The Violence Isn’t Imported. It’s Domestic.
Kemi Badenoch’s attempt to blame violence against women on migrants doesn’t just collapse under scrutiny - it actively distracts us from where the harm really happens, and who is actually responsible.
Kemi Badenoch is not a politician who is known for nuance, context or not approaching every single subject that comes into her radar for an opportunity to be pugilistic to a worrying degree. She has an innate talent for flattening complex issues into near non-coherence. Yesterday was another shining example when she took one look at Labour’s new plan for addressing Violence Against Women and Girls with the comment that:
“It’s not 11 year old boys who are committing violence against women and girls. We need to get people who are from cultures that don’t respect women out of our countries. Not all countries are equally valid. Labour’s plan to lecture schoolboys to respect women and girls is a complete distraction”
Her statement is so Badenoch it hurts - it’s simultaneously confident, incurious and exceptionally revealing. Not just of Badenoch’s own politics, but of a rhetorical manoeuvre that has become what feels like a reflex, a muscle memory, in the halls of the modern right.
You take an issue that’s structurally complex, emotionally charged and uncomfortable, strip it of its timelines, causality and evidence and then relocate all responsibility elsewhere - preferably somewhere foreign, somewhere that is, reassuringly, “other.”
Badenoch in this case is, of course, technically correct - in the most narrow and most useless sense imaginable.
Yes, eleven-year-old boys are as a rule not committing the majority of the serious acts of violence against women and girls - except this would be the same thing as me saying that toddlers do not, as a rule, run marathons. A statement that’s technically correct, but ultimately tells us… nothing.
And while Badenoch’s statement is doing that - nothing - in spades, it also ignores that we are living in a time where there has been an increase in young boys acting in overtly misogynistic ways from a very young age. This has been largely fomented through the malicious presence of the Tate brothers and commentators like them on social media, new narratives forming about masculinity and what men look like, though very importantly, not exclusively so.
Because while Badenoch points at the issue of violence against women and girls being at the border, her reluctance to look inward is also exceptionally unhelpful. She points out that there are cultures that treat women abhorrently (again, something true), yet turns a blind eye to the fact that this is not exclusive to cultures that she may see as not “equally valid.”
We as a country cannot say that we have treated women and girls with the respect and safety that they deserve. We simply can’t - not historically, culturally, institutionally and certainly not in today’s world. Framing ourselves as being “not the issue” is especially worrisome when domestic abuse is endemic, rape convictions remain shockingly low, sexual assault cases pending court dates are unacceptably high and women are still overwhelmingly harmed by men they know.
That is not a scenario in which the UK can in any way or form pat itself on the back as a finished product on women’s rights and point at foreign contaminants being the real issue. The narrative that Badenoch is trying to spin is nothing more than a comforting fiction that allows men in our own culture to avoid responsibility.
The actual evidence that comes along with this subject is exceptionally clear, and blows a hole three metres wide in Badenoch’s story - violence against women and girls in the UK is not primarily on the back of unknown strangers in public places, let alone recent migrants lurking menacingly at the border.
It is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men who are known to the victim - partners, ex-partners, husbands, boyfriends, colleagues, classmates. It happens behind closed front and bedroom doors, in homes, bedrooms, stairwells and in conversations unheard.
It happens in relationships that have long histories of coercion, control and escalating abuse that far too often get seen and not acted upon. Reviews of domestic homicides read like variations on the same theme - warning signs missed, patterns normalised, systems slow or absent and violence treated as isolated until it far too often becomes fatal.
The true and most insidious picture of VAWG completely shatters how exceptionally empty Badenoch’s solutions are. Even if we deported every single migrant in this country, this will still in no way or form fix intimate partner violence. Even if we managed to put 100,000 more police on the streets, that would still not impact abuse that happens in private spaces, by men who were born in this country, already embedded, already trusted.
Which brings us back to the subject of boys. I am not writing this piece today to make out that boys are villains in waiting, but because violence has pre-history.
Violence doesn’t spring fully formed from the fists of a 30 year old man - it’s something that’s learned. It’s absorbed and normalised over time. The mythos that underpins the violence against women - that women exist purely for male consumption, that female consent is negotiable, that a woman saying “no” is a challenge instead of a boundary - don’t come into existence the moment young boys turn into young men, or young men turn into grown men. They are seeded, germinated, early in life - watered consistently and left to grow unchecked in fertile ground of a culture that still, despite our protestations elsewhere, treats women as “less than.”
This is why Labour’s strategy in addressing these issues in schools is important - not because anyone thinks that 11 year old boys should be stood up in classrooms and be accused of being future rapists, but because we know that by that age far too many of them have already encountered Andrew Tate online. These young boys have already been fed algorithmically optimised content that convinces them that the women in their lives are objects. That kindness is weakness and that masculinity means being dominant. These young boys are being exposed to the idea, in real time while scrolling on their phones, that misogyny is not only acceptable, but aspirational.
The risks that now live in the digital ecosystems that young men and boys are engulfed by are shocking - the average age a child now first sees pornography is just under 13, while the average age that boys encounter Tate-style influencers is even younger still. Boys in this country are being raised in a digital ecosystem that trains and encourages them to dehumanise women, yet Kemi Badenoch wants us to believe that teaching them about consent, respect and equality is somehow the controversial suggestion.
It is utterly incoherent.
No rational person would suggest that we blame children for the violence of adults - what is being said, if you’re paying actual attention and not looking for a soundbite, is that if we wait until those boys are men, until the attitudes have crystallised into actions, or until a woman is already being hurt, we have failed.
The prevention being proposed is patently not about pointing fingers at school children, it’s about doing everything we can at the most effective point in men’s lives, from becoming men who appear in those domestic homicide reviews - the ones in which everyone approached say “we saw the signs, but didn’t know what to do.”
But the either or approach that Badenoch has deployed, that dichotomising of a subject into camps allows her to do something - it allows her to avoid the actual difficult work of addressing this issue.
When Badenoch talks about an “imported” violence, that’s easy. It plays all too well. It requires from us, as society, nothing more than suspecting outsiders - something which, quite frankly, we’ve never really struggled with. What this dichotomy doesn’t need is a look inward. It doesn’t demand that we admit that British culture - our culture - produces violent men at scale. It absolves us from having a look at how our own music, media, institutions and our everyday interactions are still shot through with misogyny.
Solutions that are actually effective are harder and more complex, and all involve sustained investment in education that teaches boys what a healthy relationship looks like before toxic online content yanks them in the other direction. They involve funding women’s services that were decimated by Tory austerity, and training police to take domestic abuse seriously from the first report, not the fifth. They involve shaping a society in which coercive control is recognised for the scourge that it is and named so, where warning signs are acted on with alacrity and, above all, women are believed.
All of these solutions, though, are uncomfortable to us - because they implicate us. All of us. Addressing the issue of violence against women and girls means putting our own attitudes, silences, jokes we let slide and behaviour we normalised over time under the harsh spotlight of scrutiny. It means we must accept that British men - men who have lived here for generations, men who look like the men in power - are the primary perpetrators of violence against women in this country, and they’re the ones that set the tone.
I include myself in that discomfort. I can think of moments where I should have intervened in situations that felt off, moments where a dynamic raised alarm bells, but I stayed silent because it felt awkward or easier to tell myself it wasn’t my place. That silence made me complicit. The prevention we need is exactly this - giving people the language and confidence to act on those alarm bells before harm escalates, not after a friend, colleague or loved one is already hurt.
Badenoch knows all this - she has access to the exact same data (if not more), the same domestic homicide reviews, the same evidence about who the men are who are actually committing violence against women in this country. She is making an active and strategic choice to ignore all this, because it allows her to perform toughness while protecting the men in her own party, country and culture from having to change anything at all.
So when Badenoch calls Labour’s plan to educate boys a “complete distraction,” understand what she’s actually doing - she’s distracting us from the men who are already here, already trusted, already hurting women.
It's just the utter facile nature of an argument against education that really rankles. Because someone doesn't do something at age 11 they shouldn't be educated, so their future self does or does not do a thing. Simple truth that if we didnt educate 11 year olds in the facts, skills and societal norms we would be living in anarchy and have no skilled adults in the future - by trying to score cheap points she loses the bigger reality. Truly a failed miserable excuse for a political leader.
This is particularly shocking from Badenoch, a betrayal of all those women and girls who have suffered harm from men they know, from our own 'culture'. She is a disgrace.