Resurgent rhetoric 'Protecting women' returns as favoured anti-immigration slogan for the right

"Our women, our daughters are scared to walk the streets," Tommy Robinson told tens of thousands of cheering supporters at last Saturday's "unite the kingdom" rally.

- Amelia Gentleman

"Their safety has been taken from them," he said, his voice croaking from the straining of shouting into his microphone. Communities were crumbling, he added, "at the hands of open border, mass uncontrolled immigration".

The need to protect women and children from the threat supposedly posed by illegal immigration has this summer become an increasingly frequent rallying cry used by politicians on the right to justify a hardening anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The resurgent use of the phrase has provoked many questions for analysts of the evolving debate on immigration. When did something that has been in the far right's playbook for decades reemerge as the right's most favoured antiimmigration slogan? Since when did women become so vulnerable that they need the protection of vigilante protest groups? How accurate are the claims made by rightwing politicians about the link between sexual assault and illegal immigration?

Reform UK politicians have recently seized on the need to protect women and children against an apparent threat posed by illegal immigrants. Focus on the pressures posed by immigration on jobs, housing and schools has increasingly been replaced in the prevailing anti-immigration rhetoric by the characterisation of migrants as sexual predators.

Last month Nigel Farage said anger over the use of hotels to house asylum seekers was moving from concern over "fairness - why on earth are people being given all these things - to very much about the safety of women and children".