Nearly every woman waiting in northern France to cross to Britain in a small boat has probably been raped on the journey, the UK Home Secretary has said.
Shabana Mahmood made the claim in an interview with The Rest Is Politics: Leading, the podcast hosted by the former Conservative minister Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser.
“We’re not in control of this border,” she admitted.
“The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers. You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey. Some of the men too, they’ve certainly been abused and threatened.”
That, she said, “is not the model that should decide whether somebody gets to come to the UK, make this their place of sanctuary and ultimately become one of us.”
In the same interview she turned on the demonstrators who have praised her border policy, telling them to “sod off” and saying they would want to drive her out of her own country because she is a Muslim.
No Home Office assessment quantifying sexual violence on the routes into northern France has been released alongside Mahmood’s interview.
Home Office statistics record the sex, age and nationality of those detected on arrival, not what happened to them before they embarked.
Women are a minority of those who do arrive. A House of Commons Library briefing, drawing on Home Office data, put detected small-boat arrivals at about 33,000 in the year to June 2026, of whom roughly 13 per cent were adult women, 72 per cent adult men and 15 per cent children.
The department’s own figure for that period was 33,374, down 23 per cent on the 43,309 recorded a year earlier. Eritreans, Sudanese, Afghans, Somalis and Iranians made up two-thirds of the total.
Women who land are held at short-term sites such as Manston, in Kent, southeast England, where the Home Office handed out 974 hijabs in the first six months of the year, Brussels Signal reported.
Imran Hussain, of the Refugee Council, welcomed the recognition that women and girls face sexual violence in the conflicts they flee and on the journeys that follow, and used the remarks to argue for wider safe routes than the sponsorship scheme the government has announced.
Mahmood said in June she would open new legal routes for what she called genuine refugees while closing loopholes that had been abused. The first of them, allowing communities and universities to sponsor arrivals, is due to open from this autumn.
The remarks come as opposition to the crossings has moved from the ballot box to the quayside.
On the weekend of September 5 and 6, men in black and balaclavas, linked to a group calling itself Patriot Platform, blocked roads at Dover and clashed with police in Portsmouth after about 140 people were landed at Eastney.
The group is run by Daniel Thomas, an associate of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the activist better known as Tommy Robinson, according to the campaign group Hope Not Hate.
Mahmood told chief constables on September 10 the scenes carried “obvious malign intent” and urged them to use their powers to ban face coverings.
The tactic has not stopped.
On September 22 hundreds gathered at a marina in Gosport, Hampshire, southern England, to meet a dinghy carrying 51 people. The boat was diverted and docked at Dover instead after 33 hours at sea, and six people were arrested.
Hampshire’s police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, said the two operations had cost more than £250,000 (€287,000) and that she expected more to come.
On October 4, about 150 demonstrators gathered at a marina in Gosport as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) brought ashore 149 people picked up in mid-Channel.
Flares were let off, police vans were blocked and there were scuffles. Hampshire Police had already prohibited face coverings. Twelve people were arrested, including on suspicion of assaulting officers, affray and racially aggravated public order.
A French charity that works with migrants on the Channel coast has been accused of helping to put children onto small boats bound for Britain, after video filmed near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France, was published by the online outlet Voxpopuli. https://t.co/mrGAiSHVbw
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) September 28, 2026
