This strategy echoes another hallmark of the far right: co-opting patriotism. Across the UK, Union Jacks and St George’s flags are being painted on shopfronts, mini-roundabouts, and zebra crossings. Groups like the Weoley Warriors, who describe themselves as “proud Englishmen,” are coordinating these displays. But flags in this context are not about pride. They are being used, like ‘women’s safety’, as tools of exclusion. The National Front did it in the 1970s, the BNP in the 2000s, and now it is happening again.
This playbook is old. But there is also a rich history of resistance, one which is alive and kicking right now.
Charlotte Fischer from Love & Power, a UK feminist network focused on women’s safety, explained: “There is a long history of using women’s – and often specifically white women’s – safety as a justification to enact violence on racially minoritised men. When Britain colonised what is now part of Papua New Guinea, Britain created a law called the White Women’s Protection Ordinance that criminalised men who raped or tried to rape (white British) women and girls differently, depending on the man’s race.”
Fischer continued: “Let’s be clear: In Britain in 2025, most women will experience some form of gender based violence in their lifetime. But if we actually care about women, then we need to keep focus on what will actually help our safety. What we know about women’s safety is that by a long, long margin it’s the men around you (the men in your family, the men you are in romantic relationships with). Whoever you are, whatever your racial background is, that’s who are most likely to be a threat to your safety, not folks who happen to be in the same town as you because they also want a home that is safe and has a better life.”
She also stressed that migrants’ safety is itself urgent: “They’re not in opposition. What Love & Power is doing is to work to keep ALL women – including migrant women – safe. That means being super clear on how we’re not divided and how we keep our focus on actual threats to women’s safety, not get rerouted to a decoy where folks are using a group of people who are vulnerable themselves to act as if they are a unique threat to women.”
On 19 August 2025, more than 100 women’s rights organisations – led by the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), Southall Black Sisters, Women for Refugee Women, and Hibiscus – issued an open letter to the Prime Minister. They condemned the far right’s use of violence against women and girls (VAWG) to stoke anti-migrant and racist agendas. “Attempts to weaponise VAWG through racist scapegoating of migrants not only distract from real solutions, but also deepen the marginalisation of Black, minoritised and migrant victim-survivors,” said Selma Taha of Southall Black Sisters.
Chiara Capraro, Gender Justice Director at Amnesty International, echoed this warning. Speaking to GLAMOUR, she said: “Taking on the cause of violence against women, but associating it with migrant men, is a tactic that we’ve seen the far right using throughout time. So this is nothing new. Gender based violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by people that the victim knows…The trope of Stranger Danger is really deployed to foment racist attitudes and beliefs… It is about instrumentalising violence against women, instrumentalising victims’ experiences and trauma for political ends.”
She added: “This is dangerous, for racialised men, but also for women, because it means that if you say that violence against women is only an issue because men of colour perpetrated it, it doesn’t put attention on what is going on in communities… On the one hand, they portray white women as in danger and threatened by men of colour. But at the same time, they also think about white women as becoming too emancipated. This idea that feminism has gone too far, and now it’s men who are suffering, justifies widespread misogyny in society.”
As Capraro concluded: “It’s really this kind of double-sided portrayal of women that serves both their racist aims, but also their aim to rebuild a patriarchal society where men are in control and women and children are valued less. It is not just a unilateral narrative. It’s a flexible narrative… The picture is much broader, and these actors are not the actors that are gonna solve violence against women or are even interested in that.”