The fears of the Epping protesters have been vindicated

In July this year, reports began circulating in Epping, Essex that an asylum seeker housed in the Bell Hotel had sexually assaulted a young girl. It prompted weeks of protests outside what quickly became Britain’s most notorious migrant hotel.

At the time, many mainstream commentaries tended to downplay locals’ fears about the risks posed by unvetted men suddenly living in their midst. Today, it has emerged that those fears were far from unfounded.

Former Bell Hotel resident Hadush Kebatu has been sentenced to 12 months in prison. He was found guilty of five charges, including sexually assaulting a teenage girl and an adult woman.

The incidents took place on 7 and 8 July, just days after Kebatu had illegally entered the UK via a small boat. He is reported to have placed his hand on his 14-year-old victim’s thigh, attempted to kiss her and asked her to kiss another child in front of him, while he was sexually aroused. The girls were all still in their school uniforms. The court also heard that he told the child to ‘come back to Africa, you would be a good wife’, and that he ‘wanted to have a baby’ with her.

In an impact statement, the victim said: ‘Every time I go out with my friends I am checking over my shoulder… My school skirt now makes me feel exposed.’

Kebatu’s assault on the teen was witnessed by an adult woman. The court was told that he also placed his hand on her thigh, which made her feel ‘shocked’ and ‘uncomfortable’.

In his sentencing, district judge Christopher Williams called Kebatu ‘manipulative’. He said the defendant had sought to portray himself as a ‘scapegoat’ and a ‘victim’ of the protesters’ supposed prejudices. Williams highlighted Kebatu’s ‘poor regard for women’, a view backed up by the woman’s victim-impact statement that he ‘did not even appear to know that what he’s done was wrong’.

Williams judged that Kebatu posed a ‘significant risk of reoffending’ and ordered him to sign the sex offenders’ register for 10 years. He also made him the subject of a five-year sexual-harm-prevention order.

Williams also said that Kebatu’s adult victim ‘rightly stood up for herself’ and ‘just as importantly, stood up for those more vulnerable than her’.

That last remark is particularly cutting. Over the summer, as protests against migrant hotels began to erupt across the country, it seemed as if the British state had signally failed to stand up for its own citizens, especially the most vulnerable among them.

After all, it wasn’t just in Epping that locals had cause to be concerned about the impact of the unvetted men living in migrant hotels. In Nuneaton, in Warwickshire, and Waltham Forest, in London, there were reports that hotel residents had committed similar assaults on women and children. Indeed, according to the Telegraph, Kebatu is one of at least 200 asylum-hotel residents charged with crimes this year – 44 of which were sexual, and 109 violent.

The sexual-assault victim in Epping was 14. The alleged rape victim in Nuneaton was 12. In London, an eight-year-old girl was allegedly raped. No wonder so many feel the authorities have privileged the accommodation needs of illegal migrants over the safety of children.

Too many among our right-thinking classes have decried the migrant-hotel protests from the comfort of their leafy homogenous neighbourhoods. They’ve dismissed those families expressing concerns about their children’s safety as racists and bigots, as easily exploited by far-right agitators. Yet as the sentencing today of Kebatu shows, their concerns were far from unfounded, let alone racist. They were simply and rightly worried about the wisdom of placing so many men, about whom we know so little, in hotels in the middle of our communities.

In the pre-sentence report, it emerged that Kebatu had complained that ‘he didn’t know how strict the UK was’. Now, despite his long and arduous journey from Ethiopia, it is his ‘firm wish… to be deported as soon as possible’. It is a wish that even this government should surely be able to grant. But I won’t hold my breath.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.