Content warning – this article discusses rape and other sexual offences. Reader discretion is advised.
In recent weeks, the right wing have staged protests outside asylum seeker hotels, under the guise of women and girls’ safety.
They’ve hijacked conversations around VAWG to fuel their anti-migrant agenda.
Now, more than 100 women’s rights groups have warned that this “impedes the real work of tackling the root causes of society-wide violence”.
Women and girls’ safety
In a statement, they said:
We have been alarmed in recent weeks by an increase in unfounded claims made by people in power, and repeated in the media, that hold particular groups as primarily responsible for sexual violence. This not only undermines genuine concerns about women’s safety but also reinforces the damaging myth that the greatest risk of gender-based violence comes from strangers.
In the UK, almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse, while sexual offences are at the highest level ever recorded. Every four days, a man murders a current or previous partner. A partner or previous partner carries out one in two rapes against women.
More than 90% of the time, sexual offenders know their victims. When men rape, one in three of their victims is in their own home.
Women who cannot access public funds – such as welfare or housing – due to no recourse to public funds, are three times more likely to experience male violence
Gisela Valle, director of the Latin American Women’s Rights Service, said:
Gendered violence is committed in every economic group, ethnicity, age and social group, and overwhelmingly by the men who are in women and girls’ lives. Every single act of violence is an injustice, but when we focus on a few examples and ignore others, we allow dangerous myths to spread, particularly the myth that the greatest risk of sexual violence comes from strangers. This is a long-standing myth that makes it harder for survivors to seek justice and allows the people who harm the women and girls in their lives to hide behind racial stereotypes and scapegoating.
Tyrannising asylum seekers
Back in July, an asylum seeker was charged with a series of sexual offences against a teenage girl in Epping. He denied the charges, but was remanded in custody until the trial.
But as usual, the far-right has used it as an excuse to tyrannise all asylum seekers, with protests breaking out in Falkirk, London, Merseyside, the Midlands, and the south coast.
This is despite the fact that authorities do not accommodate most asylum seekers in hotels.
Faux moral outrage
How many white men have the police arrested, charged, or even convicted of violent offences against women or children in the last month?
It’s hard to get an exact figure, but in the last week alone:
In Scotland, police jailed a white man for sexual offences against a teenage girl.
The courts sentenced a white man in Wakefield to 20 years for a series of offences against two young girls.
In Skegness, another white man pleaded guilty to 12 separate offences against children.
In Rotherham, a jury found a white man guilty of raping a schoolgirl, and he will appear in court on August 21 for sentencing.
Five minutes and one Google search were all it took me to find those – and that’s just the start. All of the results on the first page of Google were white men – eight out of eight.
Where’s the outrage from the far right? Where are the protests in Scotland, Wakefield, Skegness and Rotherham? All it would take is one far-right gammon doing a quick Google search and seeing a sea of white faces in the results. They don’t exist – because the men most often convicted of violent sexual offences are white British men, and it was never about protecting women and girls.
The real data
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) holds some data on prosecutions for sexual offences by ethnicity in the UK. The most recent data is from 2023.
For charges that included a rape charge, the courts convicted 1,431 white people. In comparison, they only convicted 457 Black and brown people of the same crimes. Additionally, the ethnicities of 767 people were either not provided or not stated.
The data clearly shows that there were nearly three times as many white people convicted as non white people.
For sexual offences that excluded a rape charge, the gap in the numbers is even more drastic.
In the same time frame, the courts prosecuted 6,549 white people, compared to only 1,345 non whites. In 2,230 cases, the perpetrators did not disclose their ethnicities.
This is nearly five times as many convictions for violent sexual offences among white people.
Dr. Baljit Banga, CEO of Hibiscus, said:
Violence against women and girls is a social issue that requires urgent government action. The far right’s weaponisation of VAWG undermines efforts to safeguard victims and survivors. Moreover, targeting Black, minoritised, and migrant communities by distorting public debate and misinterpreting data only serves to exacerbate racial and social inequalities, to the detriment of women experiencing VAWG.
Media responsibility for hijacking women and girls’ safety
More recent figures are not available yet. However, a TikTokker revealed the stark difference in media coverage between white and Black and brown perpetrators of sexual violence. The one asylum seeker got more media coverage than all of the white men combined.
No wonder the right wing are enraged about asylum seekers committing sexual offences, when the media are giving them the majority of the airtime. The media has a lot to answer for when they seem to decide whether they want to cover a story based on the perpetrator’s skin colour.
But what’s clearer than ever is that if the far right were really committed to protecting women and girls, there would be protests every time a woman made an accusation against a white man. Tommy Robinson, Richard Tice, and Nigel Farage would all be taking to the streets if they really cared.
Instead, they are using ‘women and girls’ safety’ to hide their real motive – straight-up racism.
Feature images from Police forces – Clockwise from top left. Cambridgeshire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Scotland, Sussex, Essex, Lincolnshire, and Merseyside.
By HG
This post was originally published on Canary.