The far right's rhetoric of 'protecting' women and girls has been exposed as hypocritical, as evidence shows their actions contradict their claims. Following Stephen Yaxley-Lennon's (Tommy Robinson) Unite the Kingdom march in London, videos emerged of women stripping off niqabs on stage to chants of 'take it off', revealing long hair and short dresses. These women were identified as members of Collectif Némésis, a French far-right group that uses women's safety as a pretext for anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric.
Collectif Némésis, founded by Alice Cordier in 2019, claims that women's safety is linked to migration, a claim easily disproved by statistics showing that most gender-based violence occurs in the home. In the UK, similar groups like the Women's Safety Initiative and the Pink Ladies have emerged, protesting outside migrant hotels and using slogans about women's safety to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. However, these groups are backed by billionaires and politicians, including Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, revealing a broader political agenda.
Hypocrisy is rife: reporting from the 2024 summer riots, sparked by the Southport murders, found that two in five of those arrested had previous domestic abuse reports. Researchers have long linked misogyny and far-right extremism, a connection that persists despite the use of pseudo-feminist slogans. Women's groups have condemned the hijacking of violence against women and girls conversations by an anti-migrant agenda, stating it harms survivors and impedes real work on root causes.
At the march, Robinson claimed women were 'too scared to speak out' two years ago, but women continue to call out the anti-feminist darkness at the heart of the far right. The insincerity of these stunts is clear: these groups do not care about Muslim women or their choices, but are solely preoccupied with white people's fates. The far right's 'save women' narrative is a facade for racism and misogyny.
