Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

A key part of the successful scapegoating of an entire group is to create fear. Nigel Farage and his Reform party supporters have been following the scapegoat playbook by pointing the finger at immigrants, and blaming them for the very real crisis of women's unsafety.

It's a path well-trodden: point to a group, say they're a threat, and present yourself as the defender of the threat. But if this path is so well-trodden, why can't our media seem to see it?

At a press conference in August, Reform MP Sarah Pochin suggested that migrants and refugees have a "warped view of their right to sexually assault women". She claimed that men from "predominantly Muslim countries like Afghanistan" hold a "medieval view of women's rights" and that "women are at risk of sexual assault and rape from these men".

There is no evidence to suggest that asylum seekers are more likely to harm women and girls than British citizens. Most studies find they are not overrepresented among perpetrators.

But facts and stats rarely break through in a news cycle of manufactured outrage. Unless, of course, the stats come from the Centre for Migration Control, a think tank run by the Reform UK activist Robert Bates, which successfully managed to get their muddled figures onto BBC Radio 4's Today programme, parroted by the shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick (no, 40% of sexual crimes in London last year were not committed by foreign nationals).

These long-held myths are of course, racist, and harm communities of colour - especially Muslim communities. But these myths also actively harm women and girls, by perpetuating the 'stranger danger' narrative of sexual violence.

The idea that sexual violence is only committed by scary, foreign, evil men who jump out of bushes and attack women is a convenient narrative to believe in. But the truth is much darker, one that many people struggle to rectify internally.

The Media Distortion Warping Britain's Views on Immigration

Unbalanced coverage of migration is twisting the public's perspective, argues Christian Christensen

Christian Christensen

In reality, most rapes are carried out by former or current partners, and 90% of femicide killers are known to the victim. And children? The vast majority of children who experience contact sexual abuse are abused by someone they know.

When Farage and his MPs use attacks on women to stoke an anti-migrant agenda, they are ignoring, and actively diverting away from, the real crisis of violence against women in the UK. It is the media's job to recognise this and call it out - but our ingrained societal views of gender-based violence are stopping this from happening.

"As a society, we fail to understand that domestic abuse is a public health problem," says Janey Starling, co-founder of gender justice organisation, Level Up, on Media Storm. "So much of domestic abuse is about power and control, and that's psychological. These things are less easy to put in a picture. You can't take photos of someone constantly belittling their partner, somebody checking their partner's phone, having access to their emails. And the end goal, ultimately, is to have total control over another person".

Level Up created the Dignity for Dead Women campaign, which aims to change the way the press reports on fatal domestic abuse. They developed media guidelines, backed by press regulators, for newsrooms to follow when reporting on gender-based violence. Because the way news organisations report on the deaths of women directly influences public understandings of domestic abuse - and how we can prevent it.

"There are very strict media regulations on the reporting of suicide, because the media knows that it has a preventive duty when it comes to suicide", Starling explains.

The press understands that if they report on, for example, a celebrity death, the...