The British public has spoken – the overwhelming majority believe that the ongoing small boats emergency poses a threat to female safety and want the deportation of illegal migrants who have been found guilty of violent crimes such as rape.
In the YouGov poll commissioned by Women’s Policy Institute and exclusively shared with GB News, two in three British respondents – 67 per cent – said that the small-boats crisis is threatening women’s safety across the country.
Supporting the deportation of illegal migrants who have been found guilty of rape and other violent crimes is a near-universal view in Britain, with 93 per cent of the British public holding this view.
These positions are anything but the preserve of English nationalists who support parties of the Right, such as Reform UK and the Conservative Party.
Out of the four home nations, the highest rate of support for deporting illegal migrants found guilty of violent crimes such as rape was in Scotland (97 per cent), while four in five people in Northern Ireland believe that large-scale migration has become a serious issue in terms of the threat it poses to female citizens. These are views which cut across the home nations and party allegiances.
It is understandable that coverage of the impact of the small-boats emergency on the English south coast has been England-centric – especially when one considers the amount of attention which has been paid to the Essex market town of Epping following the sexual assault of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl by Ethiopian small-boat migrant Hadush Kebatu.
Decades of gaslighting fears over impact of small boats on women just lost its biggest battle - Rakib Ehsan
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A month after his conviction, Kebatu was mistakenly released by HMP Chelmsford before being re-detained by police following a two-day manhunt. Kebatu’s sexual criminality in Epping sparked demonstrations across England, especially in the form of parent-led localised protests over how close hotels being used as part of the UK's asylum accommodation are to schools where young girls are a significant proportion of the pupil population.
More recently, two Afghan seventeen-year-olds, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, were jailed over the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl in the traditionally pleasant Warwickshire town of Royal Leamington Spa.
The truth is that there has been a wave of sexual assaults in England by those claiming asylum after crossing the English Channel on a small boat. And we must not forget the horrific murder of 27-year-old mother Rhiannon Whyte, who was stabbed with a screwdriver twenty-three times by a Sudanese small-boat migrant – Deng Chol Majek – at a train station in Walsall.
But the dangers of the UK’s asylum-seeker crisis have been felt beyond England and in the other home nations.
In Falkirk – a town in the Central Lowlands of Scotland – an Afghan national who entered the UK illegally on a small boat raped a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in October 2023. What made the attack even more shocking was that it unfolded during daylight in a busy town centre.
It is planned that Sadeq Nikzad - who sought to defend himself by citing language barriers and cultural differences, such as child marriage remaining common in his homeland of Afghanistan – will be deported after serving his sentence, having been jailed for nine years in June 2025.
Last October, 33-year-old Fawaz Alsamaou – an asylum seeker from Syria – was jailed for more than three years after sexually assaulting and strangling a woman under a bridge in the Cathays area of Cardiff in Wales.
In October 2024, Mohammed Ibrahim Hassan – a Somali national – was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for the rape of a student in 2019 in Belfast. Hassan, who has been living in Northern Ireland since 2016, had a pending asylum case.
The truth is that the small-boats crisis – and the general dysfunction of the UK’s asylum system – has fundamentally undermined the safety of British women and girls.
Most of the British public is now very much aware of the role that the UK’s lax border security and broken asylum system have played in weakening the safety of women and girls.
It is time that those in positions of power and influence respond to these anxieties or concerns – otherwise, trust and confidence in the British state will only further disintegrate.
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