Illegal migration is a threat to women and girls. That grim fact has gradually dawned on the public, as the newspapers brim each day with horrific cases of male ‘asylum seekers’ sating their depraved appetites at the expense of British citizens.
Now Shabana Mahmood has reminded us that this trail of woe begins before the dinghies’ arrival in Blighty, and migrant women are among the first victims. The Home Secretary has told The Rest Is Politics podcast that pretty much all women who come to the UK in small boats will have suffered sexual violence.
The wild west that is created by porous borders creates a fertile environment for predation
‘The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers’, Mahmood said. ‘You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey.’
While women are far less likely than men to make these perilous crossings, those who do are indeed at tremendous risk of sexual exploitation. A 2021 UN Women report notes that ‘incidences of violence against migrant women happen at all stages of migration and are committed by a variety of actors including smugglers, human traffickers, authorities (ie, police and border guards), intimate partners, and other migrants’.
Examples are legion. Last month, it was reported that three men were arrested by the Spanish authorities for allegedly gang-raping a woman on a migrant boat on course to Lanzarote. Reports from Ceuta, where thousands remain stranded following the mass migrant invasion of the Spanish enclave in July, point to a string of rapes and rampant sexual harassment.
‘A lot of guys are trying to attack the girls every night, sometimes just when you go to the toilet’, one woman told Reuters. ‘It’s different nationalities, Africans, Arabs.’
The same was true of America’s southern border, before Donald Trump sealed it after his re-election. As the New York Times noted in 2019, ‘sexual violence has become an inescapable part of the collective migrant journey’.
Mahmood’s comments focus on the people smugglers, rightly noting that their illicit activities often aren’t limited to ferrying people across the Channel. But this is only one part of the story. The wild west that is created by porous borders – the open-air camps full of people waiting to cross, populated mainly by men; many of them reared in misogynistic cultures; some of them fleeing criminal charges in other countries – creates a fertile environment for predation.
All this is another indication that the Home Office knows full well these crimes are taking place in the shadow of the small-boats crisis. But while it is comfortable inveighing against the evils of the people smugglers, it is rather less willing to admit that some of those making the crossing are themselves a threat to women and girls – both during the journey and after they have arrived. Still, it occasionally lets slip. The recent revelation that the Home Office was handing out leaflets to illegal migrants, instructing them that rape and FGM are illegal in the UK, certainly gave the game away.
Mahmood must have tremendous faith in the persuasive power of those leaflets. How else could she sleep at night, knowing that a non-negligible proportion of the men we are putting up at taxpayers’ expense are capable of inflicting misery on migrant women and British women alike?
Surely going much further – perhaps even leaving the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) – is a small price to pay to ‘smash the gangs’, wreck the business model they thrive on, and protect the truly vulnerable. One day we’ll wonder how we ever let this horror show carry on for so long.
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