Every now and again, the face of a sex offender appears on the news. A man, his eyes blank and menacing, convicted of sex crimes. To research themes for this column I trawl local news sites, and notice such stories pacing through them with a bleak, continuous thud. The perpetrators of sex crimes are almost always men, usually known to the victim, and most commonly of working age. They darken no one corner of the country. But there are certain sporadic cases that dominate social media more than any other: when an asylum seeker or refugee has committed the crime.
These stories have become emblematic of anti-asylum-hotel protests, in particular following the case of the Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Kebatu, who, eight days after he arrived by dinghy across the Channel, touched the thigh of a 14-year-old schoolgirl and tried to kiss her. This led to rioting last year outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, where the Home Office had housed him.
Anger rippled around other hotels, such as in Norfolk, where one asylum seeker had been jailed for trying to obtain naked pictures of a 14-year-old boy. People are now marching against “unaccompanied young men” seeking asylum who are moving into the former army base in Crowborough, East Sussex.
The backlash against asylum seekers has morphed from an argument about state scarcity to one of safety, as reported by my colleague Emily Lawford, who followed the campaign of the “Pink Ladies”: women and girls leading anti-migrant demonstrations.
Alongside grooming gangs – which were found by the Casey Review to involve disproportionate numbers of men of South Asian backgrounds – these crimes are being exploited to weave a damaging narrative by figures who are hardly women’s rights activists. Robert Jenrick, the former Tory shadow justice secretary who defected to Reform, writes of “alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women” and cites stats – echoed by Nigel Farage – that paint certain nationalities as inherently dangerous.
Most of us know that a kneejerk fear of someone because of their skin colour or faith is racism. But when mainstream politicians produce league tables ranking minorities for their crimes, they bamboozle us by breezing through the holes in the data in order to spout, say, the bogus claim that Afghans are more than 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than Brits. They don’t reflect the fact that the populations of certain nationalities in the UK are younger and more male than the national average – younger men are overwhelmingly more likely to commit sex crimes. Or that drawing per-capita inferences from such tiny populations, which are undercounted in official statistics, can spit out wildly warped results.
When I requested convictions broken down by ethnicity from the Ministry of Justice, the data I received showed the number of convictions per nationality without accounting for individual offenders with multiple convictions, or dual nationals. This data is drawn from the Police National Computer, an outdated 1970s system vulnerable to human error and, despite the breakdown provided, considered by Ministry of Justice officials as “not reliable for nationality”. I used population, age and sex data for each ethnicity from the 2021 Census (plus more recently available population figures, such as arrivals since the fall of Kabul) to try to adjust for differences in demographics between each group, and removed groups with overall populations below 30,000. The outcome? Not a great deal of difference in offending rates: five per 10,000 Afghan men, seven per 10,000 men with nationalities listed as UK, English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish.
This is crude maths with poor data. It does little more than illustrate that sex and age must be adjusted when analysing propensity for sex crimes. And, also, that lumping big groups of young men together in a hostile environment with little to do is a bad idea, whoever they are. We know too that the great majority of sexual abusers of children are white British (even the far-right thug Tommy Robinson admits the “majority of nonces are white, of course”).
Yet the UK is awash with corrosive innuendo. From Mansfield in Nottinghamshire to Perivale in west London, I’ve had people repeat hearsay about men – most often men who aren’t white – hanging around schools, or filming children in parks, with no evidence or police reports. One MP told me how the atmosphere in his town shifted when a sexual harassment allegation against an asylum seeker pinged into a local Facebook group; yet the allegation came from a mysterious Russian-speaking account and it was found by authorities to be false.
I hear of a refugee charity advising men not to FaceTime their families while out and about, as they risk suspicious locals accusing them of illicit filming any time they take their phones out in public. (Phoning home is one of the only things asylum seekers – without money or work – can do all day. When I visited the “asylum barge” in Portland, Dorset, the men I spoke to there spent their time walking along the beach FaceTiming their sisters back in Pakistan).
Everyday racism is on the rise. Data I obtained last year showed a 67 per cent increase in racist and religiously aggravated attacks on public transport from 2022 to 2025. Real and grim stories of sex crimes will always haunt our newsfeeds: our politicians should know better than to haunt us further with bad data, in bad faith.
Correction: This article was amended on 11 February 2026 to remove the wrong name of a hotel in Norfolk, an error inserted during editing. The piece erroneously mentioned the Park Hotel, whereas the incident in question involved the Brook Hotel.
[Further reading: Inside Sudan’s perpetual war]
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This article appears in the 11 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Labour in free fall
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