It’s time for this government to target widespread misogyny, tackle the crisis of violence against women and girls, and stop scapegoating migrants. The Home Office’s latest guidance for asylum seekers - “Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK” - is deeply worrying.
The purported aim of this questionable publication is to inform asylum seekers about UK law and so-called societal norms on gender equality and public respect. However, it only serves to fuel the far right’s anti-immigration agenda which has led to widespread violence and pogroms against migrants in recent years.
The suggestion that migrant men are sexual predators from whom women and girls need safeguarding is not new to the history of racial oppression. From slavery to contemporary forms of racism, the myth of the hyper-sexualised black male (now also increasingly Muslim, migrant and refugee) as a sexual predator who poses a danger to white women and girls has always been a politically expedient core of white supremacist politics. It was used by the National Front and the British National Party in the 80s and 90s, and it is now serving to reignite the increasingly fascistic leanings of the far right.
We acknowledge the abhorrent crimes of sexual violence that have been committed by some migrant men against women and young girls. At the same time we question the message implicit in the publication that such crimes are somehow exceptional or more prevalent compared with those committed by non-migrant men.
Equally, we challenge the idea that the UK is a bastion of progressive values on gender equality which are somehow under threat from migrant men. In defending this publication, the Home Office, the Education Secretary and the Prime Minister have all conveniently failed to acknowledge a number of very disturbing truths that tell a very different story:
First, as the government knows only too well, violence against women is pervasive throughout all communities and across all classes within the UK. This is a crisis that has been unfolding for many years, resulting in unprecedented levels of domestic abuse, sexual abuse, femicide and domestic abuse related suicides . Indeed, the scale of violence against women has led the police to declare it an ‘epidemic’ to be treated on a ‘par with terrorist crimes’ and the government has called it a ‘national threat’.
Secondly, the broader political shift to the right – driven in part by government policies on austerity and migration – has fostered an environment conducive to increasing misogyny and violence against women in all communities. A recent report by Project Resist on the impact of the 2024 far-right riots on black and minoritised women and children, highlighted the links between racism, misogyny and religious fundamentalism, demonstrating how they have strengthened new forms of racism on the one hand, and misogyny and patriarchal forms of control on the other, resulting in entrenched social division, exclusion and inequality for women.
Thirdly, violence by white men has also been perpetrated against women from minority communities, as we saw in the horrifying rapes of Asian women by racists in Oldbury and Walsall in the West Midlands in 2025. This use of rape to assert racial superiority attracted little public outcry. This amounts to the deployment of sexual violence as a deliberate strategy by the far right to dehumanise the ‘other’, fuel sectarian and racial politics and break apart communities. It should not go unremarked in this context that, as evidence shows, many of the men who participated in the racist protests in 2025 and 2026 across the UK included those who were also accused, charged and convicted of various offences related to domestic abuse.
In this light, it is a great pity that, rather than tackling violence against women and the systemic state failures that undermine the delivery of the manifesto pledge to halve violence against women and girls, the government has resorted yet again to scapegoating migrants and to playing to the far-right gallery.
As we await the government’s response to the Earned Settlement consultation (to which Project Resist and FiLiA have responded) and prepare for ongoing draconian anti-immigration measures, we remain hopeful that there will be sufficient pause to have an urgently needed and honest public conversation about migration, racism and male violence and their underlying structural causes: a conversation that will challenge (rather than imitate) the far right’s anti-immigration agenda while also addressing the growing culture of misogyny and gender inequality that fuels violence against women across and within all communities.
By Project Resist and FiLiA