I have had a sense of increasing alarm about the rhetoric used by the far right around the issue of violence against women and girls (VAWG).

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They claim they want to protect our women and girls from sexual violence but are weaponising it for their own ends. In their narrative, they describe a single type of perpetrator – a foreigner, usually a migrant or an asylum seeker. 

The narrative is a clever one in many ways because some of it sounds reasonable; of course we want women and girls to be safe from violence.

But when they talk about ‘our girls’,  who do they mean? Only white British girls? Are they including women from ethnic minority backgrounds? Do they want to protect them too? Levels of violence towards women from ethnic minority backgrounds are severe but often less visible or ‘newsworthy’.

In their attempt to create a profile of a perpetrator of sexual violence, they’re ignoring the key common denominator, which is not ethnicity, culture or faith – it is gender. Most perpetrators are men. In creating the notion of a perpetrator as ‘foreign’ and a stranger, they are missing the fact that most sexual violence happens by men known to the victim. Perpetrators live amongst us – they are our neighbours, our friends, family members. If we........

© LBC