Up and down the UK; there have been angry demonstrations outside hotels repurposed for the accommodation of asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their asylum applications. The spark for these protests was the arrest and eventual conviction of an Afghan national resident in one such hotel in Epping, Essex for the sexual assault of a 14 year old school girl. Cue a cause celebre for far right agitators such as Tommy Robinson who quickly exploited genuine local concerns about the nature of this mode of asylum seeking accommodation to enflame nativist hostility towards migrants powered by “lock up daughters” hue and cries about the threats to “our women and children” from single, “fighting age”, males of a different skin pigmentation and different religio-cultural background.
Riots erupted outside the Epping hotel and flag draped opponents of asylum seekers mobilised outside many other hotels with counter demonstrations from antiracist and migrant advocacy groups. Last summer also saw the “Raise the Colours” campaign in which Union and St George flags were raised on telegraph poles and street lamps on the outskirts and suburbs of towns; hardly a spontaneous outbreak of patriotic sentiment to celebrate a national sporting achievement (or the Ashes fiasco!) but an attempt, in a manner which resonates with anyone who has grown up in Northern Ireland, to delineate territory in which certain ethnicities are not welcome. Opinion poll findings that more people believe that only ethnic or indigenous Britons can be British citizens (more and more “native Irish” Twittertarians proclaim the same exclusivist message) is another indicator of the growing salience of ethno-nationalism in British political discourse.
Into this febrile atmosphere has entered the Pink Ladies who subvert the language of feminism to pose the spectre of the threat to womanhood and child safety from sexually predatory single men from “backward cultures” who have arrived in the UK by small boats. It is a trope that was articulated by the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine in her column of 10th December 2025 after two Afghan asylum seekers were jailed for raping a 15 year-old girl : “For too long this country has ignored the reality of what happens when men from certain cultures are let loose in our liberal democracy.” She went on to state “I don’t care if I’m accused of scaremongering or worse. Facts are facts.”[1]
So behind all the politicians’ outrage at the immigration status of perpetrators and the anecdotal news stories of offences such as sexual assault often accompanied by police mugshots of brown and black men, what are the actual facts concerning asylum seekers and crime? It is certainly moot to point out that the available evidence shows that the ethnic group most likely to be violent and sexual offenders in the UK are white men. However the reality is that the UK government’s own data cannot reveal how many crimes are committed by asylum seekers because the Ministry of Justice does not record offences by immigration status.[2]
The proxy category “foreign nationals” agglomerates a wide mix of people: recent arrivals, long-settled immigrants, students, health and care workers, their dependents, as well as asylum seekers. Taking into account this caveat, the best figures available to us are those disseminated by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. They show that foreign nationals in England and Wales are incarcerated or convicted at roughly the same rate that British nationals. When adjusted for age and sex, the share of non-British citizens in prison is actually lower than the share of British citizens but there is no publicly available data on conviction rates after adjusting for age.[3]
Ben Brindle, the Migration Observatory’s lead researcher on its analysis, opines that “it’s more likely that asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes” but attributes this “to some of the other characteristics that those people tend to have” While asylum seekers are more likely to be young men and while young men have a greater propensity to commit crime, Brindle states the lacunae in the statistics available makes comparing a young male Briton to a young male asylum seeker impossible.[4]
It is difficult to fully address the moral panics about the demographic amalgam of those arriving on British shores despite the availability of nationality data. The big gaps in the underlying population data makes comparisons shaky, if not invidious. The last census took place in 2021 – before the ‘Boris wave’ fuelled peak in migration - and the Office for National Statistics has been experiencing something of an institutional crisis in falling response rates in its main population surveys. These surveys do not include residents in communal accommodation such as asylum hotels which means that recent revivals are not recorded at all. Smaller groups of foreign nationals – for example, Afghans – are most likely to be misrepresented. Ben Brindle makes the further point that possible drivers of crime committed by young men (both Britons and migrants) such as trauma, mental health more generally and socio-economic status cannot be inferred from existing data.[5]
Into this febrile atmosphere has entered the Pink Ladies who subvert the language of feminism to pose the spectre of the threat to womanhood and child safety from sexually predatory single men from “backward cultures” who have arrived in the UK by small boats. It is a trope that was articulated by the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine in her column of 10th December 2025 after two Afghan asylum seekers were jailed for raping a 15 year-old girl : “For too long this country has ignored the reality of what happens when men from certain cultures are let loose in our liberal democracy.” She went on to state “I don’t care if I’m accused of scaremongering or worse. Facts are facts.”[1]
So behind all the politicians’ outrage at the immigration status of perpetrators and the anecdotal news stories of offences such as sexual assault often accompanied by police mugshots of brown and black men, what are the actual facts concerning asylum seekers and crime? It is certainly moot to point out that the available evidence shows that the ethnic group most likely to be violent and sexual offenders in the UK are white men. However the reality is that the UK government’s own data cannot reveal how many crimes are committed by asylum seekers because the Ministry of Justice does not record offences by immigration status.[2]
The proxy category “foreign nationals” agglomerates a wide mix of people: recent arrivals, long-settled immigrants, students, health and care workers, their dependents, as well as asylum seekers. Taking into account this caveat, the best figures available to us are those disseminated by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. They show that foreign nationals in England and Wales are incarcerated or convicted at roughly the same rate that British nationals. When adjusted for age and sex, the share of non-British citizens in prison is actually lower than the share of British citizens but there is no publicly available data on conviction rates after adjusting for age.[3]
Ben Brindle, the Migration Observatory’s lead researcher on its analysis, opines that “it’s more likely that asylum seekers are more likely to commit crimes” but attributes this “to some of the other characteristics that those people tend to have” While asylum seekers are more likely to be young men and while young men have a greater propensity to commit crime, Brindle states the lacunae in the statistics available makes comparing a young male Briton to a young male asylum seeker impossible.[4]
It is difficult to fully address the moral panics about the demographic amalgam of those arriving on British shores despite the availability of nationality data. The big gaps in the underlying population data makes comparisons shaky, if not invidious. The last census took place in 2021 – before the ‘Boris wave’ fuelled peak in migration - and the Office for National Statistics has been experiencing something of an institutional crisis in falling response rates in its main population surveys. These surveys do not include residents in communal accommodation such as asylum hotels which means that recent revivals are not recorded at all. Smaller groups of foreign nationals – for example, Afghans – are most likely to be misrepresented. Ben Brindle makes the further point that possible drivers of crime committed by young men (both Britons and migrants) such as trauma, mental health more generally and socio-economic status cannot be inferred from existing data.[5]
Such complexity of course does not prevent populist and unscrupulous politicians and tabloid newspaper editors from making sensationalist claims. A case in point was the assertion by Reform UK and the Tory Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick that Afghan nationals were 22 times more likely than British nationals to be convicted of sex offences. This figure originated from the Centre for Migration Control and was extracted from data from the years 2021-23 (capturing 77 sexual offences committed by Afghan nationals in that period. However, the population data was from the 2021 census and did not include the influx of Afghans into the UK after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory estimated the rate to be 14.5 times greater for Afghan nationals but even that figure comes with the qualification that there is no age breakdown, unlike for the prison population data. While still a striking difference, the lesson to be learned here is that where there is a relatively small number of offences, a small change in the population can shift the offending rate markedly.[6]
With regard to refugees and asylum seekers, rational discussion on this topic is often disabled by the perception that refugee migration is spiralling out of control, or akin to an exodus or foreign invasion.[7] To this we may add, the explicit othering of migrant/asylum seeking groups deemed not ‘to be like us’ and from ‘backward cultures’ inimical to the standards of Western liberal democracy particularly in their attitudes to women’s rights. In Britain, this process has involved the demonising of Muslim communities and nations fought over proprietary notions of women (not autonomous actors with agency but helpless victims needing patriarchal protection) and the construction of alien, male predatory sexuality. It has become symbiotically associated with the running sore that is the ‘grooming gangs’ scandal which has involved the industrial scale sexual abuse and rape of thousands of vulnerable, working class girls in the care system by predominantly South Asian heritage groups of older men and the failings of police, social services and certain local authorities with misplaced concerns about racism and community relations. The riots which ravaged English towns and cities and Belfast in the summer of 2024 were sparked with disinformation that the perpetrator of the Southport knife attack atrocity was a Muslim, recently arrived asylum seeker. As discussed earlier, the catalyst for the unrest outside migrant hostels last summer was the arrest of an Afghan Muslim for underage sexual assault. At times it seems as if the clash of civilisations is being fought on the streets of British towns and cities.
Contrary to the myths peddled by media, politicians and international organisations, the evidence shows that there is neither a long-term increase in refugee migration nor evidence that the Western world is being overwhelmed by floods of refugees, with refugees numbering only 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, or about 10 per cent of all international migrants, and 80-85 per cent of refugees already staying in origin regions. [8] It is incumbent on politicians to cease narratives on ‘bogus asylum seekers and comparing refugee flows to foreign invasions on small boats necessitating their repulsion by the armed services. But it is even more important to dial down the rhetoric on and refute ill-informed connections between asylum seekers; their ethnicity, culture, and criminality particularly when there is an absence of the relevant confirmatory data.
References
[1] Harron Siddique and Michael Goodier Do asylum seekers commit crimes at a higher rate? The Guardian.15 December 2025 p.21
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6) Ibid
[7] Heine de Haas (2023) How Migration Really Work. A Factful Guide to the Most Divisive Issue in Politics. London: Penguin p.364
[8] ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
