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August 20 2026 - 10:00am
The British Government has belatedly acknowledged that the engineers and doctors arriving by the dinghy-load might need some help to integrate. To this end, the Home Office has produced instructions for asylum seekers. Posters explain that making sexual comments to strangers “even as a compliment” is harassment, that “both people must say ‘yes’ to sex”, and that it is illegal in the UK to “deny a child food, clothes, shelter or care” or to “cut or harm a girl’s genitals”. Doing so will compromise an asylum claim.
This is an admission that at least some new arrivals need to be told explicitly things most Britons regard as elementary.
Rapists and child abusers exist the world over, and British boys grow up watching the same brutal porn as boys in Kabul or Khartoum. But they do so in a culture which, however imperfectly, regards women not as property but as autonomous human beings. British women have the right to work, travel, divorce, refuse sex and live independently of men. And when those rights are violated, our moral expectation is that the shame belongs to the perpetrator, not his victim.
That cannot be said of every society from which Britain is receiving large numbers of young men. Cultures are not interchangeable. If they were, we wouldn’t have boatloads of migrants risking their lives to build a better one in the UK. Yet rather than pursue a robust immigration policy, or even honestly acknowledge that (whisper it) not all cultures are equal, the Government’s answer is to issue new arrivals with instructions on how not to commit rape. This is nothing short of managed decline.
Would an explanation of consent have stopped Eritrean asylum seeker Bruke Desalagne from dragging a pensioner behind a fence and raping him in a churchyard? Perhaps a leaflet explaining that women have rights might have stayed the hand of Egyptian Ibrahim Alshafe and Iranian Abdulla Ahmadi, who repeatedly raped an incapacitated woman on Brighton beach while their friend filmed and encouraged them. Or maybe Afghan asylum seeker Ahmad Mulakhil simply needed to be told that sex with children is illegal before he abducted and raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl and filmed his crimes.
These men cannot plead cultural or legal ignorance. A man who drags an intoxicated pensioner out of sight before raping him understands that what he is doing cannot withstand witnesses. Men who take an incapacitated woman somewhere secluded, rape her and film it understand exploitation perfectly well. A man who abducts a child does not need the Home Office to explain that she is vulnerable. Treating such behavior as a failure of cultural orientation is not merely naive: it strips the perpetrators of moral agency. These are adult men able to negotiate with traffickers and organize passage across borders, not bewildered exchange students.
The posters expose a contradiction the Government would rather not confront. For years, politicians have celebrated how mass immigration has enriched Britain with new food, music and festivals. Suggest that culture also shapes attitudes towards women, sex and children, and suddenly it’s an offensive generalization. Yet the Home Office would hardly need to explain consent, female autonomy and FGM to new arrivals if it believed there was nothing worth mentioning.
None of this means that every asylum seeker is a misogynist or criminal. But neither should concern for migrants require us to suspend judgment about the societies they come from, or to pretend that attitudes formed over a lifetime ebb away somewhere in the Channel crossing. A humane immigration policy must consider not only the men arriving in Britain, but the women and girls already here. Their safety — our safety — matters, too.
