Migrant rapes in English Channel acknowledged by UK minister
The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has admitted that many women who reach northern France and board rubber dinghies bound illegally for the UK are raped during the voyage. Meanwhile, the British government empties its prisons.
Rape on the routes from France: London admits failure, but empties its prisons. In recent days, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, a British Muslim, admitted that almost every foreign woman arriving in northern France has been raped, and that only the traffickers decide who crosses the English Channel. Following the distribution of a handbook on consent to asylum seekers, the British government is pandering to this new crime wave by releasing hundreds of prisoners early, including rapists.
'We do not control this border.' This is not an accusation levelled by an opposition MP, but a statement made by Minister Mahmood herself in an interview with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell for the podcast, The Rest Is Politics. Mahmood acknowledged that criminal gangs select those who reach northern France and board the rubber dinghies bound for the UK. She then added that it can be 'almost guaranteed' that every woman in the area has probably been raped during the journey — a fate that has also befallen some men (see the interview from 31:25).
Given the seriousness of the situation, one wonders, why the minister has not identified and arrested those responsible for the violence, nor intervened to block the criminals’ routes? As the head of the Home Office, she has a duty to break the chain of rapes, not simply describe it. The minister did not accompany the interview with a public report on the abuses. The statistics only record the age, gender and nationality of those who have disembarked, not what happened to them during the journey. In the twelve months ending in June 2026, approximately 33,000 people were intercepted: 72 per cent were adult men, 13 per cent adult women, and 15 per cent were minors. Assuming Mahmood's statements are true, around 4,000 people would have been affected in a single year. This shocking figure has not yet been officially reported by the government.
The main nationalities of those who landed in the United Kingdom were Eritrean, Sudanese, Afghan, Somali and Iranian, accounting for 66 per cent of arrivals. However, nationality does not determine an individual’s faith or the perpetrators of rape. It would be wrong to portray every Muslim migrant as an aggressor, but equally wrong to avoid questions about the relationship between culture, religion, attitudes towards women, and integration. Britain should already have learnt the cost of institutional silence from the scandal surrounding the abduction and rape of thousands of young girls by Bengali gangs. The government itself implicitly acknowledged this cultural divide when it published the handbook Understanding Behaviours and Expectations in the UK on 19 August. This guide for asylum seekers was previously criticised on this website.
What yesterday appeared to be a submissive leaflet now resembles a 'white flag'. The state admits that it does not control the border, acknowledges that traffickers decide who arrives and describes widespread sexual violence. Yet its response is to issue basic instructions on respect for women. In a Labour-led UK, we are witnessing a reversal of public duties: the law has become nothing more than educational advice, while irregular entry and the power of criminal networks are realities to which one must adapt and, at most, comment on publicly.
The contradiction is made even more serious by the decision that came into force on 1 October to tackle prison overcrowding. On the first day, around 700 prisoners were released early from dozens of prisons across England and Wales, with some publicly thanking the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. The new 'progress model' allows certain categories of convicted offenders to leave prison after serving a third or half of their sentence. The government estimates that around 4,500 prisoners will be released each month in ten batches until June 2027. How credible can the threat of prison be when the state reduces the time that numerous criminals who have already been sentenced will actually spend in prison? This sends out a message of weakness, reinforced by images of prisoners celebrating and thanking the Prime Minister. Protecting a migrant woman who has been raped, defending a British girl, stopping a trafficker and removing a criminal are all part of the same justice system. Otherwise, the integration handbook and the threat of prison become meaningless pieces of paper, whilst hospitality turns into complicity with the law of the jungle that hands the weakest over to the most violent. This is how the false progress of Burnham and the Catholic-socialist British Labour Party is being consolidated, much as has happened and is happening in Ceuta under Sánchez’s socialist government.
