Britain's Daughters: How the Far Right Uses Women to Build the Nation

After every national tragedy, I watch the knights appear. They arrive online first, armed with hashtags, flags and promises to protect ‘our women and girls.’

These self-appointed protectors do not offer women freedom or safety. Instead, they portray themselves as defenders of a nation under attack, standing between vulnerable women and dangerous outsiders. Their battlegrounds become mosques, asylum accommodation and racialised communities. Their weapon is a familiar story: Britain’s women and girls are under threat, and ‘they’ are to blame.

I want to ask what that protection really means. How fear becomes nationalism, and how misogyny gets repackaged as protection.

Who Are ‘Our Women and Girls’?

Violence against women and girls is real. As a young woman, I know that safety is a constant calculation: choosing the safest route home, sharing my location with friends, or deciding how to respond when someone’s behaviour becomes threatening. Any politics claiming to care about women’s safety deserves serious engagement.

So when the far right pose as the chivalrous defenders of women’s safety, their rallying cry — ‘protect our women and girls’ — can sound compelling. Compelling but also disconcerting, because it turns women into symbols of the nation. As Nira Yuval-Davis argues in Gender & Nation, women’s bodies and sexuality are made to stand for the nation’s honour, drawing a line between a national ‘us’ —imagined as decent, civilised and deserving of protection — and a threatening ‘them’ on the outside.

In this story, men are invited to become protectors: defenders of the national home, its borders, and the women within it. Racialised, migrant, and Muslim men are cast as potential intruders whose penetration of the national border stains white British honour, legitimising harsher migration controls. Feminist scholars call this femonationalism: the use of women’s rights language by nationalists to justify racial exclusion.

Protecting Women: A Political Story

This rhetoric is powerful because it begins with something real. Women do experience harassment, abuse, and violence. The problem is not that the far right speaks about these dangers; the problem is the selective story it tells about who commits that violence, whose safety matters, and what solutions are offered.

Narratives focus public fear on the figure of the ‘racialised stranger’— the migrant, asylum seeker, or Muslim man presented as uniquely threatening. By framing the issue this way, a systemic social problem is transformed into a question of national belonging. Violence against women stops being treated as a structural issue and instead becomes ‘evidence’ of weak borders. Women’s experiences are reduced to political ammunition, and the proposed solution is always exclusion, deportation, or tougher borders, rather than prevention, accountability, and support for survivors.

The contradictions become impossible to ignore when we look at the reality of violence against women. The far right directs our attention towards the supposedly dangerous stranger. Yet more than 90 per cent of rape and sexual-assault perpetrators are known to their victims. Violence against women happens everywhere, in our homes, our relationships and within our communities.

Blaming migrants therefore cannot be a serious strategy for ending something that is ubiquitous and carries a long history. The hypocrisy becomes even clearer when we look at some of the self-appointed ‘protectors’ themselves. Two in five people arrested during the 2024 riots had police records of domestic abuse. This statistic exposes the irony of claiming to defend women on the streets while ignoring the violence they face in their homes and relationships.

Southport: When Misinformation Becomes Mobilisation

The murders of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar in Southport on July 29, 2024 were horrifying. The grief felt by their community deserved care, truth and accountability. Instead, false online claims harnessed public pain to drive hate by alleging that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK by small boat.

Although Merseyside Police confirmed at around midday on July 30 that the name circulating online was false, the misinformation had already spread far and wide. The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee recorded that the false name had received more than 30,000 mentions on X from over 18,000 accounts. Misinformation quickly turned grief into anti-migrant anger. Subsequently, during a peaceful vigil on July 30, a breakaway crowd gathered outside Southport Mosque, where violence erupted. Over the following week, disorder spread across England, targeting mosques, community spaces and hotels housing asylum seekers. None of this protected women and girls. It redirected public anger towards another group of vulnerable people — making racism look like protection.

Safety is Not a Border Policy

Targeting racialised communities does not prevent violence against women; it only redirects public anger towards a convenient scapegoat. We should be angry about the violence women face, and this justified anger should mobilise us. However, it should not result in a demand for exclusion, but a demand for change.

As Selma Taha, Executive Director of Southall Black Sisters, has argued: ‘Violence against women and girls (VAWG) demands an urgent, system-wide response that removes barriers to safety and secures long-term investment in specialist support services.’ This also means better institutional responses when survivors report abuse and education that challenges misogyny before it becomes violence. The false claims after Southport did not remain online, but the damage had been done. Grief was turned into hostility and vulnerable communities were put at risk.

We must refuse the false choice between opposing racism and taking violence against women seriously. Both matter. A politics that treats whole communities as threats while ignoring the structural causes of abuse does not protect women at all. Rather, it uses their fear to build stronger boundaries between the conveniently constructed ‘us’ and ‘them.’

As a young woman, I don’t want my safety to be used to decide who belongs in Britain. I want it to mean something simpler: that violence is confronted wherever it occurs.

Britain’s daughters are not symbols of national honour, nor are they trophies to be defended by self-appointed protectors. We are citizens and political actors in our own right. If women’s safety genuinely matters, it must be built through survivor support, accountability, and solidarity — not outside a mosque, at the gates of an asylum hotel, or at the border.