It’s a different kind of heartbreak to see people manipulate the feminist cause and use women’s pain to promote their racist agenda, but it seems as though that’s what the far-right are doing. They claim to represent the interests of us all with their extreme ideology and self-proclaimed omniscience, but they’re also often known misogynists, now choosing to weaponize gender-based violence by mainstreaming allegations against asylum-seekers.
A woman is killed by a man every 3 days in the UK, with an estimated 1 in 20 people being perpetrators of violence against women and girls per year, but the actual number is expected to be significantly higher. There’s a serious national problem of gender-based-violence (GBV) and Tommy Robinson’s politics of fear, alongside Elon Musk telling protestors they need to “fight back or die” certainly isn’t helping.
In 2024, out of the 7,874 convictions of sexual violence, 1,118 were foreign nationals and 614 had their nationality listed as unknown. This breakdown of convictions by nationality does not mean you can ignore the other 6,142 convictions just because it doesn’t support the far-right agenda. That’s over 6,000 women’s lives changed and that should not be ignored.
While yes foreign nationals have a higher conviction rate as they’re a smaller percentage of the population, the core problem is the very occurrence of GBV against and by anyone, and not every incident is documented. However, for those ones that are, the police record an incident of domestic abuse every 30 seconds in the UK and by the time you finish reading this article between 4 and 6 incidents of domestic violence will have been recorded.
Call me crazy, call me woke, but the issue here is the women being attacked. The women are scarred for life. The women who are still disproportionately suffering. Cherry-picking statistics about race doesn’t solve the issue of gender-based violence, it silences the stories of the female victims.
Women and children aren’t being protected by aggressive protesting like we saw in Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally that left officers with broken teeth, a concussion, a prolapsed disc and a head injury after being kicked and punched.
You can’t establish equality or safety by preaching hate and enacting violence. Jamie Driscoll, former mayor of North of Tyne, Newcastle, while pointing out that over 40% of those protesting at hotels are known to the police for violence against women and girls, articulated his point clearly:
“If you only protest when someone is an immigrant or someone has dark skin then that makes you a racist.”
I grew up in a society that told me as a woman I could only ever be too opinionated if I spoke about something political or took things personally, but this is personal. It’s my life, my chance at equality and my future. I don’t want disproportionately higher odds of being violently attacked. I don’t want my gender to be belittled as the punchline of your joke. What I want is to live without fear for my safety. So, I speak clearly when I say that my life as a woman is not theirs to use as far-right propaganda.
The embedded patriarchy at almost every level of society, in combination with a rise of misogyny, is preventing thousands of women and children from living safely, free from fear and violence. However, I can happily say there are people working against the far-rights weaponisation of feminism.
Nicola Sturgeon and Nadia El-Nakla have signed a letter rejecting far-right claims of being “defenders of women”, joining over 200 women and organisations supporting the accusation against the extremists spreading “racist lies” under the guise of defending women.
The End Violence Against Women Coalition have collaborated with HOPE not Hate, who are the leading organisation exposing and opposing far-right extremism. They have produced guidance about challenging far-right weaponisation of GBV that, most importantly, is sensitive to survivors of GBV and doesn’t re-enforce victim-blaming attitudes and beliefs. It’s the latest in a painfully long history of British women standing up for themselves.
Equality has no place for superiority, not between genders and not between races. Racism is not the solution to gender-based violence and it is not the answer for feminists. The problem with gender-based-violence, is and always has been, the violence itself and the suffering of the victims, not the race of the perpetrator.
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