Some cultures are misogynistic – it’s not ‘racist’ to say so

It seems we are still being gaslit over the mounting number of sex attacks on women carried out by illegal migrants. Those who ‘know best’ continue to remind us what we are – and aren’t – allowed to notice about these cases.

A webpage recently produced by Liverpool City Council is a prime example. Created to ‘set the record straight’ on gendered violence, the page’s ‘myth-busting’ section insists there is ‘no causal link between asylum-seeker populations and increased levels of violence against women and girls’. It goes on to say that ‘suggesting that certain backgrounds make people more likely to commit violence is not supported by evidence and reinforces harmful stereotypes’.

‘The strongest predictor of violence against women and girls’, it continues, ‘is not nationality or culture but gender, with men making up the majority of perpetrators worldwide, regardless of where they come from’.

These claims simply don’t stack up. Available statistics clearly show a wildly disproportionate number of undocumented immigrants are alleged to have committed sex crimes. A 2025 analysis by the Centre for Migration Control found that foreign nationals were three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as their British counterparts. In the same year, the Telegraph identified 109 men from just 50 asylum hotels who had been charged with violent offences within just a 12-month period. These included 44 sexual offences.

Perhaps the most well-known of these sex offenders was Eritrean asylum-seeker Hadush Kebatu. Kebatu had been in the UK little over a week, staying at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, before he sexually assaulted a woman and a 14-year-old girl. His crimes prompted a wave of protest last summer, focussed on the use of hotels to house illegal immigrants.

Similarly disturbing cases seem to emerge on a near weekly basis. Within the past six months alone, an Afghan national was convicted of abdducting and raping a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, two Afghan teens were found guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa, a Sudanese man brutally murdered a Walsall asylum hotel worker, a Pakistani asylum seeker raped an intoxicated teenager in a Nottinghamshire park, and a Turkish national residing at Tamworth Holiday Inn raped another teenage girl, again in a park. And there are more troubling cases like this currently passing through the courts.

No one is suggesting that a person’s ethnic or national background automatically makes them more inclined to commit sex crimes. That would downplay these men’s own responsibility for their heinous actions. But to claim, as Liverpool City Council does, that the only relevant thing that connects the aforementioned perpetrators is ‘the fact that they are men’ is deeply dishonest.

Afghanistan, Iran and Eritrea are consistently among the top countries of origin for asylum-seekers in the UK. In all three of these countries, women are treated appallingly by Western standards. In Afghanistan, men are permitted to beat their wives, for whom divorce is not an option. In Iran, men can marry girls as young as nine years old, with judicial and parental permission. In Eritrea, soldiers have been raping, enslaving and mutilating the Tigray women of Ethiopia for the better part of six years. These are not the actions of all men in these regions. But it is hardly far-fetched to say that these men have been socialised in a culture and an environment shot through with often violent misogyny.

Yet too many Western ‘progressives’ seem wilfully ignorant of all this. Only a decade ago, middle-class feminists were identifying the presence of ‘rape culture’ virtually everywhere. According to the Guardian circa 2014, the phrase denoted a culture ‘in which rape and sexual assault are common’, ‘dominant social norms belittle, dismiss [and] joke’ about sexual assault, and ‘the normalisation of rape’ is ‘so great that often victims are blamed… when these crimes are committed against them’. Everything from so-called lads’ mags to university rugby societies were held up as breeding grounds of Western rape culture. Yet when faced with the effects of actual rape cultures, these same middle-class ‘progressives’ look the other way.

The refusal to admit that some cultures are far worse for women than others, and that these cultures shape a lot of the men arriving illegally in the UK, is as negligent as it is cowardly. Anyone serious about tackling violence against women and girls must be willing to confront it, no matter its source. Otherwise, too many vulnerable women and girls will continue to pay the highest of prices.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.