Scapegoating asylum seekers is not the answer to violence against women and girls

The Home Office is facing another crisis after the High Court’s interim injunction blocking a hotel from housing asylum seekers in Epping Forest. This followed unrest after protesters descended on The Bell Hotel when a resident was charged with the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl.

Across the country, further protests have erupted from Canary Wharf to Aldershot. A key feature of these gatherings are women dressed in pink. They carry signs demanding to “keep girls safe” and share posters online with community-spirited illustrations sporting headlines like “Pink Protest, for the safety of women and girls”.

Read more:

• Are thousands of asylum seekers about to be kicked out of hotels?
• As number of asylum seekers housed in hotels rises, there’s one thing everyone agrees on
• Anti-migrant protesters ‘hijacking’ women’s safety to push ‘racist’ agenda, women’s groups warn

If one didn’t know any better, it might seem like a well-meaning campaign. But behind the pink-pastelled branding lies the same racist scapegoating. The biggest giveaway is who is missing from the conversation – Black, minoritised and migrant women – the very people most at risk of violence against women and girls (VAWG). Their voices are excluded, while their experiences of abuse are manipulated to conflate migration with criminality.

This is the weaponisation of VAWG to fuel a right-wing agenda. In a letter to Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, more than 100 womens rights groups have warned that women’s safety is being cynically co-opted by the far right to sanitise intimidation and violence towards asylum-seeking people – many of whom are women and girls who fled persecution and abuse. Scratch under the surface and their real demand is clear: to expel migrants. Almost half of Britons now wrongly believe there are more migrants in the UK illegally than legally. This misconception is not harmless, it exploits women’s pain to advance an anti-migrant agenda that puts survivors further at risk.

Black, minoritised and migrant victim/survivors of VAWG continue to be sidelined as open displays of racism face little condemnation. Instead, the government continues to legitimise far-right sentiments to feed the publics moral panic. Labour has gone further, framing VAWG as justification for harsher border controls and mass deportations without due process. In doing so, they lend credibility to the far right’s unfounded claim that Black, minoritised and migrant communities are inherently dangerous or more prone to commit crime.

This dynamic is reinforced by calls for authorities to publish crime data broken down by ethnicity and migrant status. Such data is unlikely to protect survivors but could easily be used to stigmatise communities, painting migrants as criminals. The result is to conflate women’s safety with immigration enforcement to create a narrative where Black, minoritised and migrant victims are not seen as those in need of support, but as part of the problem.

Of course, none of this addresses the real problems victims encounter. Courts face immense backlogs for domestic and sexual abuse cases, causing victims to withdraw from proceedings due to years long delays. Meanwhile, rape crisis centres are cutting services or closing entirely.

For Black, minoritised and migrant victims with no recourse to public funds (NRPF), help is even harder to find. Many are turned away from refuges because of their immigration status. Sixty-seven per cent of Black and minoritised survivors say they would prefer “by and for” services – organisations led by and for their communities. These services are trusted and specialist but remain chronically underfunded and at risk of closure. Years of austerity have further eroded local provision, leaving women and children with nowhere to turn.

The furore over the hotel injunction is no different. The far right greeted it as a permanent victory in the “fight against illegal migration”. It isn’t. The case is merely over planning laws, specifically whether housing asylum seeking people amounts to a change of use without consent. It says nothing about the merits of asylum or who deserves safety. In any case, the right has successfully dominated public discourse once more, and the government is now bracing for an onslaught of other local authorities following suit. The tail is wagging the dog. Labour will continue to be judged by a public fed in rage-bait headlines and distorted data, while the right performs outrage at the expense of survivors.

There are other alternatives to pandering to the right. Labour’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls within a decade is meaningless if it refuses to confront the real drivers of violence and continues to echo the far right’s talking points. Safety for women and girls will not be delivered through deportation flights or planning court battles, it will be secured through properly funded refuges, specialist services, accessible justice and the removal of barriers like NRPF that keep migrant women trapped with abusers.

The danger we face is not asylum seekers in hotels. It is a political culture that dresses racism in pink and calls it protection while slashing the very services victims need to survive. If this government is serious about ending VAWG, it must stop blaming migrants and start resourcing the frontline. Until Black, minoritised and migrant are protected, promises to keep women safe are nothing more than hollow slogans.

Cat Linton works in policy for Hibiscus, a charity supporting Black and minoritised migrant women. She is also an independent domestic violence advocate, specialising in working with victims with no recourse to public funds.

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