Written evidence from Rakib Ehsan, Senior Fellow, Policy Exchange [CCI0077]

INTRODUCTION
The UK has experienced significant forms of racial, ethnic, and religious diversification since the Second World War, with Britain historically representing one of the most successful examples of a multi-ethnic democracy in the modern world.[1] Britain has a long and complex history with women’s rights – marked by both serious historical restrictions and pioneering campaigns for equality. Prolonged and determined efforts by activists across centuries contributed towards significant forms of legal and social change which have empowered women and girls in various spheres of national life.

However, the public safety of women and girls in the UK has been thrust into the spotlight in recent times, with threats to female security and well-being being increasingly viewed through the lenses of immigration, integration, and identity. According to the Georgetown Institute’s Women, Peace, and Security Index, the UK is not close to having world-leader status when it comes to female well-being – positioned in 23rd place out of a total of 181 countries.[2] This means the UK is behind the likes of Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), along with a host of European counterparts (especially those in Scandinavia).

This submission by Policy Exchange advances the view that community cohesion in modern Britain is being compromised by ethnic, cultural, national, and religious differences over the rights and protections for women and girls, along with their general treatment in society. It focuses on three specific threats to the safety and wellbeing of women and girls in the UK which have the potential to destabilise social cohesion in modern Britain:

• Mass immigration (including illegal migration in the form of the ongoing small-boats emergency on the English south coast)
• Grooming-gang activity (formally known as group-localised child sexual exploitation [GLCSE])
• Honour-based violence (HBV) – including honour killings based on notions of family shame and status in the community

SMALL-BOATS EMERGENCY

The ongoing small-boats emergency – namely the continued arrival of migrants who have crossed the English Channel on a small boat, landed on England’s south coast, and entered the UK without permission – poses a genuine threat to social cohesion in modern Britain. The community-cohesion risks are especially high in relatively low-diversity provincial towns which incorporate hotels which are part of the Home Office’s asylum accommodation system. Policy Exchange flagged in its July 2023 report the socio-demographic imbalances associated with small-boat migrants – 66 per cent of the 45,755 people who crossed to the UK on small boats through the English Channel in 2022 were males aged between 18 and 39 years (30,211 individuals). This was almost ten times more than the number of females who fell in the same age bracket (3,052 individuals).[3]

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.[4] 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 percent of the British public holding this view. These positions are anything but the preserve of English nationalists, or restricted to those 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 very much mainstream, if not near-universal views, which cut across the home nations and party allegiances.

The involvement of small-boat migrants in sexual crimes poses a growing threat to community cohesion and social order in modern Britain – with Afghan nationals increasingly appearing to be at the heart of this emergent problem. While it is important to guard against grand-sweeping generalisations of entire national groups and to recognise that Afghanistan is an incredibly diverse country in terms of ethnicity and language, there are hard realities and identifiable trends which are impossible to ignore and should not be overlooked. According to the Georgetown Institute’s Women, Peace, and Security Index, which measures women’s wellbeing and includes indicators such as intimate partner violence, proximity to conflict, gender-based political persecution and general community safety, Afghanistan ranks bottom out of 181 countries.[5]

The actual rate of sexual offending by nationality is open to debate, depending on the methodology used. Sky News’s data and forensics unit, using Annual Population Survey (APS) data published in 2021 and Met Police figures that were released to the Centre for Migration Control following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, found that for Afghan nationals, there were 59.2 sexual offence charges per 10,000 across England and Wales (with the corresponding figure for UK nationals being 2.7 offences per 10,000 people).[6] When using figures for ‘country of birth’ based on the 2021 England and Wales Census, it is calculated that there were nine sexual offence charges per 10,000 Afghan-born people across the two home nations – compared to 2.9 sexual offence charges per 10,000 UK-born people. Based on the Sky News analysis, informed by advice from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the Home Office, and Oxford University's Migration Observatory, it can be concluded there is likely a significant difference in sexual offending rates among Afghan nationals compared with British citizens.

Sexual convictions among asylum seekers – specifically those who have arrived in the UK without permission by crossing the English Channel on a small boat – risks undermining citizen trust in border security and public safety (two fundamental responsibilities of the Home Office). It is crucial to understand the risk this carries in terms of civil unrest and public disorder. Following the sexual offences committed by Ethiopian small-boat migrant Hadush Kebatu against a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl and a woman who offered to help Kebatu with creating a résumé, a series of local demonstrations took place in the Essex market town of Epping. 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. While much of this were parent-led protests spearheaded by concerned mothers, some of these demonstrations contained violent elements.

The protests in Epping sparked nationwide demonstrations, especially in local areas who have been impacted by the small-boats emergency and the dispersal of asylum seekers to their towns. There has been a string of sexual-violence cases in the UK which threaten to fundamentally undermine public confidence in the migration system. One of the most recent examples were two Afghan seventeen-year-olds, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, being jailed over the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl in the Warwickshire town of Leamington Spa [7] – traditionally known for its elegant Regency architecture and pleasant public parks such as the Jephson Gardens. The sentencing of Jahanzeb and Niazal followed the guilty plea submitted by 23-year-old Afghan national Ahmad Mulakhil – also at Warwick Crown Court – to one count of raping a child under the age of thirteen in the market town of Nuneaton (also in the county of Warwickshire).[8] He appeared alongside co-defendant, Mohammad Kabir (a fellow 23-year-old Afghan national), who denied attempting to take a child, aiding and abetting rape of a child under 13, and intentional strangulation. The allegations against Mulakhil and Kabir sparked anti-immigration protests outside Nuneaton Town Hall, where St George’s Cross and Union flags were flown with demonstrators chanting “stop the boats” and “we want our country back”. The perception of Britain’s dysfunctional asylum system being responsible for weakening female public safety in traditional market towns in the Midlands requires serious attention – risking the development of an aggressively anti-establishment English nationalism which could destabilise the country’s traditional reputation for being a stable multi-racial democracy.

However, it should be noted that cases of sexual offences committed by small-boat migrants and asylum seekers have not been confined to England. 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 (during daylight in a busy town centre).[9] 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. In October 2025, 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.[10] 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.[11] Hassan, who was living in Northern Ireland since 2016, had a pending asylum case. There is ever-mounting evidence that the small-boats crisis – and the overburdening of the UK’s asylum system by younger male asylees who originate from countries which have a generally unfavourable climate towards the treatment of women and girls – has eroded female public safety in Britain (with this becoming an established mainstream view).

GROUP-LOCALISED CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION (GLCSE) – GROOMING GANGS

The decades-long nationwide scourge of grooming-gang activity and associated cases of gross institutional mismanagement was thrust into mainstream British political discourse – due to growing international attention being paid to such industrial-scale forms of group-based child sexual exploitation (GLCSE).

It is important to recognise that grooming-gang activity has involved perpetrators from a diversity of ethnic and religious backgrounds. In Baroness (Louise) Casey’s national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse, which was published in June 2025, it was stated that “returns from police forces in July 2020 suggested that the nationalities and ethnicities of offenders and suspects in group-based CSE investigations varied considerably, including American, Angolan, Bangladeshi, Bengali, British, Bulgarian, Congolese, Dutch, Eritrean, Indian, Iranian, Jamaican, Lithuanian, Pakistani, Portuguese, Somali, Syrian, and Zimbabwean”.[12] It is also worth noting that a Romanian grooming gang was convicted in October 2025 for raping and sexually abusing ten women in flats across Dundee in Scotland.[13]

Due to lack of sufficiently robust data, comparisons could not be made in terms of proportions across these groups. However, the Casey review added that at a local level for three police forces - Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, and West Yorkshire - there was enough evidence to show “disproportionate numbers of men from Asian ethnic backgrounds amongst suspects for group-based child sexual exploitation”.[14] It was concluded that more effort was needed to identify the nature of group-based child sexual exploitation and why it appeared men of Asian - specifically Pakistani – heritage are disproportionately represented in some areas, to better understand and tackle grooming-gang activity.

The findings of the Casey review consolidated the findings of an academic paper published in the February 2020 by Professors Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe.[15] This academic study, which did not feature at all in the October 2020 Home Office ‘literature review’ on the ‘characteristics of group-based child sexual exploitation in the community’,[16] concluded that men with Muslim-sounding names, especially of Pakistani heritage, “dominate GLCSE prosecutions”. The data in the paper jointly authored by Bhatti-Sinclair and Sutcliffe consisted of 498 defendants in 73 prosecutions between 1997 and 2017. Using census data for 404 local authorities, the paper analysed the relationship between GLCSE prosecutions, and the ethnic and religious composition of each local population. The analysis suggests it is Pakistani heritage, rather than Muslim religious identity, that is more closely linked with GLCSE prosecutions. Regression results showed that Bangladeshi heritage has no effect on GLCSE prosecutions (a near-universally Sunni Muslim ethnic group). In this context, the labels Asian or ‘South Asian’ are unhelpful. The paper found that while being ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Muslim’ were powerful variables in explaining for GLCSE activity in a local area, the Indian-heritage proportion of a neighbourhood had no effect. In fact, a higher Hindu proportion was correlated with lower GLCSE activity.

There is an emergent body of research – including the recent Casey audit into the cultural and societal drivers – which points to the over-representation of men of Pakistani Muslim heritage in grooming-gang activity. It is time to shine a light on poorly integrated Muslim communities (especially those originating from the district of Mirpur in Azad Kashmir) which have formed patriarchal clans along kinship lines – essentially biraderi-style clannishness reinforced by cousin marriage. Indeed, Mirpuri-heritage grooming gangs highlight the downsides of family solidarity, multi-generational cohesion, and tight-knit community networks based on cultural codes of ‘secrecy’ and ‘protection’. Participation in tight-knit male networks which operate in the night-time economy and relatively segregated communities has been previously cited as a notable factor in GLCSE – with public-facing, street-based work providing ‘opportunities’ for carry out grooming-gang activity. While many of the cases of gross institutional mismanagement involved grooming gangs of Pakistani Muslim heritage and white-British girls from working-class backgrounds (disproportionately in care and suffering from disabilities/learning difficulties), it should be acknowledged that there have been non-white victims of GLCSE, as highlighted by organisations such as the Muslim Women’s Network UK.[17] Cultural codes of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ should be explored in the context of GLCSE victims being coerced and silenced within ethnic-minority communities.

In the interests of social cohesion, it is vital that the national statutory inquiry into grooming-gang activity leaves no stone unturned when it comes to matters of culture and identity, and how such factors shaped institutional responses to such abuses across the UK. There is the possibility that many of these failings were the by-products of a toxic fusion of the old and new – traditional classism blended with modern sensitivities over race and religion. The desire to ‘preserve’ community relations, along with victim-blaming tendencies fuelled by class-based prejudices, should be an integral part of a national inquiry into grooming gangs – an examination of the ‘classist multicultural state’. A truly national investigation will look at the role of central government, devolved administrations, the Crown Prosecution Service, local councils, police forces, NHS trusts, and the school system; the degree to which social workers and safeguarding teams neglected their basic duty of care and failed to treat the most vulnerable members of society with respect and dignity.

The holding of a national statutory inquiry is a step in the right direction from a social-cohesion perspective – survey data published in 2025 very much suggests that it commands majority support among the British public. A January 2025 survey by JL Partners (a member of the British Polling Council) found that nearly three in four respondents – 73 per cent – believed that there should be a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal.[18] This rose to 75 per cent for ‘BAME’ respondents. While 10 per cent of BAME respondents opposed the holding of a national inquiry into grooming-gang scandals, this increased to 15 per cent for their white counterparts. BAME respondents were also more likely than their white peers to support the death penalty for people found guilty of raping a child as part of a grooming gang (37 per cent / 29 per cent). Seven in ten BAME respondents supported the deportation of foreign nationals if found guilty of such an activity. A later poll in June 2025 conducted by YouGov found that 87 per cent of British public supported a national independent inquiry into the sexual abuse and rape of children by grooming gangs.[19] There is a generational opportunity for there to be a national reckoning when it comes to investigating and tackling grooming-gang abuses and associated institutional scandals – one which commands support across race, social class, region, and political affiliation.

HONOUR-BASED VIOLENCE (HBV)

While somewhat connected to grooming gang abuses (especially within communities with ‘codes’ of honour and shame), honour-based violence (HBV) is a women and equalities issue in modern Britain which is deserving of sustained attention. HBV can take various forms – including forced marriage, virginity testing, enforced abortion, female genital mutilation (FGM), as well as physical, sexual, and economic abuse under an overarching model of coercive control.[20] This can escalate to murder and murderous intent, kidnappings and abductions, and domestic imprisonment.[21]

Some of the most high-profile cases of honour-based violence in the UK include the murder of seventeen-year-old Shafilea Ahmed by her parents in the industrial Cheshire town of Warrington, on the grounds that she was pursuing too Western a lifestyle and disrespecting their demands to wear traditional clothing and agree to an arranged marriage.[22] Another case of honour-based murder was 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod, a woman of Iraqi Kurdish heritage from Mitcham in south London who was killed by two older male cousins because her family disapproved of her boyfriend.[23] While it is estimated that there are 12-15 honour killings a year in the UK, the Savera UK charity suggests that this is the ‘tip of the iceberg’.[24] An interactive map of confirmed and suspected honour-related deaths developed by Karma Nirvana shows that it has taken place across much of England.[25] The charity’s research has highlighted the way a controlling familial dynamic can involve multiple perpetrators and be accepted by many victims because of a deep sense of conditioning - both cultural and religious.[26]

The November 2025 publication of data by the Home Office on Honour-based-abuse-related offences and incidents, follow the police and Crown Prosecution Service definition: “An incident or crime involving violence, threats of violence, intimidation, coercion or abuse (including psychological, physical, sexual, financial or emotional abuse) which has or may have been committed to protect or defend the honour of an individual, family and/or community for alleged or perceived breaches of the family and/or community’s code of behaviour.” As it stands, there is not a statutory definition for HBV across England and Wales. Of the 2,949 HBA offences recorded in the latest year, 109 were classified as female genital mutilation (FGM), two fewer than the previous year (111). These offences had been increasing, from 65 in the year ending March 2021, the earliest year for which comparable data is available. Over half (58%; 63 offences) of the FGM offences recorded by the police came from the mandatory reporting duty for FGM. Of the 2,949 HBA offences recorded, 125 were forced-marriage offences. It should be acknowledged that these police-recorded figures only cover reported offences – there is likely to be significant levels of ‘under-reporting’ due to fears of repercussions from one’s own family and community.

There is the possibility that a cultural scepticism to tackle and engage with such ‘community matters’ is responsible for the lack of attention paid to HBV. There is a risk that under the UK’s model of state-sponsored multiculturalism – along with the absence of an up-to-date national integration strategy – semi-autonomous ‘communities’ have been given the space and freedom to implement and enforce religio-cultural codes of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ which violate the safety and dignity of women and girls.

There have also been questionable judicial rulings over matters which appear to constitute HBV. One such example is Hussein Alinzi, who avoided jail after beating his fifteen-year-old daughter with a metal bar, leaving her unconscious in an attack outside her school in south Manchester.[27] Following the attack, the girl was found to have suffered fourteen different types of injury – including facial bruising, as well as being treated for a bite mark to her left temple. Alinzi accused his daughter of attending school early to secretly meet up with a boy and for wearing make-up (in fact, the child had been advised to arrive early to school to attend an exam and was wearing make-up on the advice of her mother to cover up bruises sustained from Alinzi’s previous beatings). However, Alinzi was spared a jail sentence in August 2023 after his daughter – the victim – appealed to the judge to the Manchester Crown Court to show him leniency in a plea for mercy. At the sentencing hearing, the victim spoke of how her mother was struggling to look after her younger brother in her father’s absence and that she felt “guilty” that she had “brought shame” to her family. With the judge handing a suspended prison sentence of eight months, Sophie Francis-Cansfield, head of external affairs of Women’s Aid, said: “This case of child abuse continues to demonstrate the deeply misogynistic views that are still prevalent in our society, especially when it comes to placing the blame for the abuse on the survivor…It is disappointing to see such lenient sentencing, especially when considered alongside a pre-existing history of abuse”.[28]

The ruling in the case of Hussein Alinzi, which generated national media attention, risks exacerbating perceptions of ‘two-tier justice’ and that cultural codes of ‘shame’ in ethno-religious communities can result in more lenient sentences in the court system. From a social-cohesion point of view, the concept of Britain being a democratic national community rests on the belief that the judicial system operates in the spirit of neutrality and impartiality – irrespective of the racial and religious background of honour-based perpetrators and the cultural justifications they provide for their physical violence and mental abuse towards women and girls within their own family and community.

CONCLUSION

This Policy Exchange submission advances the view that the rights, protections, and freedoms of women and girls in modern Britain are increasingly being viewed by the British public through the prism of immigration, integration, and identity – putting social relations between different ethnic, racial, and religious communities under strain. This does not only have the potential to corrode social cohesion, but to ultimately heighten the risk of civil unrest and public disorder.

In the interests of female public safety and wider social cohesion, it is imperative that a radical overhaul of the UK’s immigration and asylum system takes place. A new refugee settlement based on compassionate control, as recommended by Policy Exchange, establish a new safe and legal route for refugees from any country, subject to an annual cap democratically determined by Government and Parliament on a yearly basis, and prioritising women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in conflict zones and insecure displacement facilities.[29] The level of the cap should be required to be proposed each year by Government in a statutory instrument and approved by Parliament under the affirmative procedure. This would go some way towards addressing mainstream concerns over the threat that the small-boats crisis poses to the security and well-being of British female citizens.

In the words of the current home secretary and former justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, the UK needs “a moment of reckoning” for those who turned a blind eye to grooming gang abuses. It is vital that the national statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs does not only investigate the ethnic, cultural, and indeed religious factors which drive group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE), but also focuses on determining public-sector accountability – exploring the role of racial/religious sensitivities, classist prejudices, and victim-blaming tendencies in cases of gross institutional negligence; dereliction of duty of care. The inter-relationship between grooming-gang activity, cousin marriage, and honour-based abuse (HBA) within certain communities should also be examined, engaging with the role of religio-cultural community codes of ‘shame’ and ‘honour’.

A critical part of ‘diversity management’ in the UK – protecting social cohesion - is public institutions protecting the most vulnerable women and girls in modern Britain, irrespective of the potential racial, ethnic, and religious sensitivities. Failures to act due to fear of destabilising community relations will only exacerbate perceptions of two-tier governance and inflame social tensions which will become increasingly difficult to extinguish.

January 2026