape of a local child (police vehemently deny that). The vacuum always gets filled: on Saturday, the far right marched outside council offices in Nuneaton, with crowds shouting officers were “protecting paedophiles”.
What we are seeing is in many ways an extension of the centuries-old racial prejudice that ethnic minorities are a sexual threat to white females (and the white males who claim possession of them). But it is also part of a wider negative depiction of asylum seekers – a narrative that says they are dishonest, greedy and criminal. Think of the spurious stories that child refugees are, in fact, devious adults pretending to be children. Is it any wonder a new YouGov poll shows nearly half of Britons wrongly believe that illegal migrants now outnumber those here legally? The same forces that wish to disproportionately associate asylum seekers or migrants with sexual assaults have quite successfully sold the lie that they have already committed a crime by being in the country.
Just as we saw with the unrest after the Southport murders last summer, all of this not only inflames racial tensions – it distracts from the very real epidemic of gender-based violence. Few of the politicians or pundits concerned about so-called small boat “perverts” ever mention the crisis of, say, rape trial backlogs or funding cuts for domestic violence refuges. Some protesters will feel genuine worry for the safety of local women. For others, tackling male violence is only desirable if those males are migrants or asylum seekers. Indeed, many involved in the Southport disturbances were perpetrators themselves: two in five people arrested for last year’s riots had previously been reported for domestic violence.
There is no clear way out of this when the two main parties are busy in a race to the bottom: as of this week, Labour is pondering letting police release the ethnicity or immigration status of criminal suspects, while the Conservatives have suggested authorities should “swab and track” asylum seekers arriving on small boats – effectively storing their DNA on the assumption they may commit crimes in the future.
It feels a dark kind of summer, in which prejudice is dressed in fuchsia and the political class shrug their shoulders while the angry mob grows. We are often told that newcomers to these shores refuse to adopt “British values”, but perhaps those stoking the public’s worst instincts can remember one themselves: in this country, people are innocent until proven guilty. That includes asylum seekers too.