How anti-migrant groups are hijacking women’s rights to promote their agenda
Anti-immigration protesters in Britain are increasingly taking an “opportunistic” approach to women’s issues in a bid to make their extreme views more publicly acceptable, experts have warned.
Slogans “protect our daughters” and “save our children” are now prominent at anti-immigration marches and demonstrations, prompting women’s rights groups to express concern about the “weaponization” of violence against women and girls to “promote anti-immigrant agendas.”
With the rise of this rhetoric, two separate women-led and oriented groups emerged within the movement last year: Pink Ladies and the Women’s Safety Initiative (WSI).
These groups, which deny that they are far-right, carry slogans such as “I’m not far-right, I’m worried about my children” and “protecting women and children is not right-wing at all”, which are often seen at demonstrations.
But experts say these groups – knowingly or unknowingly – have adopted the same language used by the far right in order to add a “veneer of respectability” to their ideology.
Experts say these narratives appeal specifically to women in an “opportunistic” way, exploit real fears about real issues and make the far right look more “acceptable.” Both mean that the far right can appeal to a wider audience and increase the acceptability of its ideas within the mainstream.
Experts say the past year has marked a significant evolution in the far right, with women increasingly organizing more formally within the movement and becoming more visible and vocal at the street level, all of which serve as effective promotion and recruitment tools.
Andrea Simon, director of the Coalition to End Violence Against Women (EVAW), one of more than 100 women’s rights organizations who raised these concerns to prime minister Keir Starmer in August, said: Independent: “These narratives are promoted by those who take advantage of real social concerns about sexual violence to deliberately fuel racism in our societies.
“We know that violence against women and girls is perpetrated by men of all backgrounds and that the vast majority of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.
“We are increasingly seeing women, particularly white women, publicly engaging in these groups, in part because of their cynical embrace of violence against women and girls. These groups are opportunistically attracting new supporters en masse as society grapples with serious, long-standing failures to address male violence against women and girls, years of austerity and widening inequalities.”
A researcher from Hope Not Hate, an anti-racist and anti-fascist organization, said: The “foreign sexual threat” narrative against women and girls has existed on the far right for years, but it left its mark on this summer’s protests.
Issues such as grooming gangs and arrests of asylum seekers for sexual offenses, which critics say are used to advance far-right figure Tommy Robinson’s anti-immigrant agenda, “reinforce” this narrative, according to a spokesperson for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
Demonstrations outside asylum hotels this summer broke out after Hadush Kebatu, an asylum seeker living at the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, where the first demonstration took place, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl.
The Hope Not Hate researcher stated that the “pedophilia threat”, which is the unfounded claim that all asylum seekers are a threat to children, included many women in the roles of mothers and grandmothers in the protests that took place this summer. Minutes later, chants of “stop the boats” were heard before chants of “protect our children” were heard.
Both narratives serve to “make anti-immigration sentiment a public safety issue,” which is a harder argument to counter, the researcher said. “It also makes the far right appear more publicly acceptable,” they added: “[The men are] “They no longer present themselves as rogue far-right members, but as protectors of society.”
Lois Shearing, author Pink FurryAn investigation into how women are recruited online by the far-right has said it can provide the far-right with a strong “veneer of respectability”.
A spokesman for the ISD warned: “The safety of women and girls is a key narrative used by the far right, and this is much easier to promote than extreme anti-immigrant hatred. There is therefore a danger that women and girls will be cynically used as a wedge to support these beliefs.”
“This is often expressed in the wider anti-immigrant discourse around crime and the description of mass immigration as ‘invasion’.
“This rhetoric is used to argue that because immigrants (with the subtext of immigrants typically from non-white or Muslim countries) pose a threat to (white) women and girls as a whole, the safest course of action is mass deportation.”
Researcher Hope Not Hate said female-focused groups that emerged this year, with family-oriented events, “girl power” messages, songs and the choice of the color pink, were portrayed in this “cleaner-looking” light and denied being far-right. All this, they said, contrasted with the violence of far-right riots fueled by stabbings in Southport last year, which led to mass arrests for the violence.
According to the researcher, Pink Ladies began as a trend of wearing pink to marches, before figures such as Orla Minihane, deputy chair of Epping Forest Reform UK, began organizing the group during the Epping protests.
The band held one of their biggest independent shows in Chelmsford last month; right-wing commentator Mike Graham told the crowd: “Pink protest” [asylum seekers] They’re all fucking rapists. Because it’s the only language they understand. We don’t want them here.”
Founded by Jess Gill earlier this year, WSI is smaller and has a more serious tone that can be described as politically focused. But the group uses similar rhetoric, holding signs saying “mass migration means mass risk for women” or “securing borders means safer for women.”
Pink Ladies and WSI are new in that they are more formal and individualistic, as well as highly organized and mainstream street mobilization, according to the Hope Not Hate researcher, who says that “with mobilization comes recruitment.” Shearing agreed, adding that an appeal had been made to a “wider group of women”.
Although there is no data to confirm whether women now make up higher proportions of the far-right, Shearing said this means more and more women are becoming involved, as numbers are rising in the movement overall.
They warned that among the most worrying developments they noticed in 2025 was the gradual normalization of extreme anti-immigrant beliefs.
“The momentum we see for hotels and marches will diminish,” they said. “But I worry about how long it will take for us to undo how acceptable these views have become in mainstream politics.”
A WSI spokesman said: “These so-called experts should be less concerned about WSI defending women and representing the public and more concerned about the brutal murders of Emily Jones and Rhiannon Skye White by immigrants. [or] The racially motivated grooming of British girls by predominantly Pakistani men.”
They added: “We represent the stories of thousands of women and girls across the country who attend and speak to WSI.”
Independent Pink Ladies has been contacted for comment.
