The British government has produced a leaflet telling asylum seekers not to rape women.
Well, not quite. But that is what much of the British media has decided the story is.
The Home Office has actually produced a nine-page guide called Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK. It covers gender equality, domestic abuse, sexual consent, harassment and behaviour in public. Women, it explains, have the same rights as men. Sex requires consent. Domestic abuse is illegal. Following somebody who has rejected your attention is harassment. The rules, the Home Office explicitly says, “are not just for people seeking asylum, they apply to everyone living here.”
Some of it is excruciatingly basic.
“If you have sex with someone who does not want to, this is called rape,” the booklet explains.
Quite.
And almost immediately came the reaction.
Across talk radio, newspapers and social media, a peculiar argument took shape. Why, people demanded, would the government produce such a leaflet unless it knew something? Why tell asylum seekers not to rape unless ministers secretly know that asylum seekers are likely to rape? Reform UK called the document proof that the government “knows that they are a menace.” The shadow home secretary said people were arriving from societies whose attitudes towards women could be “completely incompatible with Western society.”
I listened to versions of the same argument on LBC, a station I generally like, and found myself wondering whether we had learned anything at all.
The leaflet had become a confession.
Aha. So you knew.
But knew what?
Of course people arrive in Britain from different cultures. Of course attitudes to women, family, homosexuality, masculinity, religion and sexual behaviour differ enormously around the world. To pretend otherwise is idiotic. Patriarchy is not distributed evenly and it does not take identical forms everywhere. There are societies in which women’s autonomy is severely restricted. There are men arriving in Britain who will carry some of those assumptions with them. There are asylum seekers who commit rape and other terrible crimes. None of this needs to be denied.
But neither does the existence of a government leaflet establish a crime rate.
Indeed, Britain’s Office for National Statistics says it does not hold crime breakdowns by asylum-seeker or migrant status. That rather important absence has barely impeded the certainty of the discussion.
Something else is happening.
Lacan had a useful word for it: extimité – extimacy. The thing we experience as most alien, most repulsive, most emphatically outside us, can be intimately connected to something within ourselves that we cannot comfortably recognise.
The stranger arrives carrying our secret.
And so consider what Britain believes it is seeing when it looks at the young male asylum seeker.
Sexual aggression. Contempt for women. Primitive masculinity. Homophobia. The belief that women exist for male gratification. A readiness to dominate weaker people. A failure to understand consent. A culture in which other men enforce the rules and humiliation keeps everyone in their allotted place.
Hideous.
Foreign.
Except that it isn’t particularly foreign.
British police chiefs have already described violence against women and girls in England and Wales as a “national emergency”. More than one million such crimes were recorded in a single year – around 3,000 a day – and police-recorded violence against women and girls increased by 37% between 2018 and 2023. At least one woman in twelve is estimated to experience such violence each year.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.2 million women experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2025. Women represented 72% of victims of police-recorded domestic-abuse-related crime.
In the same year, an estimated 739,000 women experienced sexual assault, including attempts. Around 1.8 million women said they had experienced rape or attempted rape since the age of sixteen. Among people who had suffered rape or assault by penetration, more than half said the perpetrator was a partner or former partner.
Not a stranger coming off a dinghy.
Someone they knew.
Even murder does not fit the comforting picture.
Female homicide has not recently surged: 155 women and girls were recorded as homicide victims in England and Wales in the year to March 2025, compared with 158 the previous year. But look at who kills women. Of adult female homicide victims, 40% were killed by a partner or former partner. More than half of adult women who were murdered died in domestic homicides. Of the 75 female domestic-homicide victims that year, all but four had a male suspect.
The danger is already inside the house.
Literally.
And then there is the culture we are producing for boys.
Andrew Tate did not become one of the world’s most recognisable misogynists because millions of teenage Afghan refugees were watching him.
British boys were.
Ofcom’s own review of risks to children online cites research finding that 19% of boys aged nine to sixteen had a positive impression of Tate, rising to 23% among fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. It cites evidence associating exposure to Tate-style material with misogynistic attitudes and unhealthy ideas about relationships. Seven in ten teachers in one study reported seeing an increase in sexist language in the classroom.
This is not a minor cultural irritation. It is the transmission mechanism.
The boy sits in his bedroom in Birmingham or Basingstoke or Brighton with a phone in his hand and an algorithm teaches him that women are manipulative, feminism has emasculated him, homosexuality is contemptible, sexual dominance proves masculinity and humiliation is strength.
Then we hand a Syrian a leaflet.
And congratulate ourselves on defending Western values.
There is something almost exquisitely psychoanalytic about it.
Britain hardly needs to import institutions capable of producing shame, domination and sexual secrecy.
We built some of the finest in the world.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse investigated allegations and safeguarding failures in boarding schools stretching back decades. It examined ten boarding schools and concluded that the boarding environment itself could heighten risks through extraordinary inequalities of authority and dependence between children and adults. It recorded cases of boys being sexually assaulted and raped by staff at prestigious educational institutions.
This doesn’t mean boarding schools cause sexual abuse. Nor does it mean British men are uniquely predatory.
That is precisely the point.
Human beings build cultures around power, sex, shame, hierarchy and belonging. Those cultures vary, but no civilisation graduates from the problem.
Britain’s peculiar genius was often to disguise domination as character-building.
Don’t cry.
Don’t tell.
Don’t be soft.
Take it like a man.
Know your place.
Respect the prefect.
Respect the master.
Respect the institution.
And above all, never expose the institution to embarrassment.
One should be extremely careful about drawing a straight line from the British public school to today’s politics. But it is hardly absurd to notice how often the old grammar survives: hierarchy masquerading as liberty, cruelty presented as humour, humiliation as masculine bonding, and the eternal search for the top dog who is permitted to break the rules because breaking the rules demonstrates that he is the top dog.
Boris Johnson understood that performance instinctively.
Nigel Farage does too.
Andrew Tate has industrialised it for the smartphone.
The content changes. The structure is remarkably resilient.
Race works similarly.
The recent case of Jason Arday should at least have caused Britain to examine the peculiar intensity with which it sometimes scrutinises a Black person who has risen into an institution traditionally associated with white prestige. There were legitimate questions about Arday’s academic work and claims about his past; those questions did not cease being legitimate because he was Black. But after his death, the scale and tone of the coverage itself became the subject of a national argument
Again, Lacan is useful.
The question is not simply whether the accusation is true.
The more revealing question is: why are we enjoying it so much?
Why this excitement?
Why this repetition?
Why the almost erotic pleasure of exposure – we’ve caught him; we’ve found them out; now we know what they really are?
That is the part conventional political argument misses.
The migrant may have committed a crime. Deport him where the law permits it. The academic may have plagiarised. Investigate it. A cultural practice may be misogynistic. Condemn it.
None of that explains the surplus enjoyment surrounding the story.
The pleasure comes from locating everything intolerable safely somewhere else.
They don’t respect women.
They are homophobic.
They abuse children.
They have primitive attitudes towards sex.
They cannot control themselves.
And Britain?
Britain apparently stands on the White Cliffs of Dover clutching Magna Carta, a rainbow flag and a consent form.
This would be funny if the displacement were harmless.
It isn’t.
Because once misogyny becomes principally something carried across the Channel in a small boat, the British woman being terrorised by her British partner disappears from view.
The girl whose classmates have learned their sexual politics from a misogynistic influencer disappears.
The child abused inside a respected institution disappears.
The Black person converted into an object of collective suspicion disappears.
Even the asylum seeker who is himself gay, or a woman fleeing forced marriage or domestic violence, disappears. He or she becomes simply the migrant: a screen onto which Britain can project whatever it most fears about itself.
There is a final irony.
The Home Office leaflet may actually be perfectly sensible.
Explain the law. Explain consent. Explain equality. Translate it into twenty languages. Give it to everyone arriving. Put the same information in schools. Put it in universities. Put it in football academies. Put it in Parliament. Put it in the Metropolitan Police. Put it in investment banks and barristers’ chambers and boarding schools.
Put it in pubs.
Put it on TikTok.
Put it through every letterbox in Britain if necessary.
There is nothing racist about telling somebody that women are equal and rape is a crime.
The racism begins when we imagine that we are the people who already know.
That is the fantasy worth examining.
The leaflet does not prove what they are.
It reveals what we desperately need them to be.
Different.
Backward.
Sexually dangerous.
Not us.
And perhaps the most genuinely British thing we could do now would be something Britain has historically found considerably harder than instructing foreigners in civilisation.
Look in the mirror.
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