Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, has said the Government's poster campaign teaching migrants that women are equal and the age of consent is 16 is an admission that too many migrants are ignoring British laws.
Home Office campaign under fire
Writing in an article, Kearns said: "Every summer, girls leave our country for what they are told is a holiday. Some of them do not come back the same. Some do not come back at all, not as children at least, but as wives. That is not something our great country should tolerate."
She argued that equality between men and women was "hard won by women who chained themselves to railings, who fought for equal pay, and who forced the country to accept that a wife could not be raped by her husband with impunity."
Failure to integrate
Kearns said that in modern Britain, there are women living under coercive control and facing domestic abuse daily. "Many of these women know perfectly well that what is being done to them is against the law, but sadly, know equally that nobody is coming."
She attributed part of the problem to people arriving from places where the treatment of women "bears no resemblance to what is expected here" and said too many of those communities have failed to integrate. "Microcosms of British society operate on standards imported from somewhere else, at the expense of the women who live under them."
Kearns said it is "unforgivable and unacceptable" that there are households and post codes where the settled understanding is that "the law stops at the front door." She added that "previous generations of migrants did the hard work of assimilating, proudly finding their place in our great country. More recent arrivals, in too many cases, have not."
National epidemic of violence against women
Describing violence against women and girls as a "national epidemic," Kearns wrote: "A woman failed by a British husband and a girl failed by a family that considers her marriageable at 14 are both failed by us."
She said the Home Office poster campaign trying to force immigrants to recognise women are equal and that the age of consent is 16 "is an admission of this danger." Kearns added: "Pretending it is not happening silences the survivors, re-victimises them, and leaves other women less safe."
She said fears over undocumented young men entering the country illegally have been dismissed by the Left, but the campaign shows "the government knows the risk is real."
Call for integration and consequences
Kearns argued that the UK must ensure people welcomed into the country respect British law and customs. "Our Cultural and Integration Commission starts from the principle that Britain can be multi-racial without being multicultural, and that shared values are a condition of living here rather than a suggestion pinned to a wall."
She said immigration cannot mean "opening the door and hoping for the best" and must mean insisting that people admitted accept British law and the equality of British women "without exception."
Kearns concluded: "Men who abuse women should not be granted the right to settle here. Those who abuse women after settling here should lose it." She added that the principle of women's rights won by those who "chained themselves to railings" was "not won so that it could be quietly suspended at certain front doors. It applies to every woman in Britain, or it applies to none of us."
