The Far-Right is No Friend to Women and Girls
By Claire L. Heuchan
Claire Heuchan is FiLiA's Director of Anti-Racism and Lesbian Community Engagement. She's an award-winning feminist blogger, as well as Founder & Chair of Labrys Lit Lesbian Book Group.
Three young girls – Alice Aguiar, Bebe King, and Elsie Dot Stancombe – were murdered at their dance class last week in Southport. Eight other children and two adults sustained terrible injuries during this attack. The perpetrator was Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, seventeen at the time of the attack, eighteen this week; a landmark birthday his victims will never reach.
Alice, Bebe, and Elsie died at nine, six, and seven respectively. They will never grow up to find their vocation or fall in love. They will never travel the world or even fly their parents’ nests. They will never graduate from school or learn the countless lessons adults pick up simply by living from one day to the next. Rudakubana denied these girls a million different experiences. All the rich and beautiful possibilities within those three lives were forever extinguished by his brutality and entitlement. This is the terrible cruelty of femicide. This is the reality of male violence against women and girls.
The murders of these children have attracted national attention and a public outpouring of grief as people struggle to make sense of this tragedy. There has been wide speculation from news outlets and on social media as to why it happened. Much has been made of Rudakubana’s race and presumed religion, and not nearly enough of his sex. Because, appalling as it was, the murder of these girls did not happen in isolation. Every single year in Britain men kill women and girls. In 2023 alone, men killed over 100 women in the UK.
This violence is widespread, documented by Counting Dead Women and the Femicide Census. According to Dr Karen Ingala Smith, the feminist who started this vital project: ‘On average since the end of 2009, 140 women have been killed by men every year. That’s an average of two women dead at the hands of a man, every five days.’” To put this figure in perspective, the average number of women murdered by men in a single year outstrips the combined fatalities of all terror attacks in Britain over the last decade.
To end male violence against women and girls – to prevent more children being robbed of their lives as Alice, Bebe, and Elsie Dot were – we as a society must name and recognise the problem. We must dismantle the hierarchy of gender and put an end to the sex-based inequalities that culminate in female lives being treated as disposable. We must raise boys to not only respect but actively enable the rights, bodily autonomy and freedom of girls.
And yet, instead of reckoning with the reality of femicide, far-right activists chose to capitalise on children’s deaths and sow racialised division. Unverified claims that Rudakubana – born in Cardiff and from a Christian family – was instead a Muslim immigrant who crossed the English Channel in a boat spread like wildfire online, whipping up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment. This misinformation fuelled demonstrations outside hotels believed to host sanctuary-seeking people, where rioters smashed windows, set fires, and injured police officers.
There has been unrest in cities and towns across the UK, including Manchester, Hull, Liverpool, Bristol, Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool, Rotherham, Middlesbrough and Belfast. And the coupling of misinformation and bigotry has resulted in terrible consequences. A Muslim man – as yet unnamed – was stabbed at Blundellsands & Crosby train station mere hours before the far-right rioted outside a Liverpudlian mosque. Steve Rotheram, Mayor of Liverpool City Region, has even spoken out over his concern that instead of condemning the rioters, Nigel Farage is ‘giving them some legitimacy to go out and perpetrate some of these acts.’
The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, also condemned the ‘far-right thuggery’ behind these riots in a statement delivered from 10 Downing Street. ‘To those who feel targeted because of the colour of your skin or your faith, I know how frightening this must be,’ he said. ‘I want you to know this violent mob do not represent this country. And we will bring them to justice.’
It’s true that people have been volunteering time, labour and energy to repair a vandalised mosque and sweep up streets trashed by rioters. There are white British people strongly opposed to Islamophobia and racism. But it’s also true that the rioters are a part of modern-day Britain, shaping what it means to live in this country for ethnic and religious minorities. And in situating the far-right outside of this country’s representatives, Starmer fails to acknowledge the racism baked into British culture; the context which led to these riots in the first place.
“Even in their responses to this violence, our Prime Minister and Home Secretary fail to centre Muslim people, or call out racism for what it is. What we are seeing unfold is more than ‘thuggery’; it is violent racism. This is an inevitable outcome of years of state sponsored Islamophobia and racism, where Muslims, people of colour and migrants are scapegoated as a distraction from decades of economic hardship and political failings.”
We cannot afford to wallpaper over British racism any more than we can afford to deny the extent of male violence against women and girls. These societal problems will never be fully resolved when they are only partially acknowledged by those with the power to generate meaningful social change. And while our Prime Minister fails to address structural racism, while the far-right obscure the reality of male violence against women and girls, vulnerable members of this society pay the price.
As Women’s Aid point out, many of the sanctuary-seeking people housed in the Holiday Inn set on fire in Tamworth are women escaping domestic abuse and other forms of violence. The abuse these women have experienced is connected to the murders of Alice Aguiar, Bebe King, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, part of a global pattern of male violence against women and girls.
While the far-right seek to position male violence as an imported problem, framing it as the product of an innate savagery in men of colour and Muslim men, the truth is that white men are perpetrators. Men from every ethnic and religious background are perpetrators. And it’s not race or religion that’s the source of male violence, but rather masculine socialisation. Male entitlement to women’s bodies; our domestic and reproductive labour; our lives. Across the UK men are killing, controlling, raping and abusing women and girls.
There are over eight billion people in this world, but not a single country, culture, or faith community that is free from the blight of male violence against women and girls. Everywhere you could possibly go on this planet, femicide exists.
This is why FiLiA is committed to building sisterhood and solidarity on a local, national and global level – because all around the world male violence shapes and shortens the lives of women and girls. Female lives are interconnected. We share a common struggle. Women are oppressed as a sex class by men as a sex class. And even the men who are not perpetrators benefit from male violence, which is exercised in part as a form of social control used to maintain the subordinate status of women and girls.
While the far-right may present themselves as the solution to many a social problem, more often than not they have a vested interest in sustaining social and economic inequality. After all, the riots across England and Northern Ireland do nothing to honour the memory of the slain girls. Instead, demonstrators have co-opted their murders to ratchet up tension between ‘ordinary’ British people and the racialised Other (people of colour, Muslims, refugees and sanctuary-seeking people). And Nigel Farage has capitalised on this tragedy by using it as an opportunity to call for authoritarian measures leveraged against already over-policed communities, such as stop and search and higher prison sentences.
In 1970, Black feminist icon Florynce Kennedy came up with the term ‘horizontal hostility’ to describe members of oppressed groups competing with each other for a limited share of power and resources. Half a century later that dynamic continues to unfold as people of colour and working-class people are pitted against each other by the dominant ruling class. The Daily Mail churns out endless splashy headlines about migrants, refugees, and people of colour, all along the theme of ‘they’re coming here and taking our jobs.’
During fourteen years of Conservative government, then Home Secretary Theresa May put in place the hostile environment: a collection of policies through which state-sanctioned ‘hostility’ to migrant, refugee, and sanctuary-seeking people aimed to make the process of naturalisation so arduous and expensive that even those in desperate need would be discouraged. And – as is often the case – women and girls paid a disproportionate price. Women fleeing violent relationships with no recourse to public funds, meaning they’re ineligible for benefits, are left financially dependent on their abusers.
Lesbian survivors of corrective rape and criminalisation in their countries of origin face a culture of disbelief at the British Home Office, with motherhood being treated as evidence of heterosexuality and women asked to provide footage of themselves being sexually intimate with partners. Just this weekend, boxer Cindy Ngamba made Olympic history by winning the first medal for IOC’s Refugee Team – though she grew up in England, Ngamba was unable to represent the British team because she was denied citizenship. Cameroon – her birth country – actively criminalises lesbian sexual acts.
The oppressions of women and girls and people of colour, of working-class people and migrants, are not in competition with each other. In fact, they’re interlinked; connected by what bell hooks often described as ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’ And there is significant overlap between each of these demographics, with those marginalised on multiple fronts living in a state of heightened vulnerability – what Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw dubbed intersectionality.
While it has become a right-wing talking point to dismiss intersectionality as ‘woke’, academic jargon, this is far from coincidence. Because intersectionality in its true form gives us a political lens and the language needed to see through and articulate the harm the dominant political order does to women and girls from every demographic. Patriarchy manifests against victims of male violence, like Alice, Bebe, and Elsie Dot; in the fact that almost a third of women’s convictions in the UK are for not paying TV licence fee, effectively criminalising poverty; it traps Cindy Ngamba between one country that would punish her for loving women and another that punishes her for fleeing this peril.
Women’s lives and political struggles are all connected. And our approach to feminist politics, to movement building, must reflect that reality. Solidarity is crucial to the success of women’s liberation. After all it’s the same punitive, patriarchal state that keeps sanctuary-seeking women living on a pittance from week to week and enforces the two-child benefit cap – a policy which, if reversed, would lift a quarter of a million British children and their mothers out of poverty. Only when women unite will this system of inequality be defeated. As the late Jo Cox MP said in her maiden speech to parliament: ‘We have more in common than that which divides us.’
The feminist movement must advocate for the rights and freedoms of all women, all girls. Including women from ethnic and religious minorities; women who are working-class and/or living in poverty; women who are migrant, refugee, or sanctuary-seeking. We cannot hope to achieve the liberation of all women and girls while championing only the interests of a privileged few; not when women specifically are made vulnerable on so many different fronts. Otherwise we can never hope to eradicate patriarchy; to end male violence against women and girls; to live in a world where children like Alice, Bebe, and Elsie Dot are safe from harm.