Quality Cuts
about Islamophobic racism and sexual violence.
A summer of grotesque violence against women culminated in the terrorist murder of three little girls at a dance lesson in Southport. A 17-year-old boy, British-born and raised and of no known religious background, entered a Taylor Swift-themed dance lesson to stab the women and girls who would of course be present: he injured eight children and two adults, and killed six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine-year-old Alice Da Silva Aguiar. The far right conspiracy mill, after months of Islamophobic agitation in support of the genocide in Gaza and election season for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, chose to spread to their followers that the attack had been perpetrated by a Muslim immigrant, in order to incite days of racist violence and vandalism. White and predominantly male mobs attacked people of colour in the streets, desecrated Southport as an insult to the grieving families, and attempted to burn to death the occupants of a hotel housing refugees.
In the midst of this, far right celebrity and aspiring journalist Tommy Robinson (born Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) declared on Twitter that, “Our women are not halal meat”.
This half-arsed, cynical pretence at progressive ideals and opposition to racism is characteristic of Robinson. He has made conspicuous departures from more than one organisation over its far right leanings, implying in the process that he had not expected this of the British National Party or the English Defence League, in spite of founding and leading the latter for over four years. Likewise, his involvement in the Zionist movement and desire to be seen at their marches are as much to gloss over his numerous associations* with antisemites as they are relevant to his current focus on Islamophobic racism. It hides him about as effectively as standing behind a lamp post, but at this point it seems more about placating that variety of right winger who can control neither their impulse towards bigotry and antagonism, nor their histrionics over those things being named.
Robinson’s assertion is supposed to be interpretable as a pro-woman sentiment; not actually one, but one that is set up to be read that way if it makes you feel better. The real point, of course, is to perpetuate Islamophobic attitudes and violence through reaffirming in a non-incriminating way the false narrative about the Southport femicides (Robinson has previously been prosecuted for libelling a 15-year-old refugee and assault victim), and also reminding his followers of his pet topic: the ‘grooming gang’ scandals in Rochdale and Rotherham.
It is unequivocal that there have been multiple instances of largely Muslim men organising to groom, rape and traffic vulnerable, young, usually white girls, in the UK. Men sexually abused at least 47 girls in Rochdale in the 2000s, and over 1,400 in Rotherham over a 16-year period.
These incidents were a godsend to the British far right, much less for the truth of what happened than what could be imagined about them. Their usefulness for furthering Islamophobic racist attitudes is obvious, but intertwined with this, although perhaps counterintuitive at first glance, is the opportunity they present for maintaining routine sexual violence. It seems to escape the amount of attention it should have, perhaps because the mainstream left wing has a known hypocritical unwillingness to take men’s oppression of women seriously, but one goal of the far right is the violent control and abuse of women. The importance of the child sexual exploitation cases is in their potential for exacerbating racism, and in the process diverting attention away from and thus enabling the real causes of sexual abuse of women and children, which right wingers have every intention of maintaining for their own benefit. The victims themselves are of no value to men like Robinson, who never hesitated to interfere and impede for the sake of their true racist priorities. Their protest nearly resulted in the dismissal of the Rochdale rapists’ trial over safety concerns, with Robinson himself boasting two separate** contempt of court convictions for his recording and prejudicial racist comments about defendants in other trials. Following the eventual conviction of the Rochdale gang, racists chose next to attack the British Muslim chief crown prosecutor. Nazir Afzal was blamed for the initial decision by CPS not to pursue the Rochdale case, the government was pressured to have him sacked and deported despite being born and raised in Birmingham, and the English Defence League*** and British National Party harassed him to the point of letters full of faeces at work, and needing police protection and a panic button installed at home.
Not only was Afzal not responsible for the initial dismissal of the case, but it was him who had overturned the decision and brought it into court. While highlighting the relevance of the rapists’ jobs rather than religion alone as a factor, since participation in the ‘night time economy’ is what gave them access to vulnerable children in the first place, Afzal has still recognised the presence of misogyny in the British Muslim community. Being the UK’s foremost prosecutor of femicides, including ‘honour-based’ murders like Samaira Nazir and Banaz Mahmood, and having helped NGOs to introduce the Forced Marriage Civil Protection Act 2007, which has saved thousands of women and girls since its introduction (predominantly from Muslim and other minority communities), Afzal might be considered more informed about misogyny in the British Muslim community than the white nationalist horde, and in fact a great deal more effective against it. If this is not enough, prior to becoming chief crown prosecutor, Nazir Afzal worked with the National Paedophile Unit prosecuting child sexual abusers; he acknowledges himself as one part of a wider system, and the efforts and expertise of healthcare workers, NGOs and survivor groups who have educated him to do the work he’s done; he is at pains to point out, over and over, that the pandemic of sexual violence against women and children is caused by misogynist men living alongside an inept and underfunded legal system. Faced with someone who has materially helped a huge number of women and girls — who has done everything to which Robinson and his kind claim to aspire — our ham-faced would-be protectors responded with envy and disgust, and tried to have him driven out of the country altogether.
This is, again, not remotely surprising. It isn’t comfortable to credit a movement that relies so heavily on anti-intellectualism with intelligence, but the far right’s habitual intercessions on behalf of sexual predators are no accident. They obsess over sex crimes by Muslims because locating the desire to hurt women as exclusively within the Quran or as an effect of non-white heritage enables racist and anti-immigration attitudes, and because the tunnel vision focus on a visually identifiable Other necessarily blinds people to what, for white nationalists, is a very uncomfortable reality.
Between 80 and 90% of sexual predators of women and children in the UK are British white men. As with sexual violence against adults, most abused children know their attackers: according to the Office for National Statistics’ research, the main perpetrators of child sexual abuse are family, friends or acquaintances. 16% of girls and 8.1% of boys were abused by a parent or guardian, most often the father or stepfather, and 37% of all victims were abused by a friend, neighbour, or someone known to the family. Most victims were abused either in the perpetrator’s home or in their own home. 10.8% of girls are sexually abused by a current or former partner. Girls are 80% of child sexual abuse victims, and 96% of perpetrators are men. For all the ‘Great Replacement’ fretting, the UK is still overwhelmingly white, because of which most victims and therefore their perpetrators will be too. Street grooming is a particular form of abuse that exists, but is shocking (and useful for enablers) precisely because it is so different from the vast majority of child sexual abuse. Even here, though, investigations have indicated that most CSE gangs in the UK are made up of white men. It is clear that the vast majority of child sexual exploitation simply does not fit the profile of street grooming of white girls by South Asian Muslim men, and that straight white men’s interest in having another group recognised as the main threat to women and children is anything but well-intentioned.
A sincere opposition to Muslim men’s sex crimes might be expected to centre the experiences and expertise of Muslim women. As can be extrapolated from the data, these are the women who are most in danger from Muslim men who want to pursue sexual violence, because these are the women who share homes and community spaces with Muslim men, who have a great deal more experience with the way that Islam as preached and as practiced, and the nature of life as South Asian or other minority ethnic groups in the UK influence men’s decision to rape, how women and girls who are victimised understand what is happening to them and how they can be reached and protected. To say that this is an avenue the far right are disinterested in exploring would be something of an understatement. Of course, they may pay occasional lip service to misogynist abuse in the Middle East and South Asia, but with the clear intention of affirming that violent misogyny is a unique, immutable feature of Muslim cultures that proves the need for anti-immigration policies that will also impact women and children. In the last year, this has been stretched to the point of demanding support for a genocide in Palestine that inevitably impacts women and children and is being carried out by men who can’t shut up about how much they love stealing underwear — a known precursor of other sexual violence — on behalf of a nation whose public and politicians recently declared support for the routine gang rape of Palestinian hostages. This is also yet another instance of ardent Zionist and hapless ingenue Tommy Robinson accidentally attaching himself to a hardcore racist and misogynist movement.
This ignorance of Muslim women as survivors and experts is not simply a racist failure on the part of the right wing. Deportation and immigration bans are the proposed solution to a misrepresented immigrant misogyny problem because deportation and immigration bans are their main goal, and so must be presented as the only effective solution to prospective female supporters. In terms of sexual violence, all that concerns the far right is a shuffling of men back to their allocated targets. What happens to Muslim women, or in fact women of any religious or ethnic minority, is of no interest to white nationalist men as long as it’s far away and perpetrated by men of their own community — or really, as long as white women and girls are recognised as off-limits to anyone else, hence Tommy Robinson’s pronouncements on meat. He takes for granted his automatic ownership of some women and girls as livestock, and his complaint is solely about which other men may eat off his plate. It’s a message phrased to satisfy right wing would-be feminists so that they don’t run from the branding iron, but directed in fact towards other men. Muslim men are reminded of the international gentlemen’s agreement about the ownership of women and the sanctioning of sexual abuse, and white men are reminded to tie their racist aggression to a sense of entitlement to women and girls’ sexuality, by invoking an idea of Muslim grooming gangs as vandals of white male property. This presumed right to women through being male is what led to the veiling practices that turned into the hijab and its cousins in other religions, and is why racist white men want blanket bans on Muslim women covering their bodies, or why they will rip them off women in the street — because they understand and agree with the foundational ideas about ‘modesty’ and ownership, and want to forcibly expose and humiliate those women as an insult to the men to whom they belong. This is why men rape when they go to war. This is one of the reasons that white slavers made such a point of raping the Black women and girls they held hostage. This is why Christian fathers walk daughters down the aisle or have their little girls pledge their virginity to them. This is why Christians and Hindus and Muslims alike manage known child molesters in their communities by marrying them to little girls to sanction and control future abuse. This is why societies that emphasise filial piety have had such widespread and sanctioned sex trafficking of little girls. This is why, where rape has been criminalised, it has almost always been recognised as a crime of property damage against a husband, brother or father. This is why Muslim men murder their sisters and daughters for getting boyfriends or not marrying on demand. This is why far right supposed crusaders against paedophiles still associate with a huge number of rapists and child molesters and see no problem with accused sex trafficker, pornographer and rape advocate Andrew Tate (although this may be because he enjoys claiming to be a Muslim sometimes in order to churn out exactly the kind of rabid misogyny that Islamophobes would like to have publicly associated with British Muslims). Right wing men will not tackle the misogyny of Muslim men, because they agree with it. What they are offering is only a selfish weaponisation of an issue for which they have absolutely no empathy, in order to manipulate the gullible into supporting a racist ideology that is in fact set up fro the benefit of violent men.
*Gavin McInnes and Robinson have been colleagues via Canadian site Rebel News.
**Tommy Robinson is a convicted stalker of Lizzie Dearden, author of the two linked articles, and falsely accused her partner of paedophilia.
***In 2012. Tommy Robinson was a member until October 2013.