Women and the far right

In reality, the killer was British – but by the time the truth emerged, it hardly mattered. Across the country, minorities were targeted under the guise of national safety. The violent femicide at the heart of it all was forgotten.

The far right slogan, “Our women are not halal meat” began gaining traction in the early 2010s. It emerged in response to reports of grooming and sexual exploitation of predominantly white girls by groups largely made up of Pakistani men. These crimes were vile, and the response to them grievously inadequate. The aim of the far right activists who latched onto these incidents was to frame child sexual abuse as a purely racial issue.

That narrative gradually seeped into the broader right. Earlier this year, the Labour government came under fire from right wing politicians and commentators after a Home Office minister rejected calls for a new statutory inquiry into the scandal. The government pointed out that a vast investigation led by Professor Alexis Jay between 2016 and 2022 had already examined the issue. Britain had already held the inquiry for which they were agitating – why hold another?

Despite the Jay investigation, the government became a target for far right provocateurs. Elon Musk called for Keir Starmer’s imprisonment, and branded the Home Office minister Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”. 

At the World Economic Forum, Argentina’s president Javier Milei claimed that British citizens were being jailed for exposing “horrifying crimes committed by Muslim migrants”. There is no evidence to support Milei’s claims. It appeared to be a reference to Robinson – but he was jailed not for exposing crimes but for contempt of court, after repeating lies about a Syrian refugee. Meanwhile, dozens have been convicted and hundreds arrested during investigations into the grooming gangs, with prosecutions ongoing. 

The myth of minority-driven sexual violence

Today, myths about minority-driven sexual violence takes on numerous forms across Britain, Europe and the world. 

Far right female commentators post lengthy YouTube and TikTok videos recounting alleged harassment by men with foreign-sounding accents or darker skin. Right wing media outlets amplify stories of violent crimes committed by immigrants while largely ignoring or playing down the cases of women murdered every week by partners or ex-partners. Similar trends play out across the world. 

In Germany, far right groups seized on reports of sexual assaults by North African men during the 2015-16 Cologne New Year’s Eve celebrations to push anti-immigration policies, while in Sweden, claims about migrant-led crime waves and “no-go zones” have been used to justify hardline immigration policies. 

In the US, Donald Trump infamously launched his 2016 campaign by painting Mexican immigrants as rapists, a sentiment echoed in right wing panic over crimes allegedly committed by undocumented migrants. The pattern is clear: a focus on race and migration in the crimes creates the illusion of a unique and foreign threat to women’s safety, even as the real epidemic of gender-based violence – committed overwhelmingly by men known to their victims – goes ignored.

The argument that sexual violence is a characteristic only of immigrant communities does not survive contact with the facts. According to the Ministry of Justice and the Office for National Statistics, 88% of those prosecuted for child sexual abuse offences in England and Wales in 2022 were white – slightly higher than their 83% share of the general population. 

Meanwhile, South Asian defendants accounted for 7% of prosecutions, slightly lower than their 9% population share, and Black defendants made up 3% compared with making up 4% of the population. When it comes to the specific issue of child sex abuse gangs, the majority are made up of white men under the age of 30, according to a Home Office report. The broader picture for rape and sexual assault is similar. In the UK, most recorded sexual offences are committed by white individuals. 

Enablers and recruiters

While often perceived as male-dominated, women have been integral to the far right throughout history. Savitri Devi, a postwar Nazi propagandist, led the European neo-Nazi underground in the 1960s, while women such as Elizabeth Tyler played a crucial role in the Ku Klux Klan’s early 20th-century resurgence, serving as preachers and propagandists.

Today, female leaders continue to shape these movements. Jayda Fransen served as deputy leader of Britain First, while Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and Alice Weidel have all led far right nationalist parties to varying degrees of victory in Europe. 

Beyond their institutional and organisational roles, white women serve a crucial ideological function within the far right: they are the mothers of the white race. If supremacy is the core function of the far right, misogyny is a key component of that ideology, says Kathleen Blee, an American sociologist and distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh. 

“Misogyny plays a really deep role because they’re promoting the ascendancy of Aryan man, western society… but also, the superiority of maleness and the superiority of men,” she tells the New European. “It really is essential to their ideology.”

Subjugating women to their child-bearing function is therefore integral to the far right’s aims. As journalist Lois Shearing writes in their book Pink-Pilled: Women and the Far-Right: “The far right knows that it needs cis, white women to continue the white race. After all, there can be no increase in white babies without white cis women.” 

Misogyny to its core

Perhaps the greatest irony of the far right’s weaponisation of violence against women and girls (VAWG) is not only the blind eye it turns to white perpetrators, but that such movements are notorious for perpetuating gendered violence within their own ranks. 

Fransen, the former deputy leader of the English Defence League, accused the then-leader, Paul Golding, of violently abusing her and locking her in their home during their relationship. In a 2022 article for The Ferret, two former members of the British fascist organisation Patriotic Alternative described experiencing suicidal ideation due to the misogyny they faced. 

One woman warned: “I think these groups are actually really dangerous… These people are full of rage. Rage because they can’t find a partner, rage because they feel the world is against them. Before you know it you’ve gone from worrying about demographics to laughing at the idea of a woman you’ve never met being raped. If they’re willing to treat women in their own circles like this, imagine how they could go on to treat those outside of the group.” 

Joe Mulhall, head of research at Hope Not Hate, explains that while misogyny is a “fundamental core element of any far right politics,” it also serves as a common gateway into the movement, particularly in the digital age. 

“What 14-year-old boy didn’t Google ‘why can’t I get a girlfriend?’ Or, ‘how do I get a girlfriend?’” Mulhall notes. “Nowadays, I guess they all do it. And it’s very, very easy to find content which in turn says: ‘This is not your fault. This is about feminism.’”

Fighting for truth

So how does the far right reconcile its own misogyny with that it attributes to minorities? Shearing argues that it is less about protecting white women and more about “an extension of the far right’s aim to preserve racial purity… Women are to be defended not for their own protection, but as a commodity to be hoarded and guarded, like land or wealth.” 

Blee argues that the far right’s co-option of violence against women and girls is not just an extension of their ideology, but also a sinister example of its ability to latch on to other movements to expand its influence. “It’s incredibly opportunistic,” she explains. “They’re into disguising what they do to make it seem more palatable to a mainstream audience… It’s just a great opportunity to make racist inroads into the population under the guise of women’s rights.” 

The ease with which social media leads users down rabbit holes is particularly stark. How videos of women baking bread or caring for their children can swiftly segue into white supremacist content is, as Blee puts it, “an opportunity served up on a platter for them… they’re taking advantage of other kinds of social movements and sort-of ideologies in the population, elaborating them and turning them more sharply to the far right.”

Shearing concurs, describing the breadth of radicalising content they have encountered online during their research, which funnels users towards “more radical conversations and conspiracy theories via both algorithmic suggestions and communal prompts”. 

They offer a striking metaphor for radicalisation in the digital age – not as a pipeline but as an ocean: “Pipelines suggest an opening that you stumble across or walk into, but you can stride boldly into the ocean, or you can dip your feet in, out of curiosity, before looking back and realising you’ve drifted much further out than you thought.”

But of course, every narrative contains a grain of truth – something to seize on to, even if it becomes distorted. Governments have long struggled to put an end to gender-based violence, creating a void that far right groups exploit by amplifying women’s fears of assault. In the UK, recent data reveals the scale of the issue: one in 12 women in England and Wales is affected by gender-based violence, while an average of two women a week are murdered, mostly by a current or former partner. 

Meanwhile, governments across the West have failed to address medical misogyny, the gender pay gap or the unequal burden of housework, which have all opened the door to far right exploitation. Women shoulder an unequal division of unpaid care responsibilities, with women in the UK spending an average of 26 hours per week on unpaid work versus just 16 hours by men.

For Blee, dismantling the far right’s appeal means relentlessly exposing the far right’s hypocrisies – one of which is “putting a finger on the misogynistic part of the far right”. She explains: “Going after individual things, like the groomer issue, is really important.

“Without trying to see what’s behind this and how these ideologies have gotten entangled with each other and given them so much power, I think we really are not going to be effective.” 

How, then, can progressives best dispel the myth of the far right as protectors of women? For Mulhall, the answer begins with educating young men. “Why is it that so many young men are finding role models in people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and increasing numbers of young people are getting dragged into misogynistic, online, far right spaces?” he asks.

But he stresses that this work must come from men themselves: “The burden in all these spaces is on the men not expecting women to come in and fix those problems. Peer groups need to be engaging with each other. Fathers need to be speaking to their sons. Mothers need to be speaking to their sons.

“Education is going to be the big thing.”