You might have thought, after last summer’s riots, that certain politicians would be more careful about their pronouncements on migrants and migration, but that has not been the case. Since the arrest of a 38-year-old Ethiopian asylum seeker on three counts of sexual assault in Epping in July, protests have taken place outside ‘asylum hotels’ up and down the country. And alongside the usual clusters of Union Jacks and Saint George’s flags, and the familiar demands to stop the boats and take our country back, one theme has repeatedly featured in these protests: migrants as a collective sexual danger to women and children.

Not since Sir Lancelot and the knights of the Round Table rode out from Camelot, have so many men been willing to defend ‘their’ women: Arise Sir Robert of Jenrick, already dinning is armour in the Telegraph in January:

We have imported thousands of people from alien cultures who possess mediaeval attitudes towards women. It’s astonishing that so many self-described feminists continue to defend mass migration, directly or indirectly, even when the risks are now so clear. When forced to choose between the two, they seem to always choose mass migration over the interests of women in this country.

Yes, even the ‘self-described’ feminists won’t defend the ‘interests of women’ as well as Honest Bob can. And here is, more recently in the Mail on Sunday, warning of the migrant threat to his daughters:

I certainly don't want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally and about whom we know next to nothing.

And being a man of action as well as words, Honest Bob has been taking time off from his hols to seek out the evil ones. Here he is, on a beach near Dunkirk, in a video calling on the French police to arrest some migrants - accompanied by dramatic music to emphasise the drama and the courage of this bold knight, holding the line at Dunkirk against the new invader.

And here is again, at Epping:

Who says chivalry is dead? But what did Bob get for all this? On Radio 4’s Thought for the Day last week, the woke metropolitan elite theologian Dr Krish Kandiah accused him of promoting xenophobia. When Bob pretended to be outraged, the BBC, once again showing the courage that has so often come to define it in these dismal times, issued a grovelling apology.

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There was no apology required. Jenrick was promoting xenophobia, and he has been doing this for a long time, ever since he realized that it could boost his chances of becoming Tory leader.

Others are playing the same game. All summer, Sir Nigel of Farage has been recycling dubious statistics from the Centre for Migration Control suggesting that Afghans and other migrants are more likely to be rapists and sex offenders than us Brits - the better to present ‘broken Britain’ as a dystopian nightmare that only he can save us from.

These statistics have been critiqued here and also here, for their misleading and inaccurate conclusions. But no one is bothered with facts amongst this crowd. And it’s not just the men. Here is Reform MP Sarah Pochin, one of ‘Farage’s fillies’, as these women inexplicably call themselves, claiming that migrants put ‘women at risk of sexual assault.’

And here is Andrea Jenkyns, a politician as malignant as she is dim, in an interview with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru Murthy, who asked her:

Krishnan Guru Murthy: I mean the vast majority of sexual crimes are committed by British-born people, aren’t they?

Andrea Jenkyns: Well I think the issue there, I’d correct you there in the fact that the issue there…

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Well that’s a fact, there’s nothing to correct.

There is indeed nothing to correct. According to Rape Crisis England and Wales, 1 in 4 women in the UK have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16, and 1 in 6 children have been sexually abused. 1 in 2 rapes are carried out by their partner or ex-partner, and 6 in 7 rapes against women are carried out by someone they know. Out of the 71,227 rapes recorded by police last year, only 2.7 percent resulted in charges. When Guru Murthy suggested once again that these figures ‘had nothing to do with migrants or anything like that’, the following exchange occurred:

Andrea Jenkyns: No, but some have. Of course.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Some have, but they’re to do with society and everybody here.

Andrea Jenkyns: No, but it’s… Yes, to do with society, one is too much.

Krishnan Guru Murthy: Exactly, what I’m saying is the vast majority of these crimes…

Andrea Jenkyns: But some is cultural as well.

Could the fact that so many women are raped by people they know be ‘cultural’, as well? Don’t expect the likes of Jenkyns et al to care. As ex-Reform MP-turned-migrant boatstopper Sir Rupert of Lowe posted on Facebook last week:

Of course there are British rapists. OBVIOUSLY we know that. Sadly, they are our problem - they are scumbags, and should be treated as such, with an incredibly harsh sentence.

The usual suspects seem to think that just because there are British rapists, we must blindly accept the foreign ones too.

The existence of British rapists does NOT mean that we have to continue importing thousands and thousands of foreign rapists.

STOP importing, START deporting.

There will always be British rapists. That is a fact of life.

We do not have to harbour foreign rapists.

That is a choice.

Deport them all.

It’s safe to assume, when a man dismisses ‘British rapists’ as a ‘fact of life’ while calling for the deportation of ‘thousands and thousands of foreign rapists’, that the protection of women is not his primary concern. In a debate on Europe’s consent laws in 2020, Amnesty International’s Women’s Rights researcher Anna Blus called for ‘a society where we are free from rape, and where everyone’s sexual autonomy and bodily integrity are respected and valued.’

This is what we should all want, but the radical right’s knights in shining armour have a very different agenda: to convince the native population that they are being ‘invaded’, and possibly ‘replaced’ by non-white immigrants who might also be sexual predators.

This is why, in 2015, Gert Wilders described young Muslim immigrants as ‘testosterone bombs’ intent on ‘a sexual jihad.’ In Germany, in 2015-16, a wave of robberies and sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, sparked widespread condemnation of ‘rapefugees’. In the US, ‘angel moms’ whose daughters had been killed by ‘criminal illegal aliens’ were paraded in support Trump’s deportation agenda. In Spain, the Vox leader Santiago Abascal tweeted last year:

SPANIARDS are fed up with being victims of assaults, machete attacks, robberies and rapes. Almost always at the hands of the same people; illegal immigrants that the PP party and the Socialist Party insist on bringing to Spain with a pernicious magnet effect that is only growing.

These iterations of the foreigner as sexual predator have a long and toxic historical pedigree, in the ‘white slavery’ stories that accomapnied anti-Chinese ‘yellow peril’ campaigns in nineteenth century America (note the bestial features of the Chinese here):

In the American south, both during and after slavery, the image of the black sexual predator haunted the white imagination. DW Griffith reprised it in his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation:

In Nazi Germany, the figure of the ‘lustful Jew’ as a threat to women and young girls was a persistent theme of antisemitic propaganda and publications such as Der Sturmer:

This is the bottom-of-the-historical barrel that the likes of Jenrick, Farage, Abascal and Lowe have been scraping from. By representing migrants as a ‘cultural’ sexual danger to the (white) community ’, radical right politicians can stir racist hatreds and phobias without ever mentioning race. By attracting mothers and even children to anti-migrant protests, far right activists on the ground can present these protests as the expression of legitimate public concerns.

To recognize this usefulness is not to deny that sexual crimes have not been carried out by migrants and asylum seekers, but the safety of women and girls is not enhanced by exaggerating the scale of such crimes in order to portray them as an ‘ethnic’ phenomenon.

And the movements that do this are rarely as committed to women’s rights or the safety of women as they claim to be. For years, Tommy Robinson and the EDL presented themselves as the protectors of British children against ‘Muslim paedophiles’ and ‘rape jihad’, but at least 20 members of the EDL have been convicted of child sexual exploitation - 10 of whom were active members while Robinson led the organization. Over 40 percent of men arrested during last summer’s riots had previously been reported for domestic violence. In Bristol, two thirds of the 60 arrests between July-August 2024 had been reported for a range of similar offences.

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Such men were clearly a danger to women and children before they went out to burn mosques, and terrorize asylum-seekers. Reform is equally infested with these types, and who can be surprised, when its leader has described Andrew Tate - a man actually charged with rape and sex trafficking in two countries - as an “important voice for emasculated men”?’

In the United States, the American electorate - fuelled in part by QAnon conspiracy theories about elite paedophile networks - elected a convicted rapist as their president, who promised to protect American women and children.

For the last few months, Trump has frantically trying to conceal his historic involvement with the most notorious paedophile of the modern era, while moving towards a pardon of that paedophile’s closest associate. Hypocrisy is the very least you can say about an administration in the midst of the biggest rollback of women’s rights in the modern era.

Its supporters include Christian nationalist groups that believe women should be subordinate to their husbands and fathers, and should not even vote. Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also been accused of sexual assault. Hegseth has previously attacked ‘woke’ generals and DEI programs that have left the US military weak and ‘effeminate’. And earlier this month, this paragon of masculinity reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church, in which various pastors said that women should not be allowed to vote, with the accompanying message ‘All of Christ for All of Life.’

Trumpism has also breathed rancid new life into the toxic manosphere, where white supremacists like Nick Fuentes taunt women with the slogan: ‘Your body, my choice. Forever.’ Following Trump’s victory in November, Trump supporters in Texas State University raised signs proclaiming ‘women are property’, and school officials in Minnesota warned parents of an upsurge in ‘misogynistic…transphobic, and homophobic memes and messages,’ in which young boys echoed the phrase ‘your body, my choice.’

In Brazil, the former president Jair Bolsonaro once described his only daughter as a product of his wife’s ‘weakness.’ Bolsonaro has also said that women should be paid lower salaries for getting pregnant and should stop ‘whining’ about femicide. In Spain in 2019, Vox refused to sign an agreement on violence against women because it supposedly focussed exclusively on women and assumed that men were guilty.

Vox’s main representative in Andalusia is a former judge named Francisco Serrano, who has denounced ‘gender jihadism’, ‘female-chauvinism’, and ‘feminist supremacy’.

This how they roll. And when these knights in shining armour come riding to the rescue of ‘our’ women from migrants, we should be very clear about the game they are playing. Because sexual violence is a serious issue - too serious to be left in the hands of men (and women) who use the acts of a handful of individuals as a pretext for the dehumanisation of thousands.

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