The UK’s justice ministry released startling figures yesterday, and rather than summarising them here it’s better to let you read the full facts from a UK newspaper:
“Data from the Ministry of Justice, obtained under freedom of information laws, show that 15 per cent of sexual offences, including rape, were accounted for by foreign nationals between 2021 and 2023.
A further eight per cent of convictions were recorded as unknown nationalities.
Those labelled “unknown” are likely to largely include non-British nationals, taking the total number likely to have been committed by foreigners up to 23 per cent.
This is despite census data showing foreign nationals make up just 9.3 per cent of the population.”
These are not figures somebody has invented on social media, nor are they figures from some think-tank with an agenda: They are the official figures from the UK Government.
I mention this because it is a simple statement of fact that the Irish Government refuses to collate criminal data – especially that pertaining to sex crimes – that categorises offenders by nationality or migrant heritage. The only thing that we can do in Ireland, if we want to get some idea of what the figures might be, is to look at the trends of our nearest geographical neighbour.
It is unpopular, for some reason, to note that Ireland and the UK are very similar countries that shared a common culture (not always willingly) for close to a millennium. We share a justice system, a cultural framework, a parliamentary political system, and many other things. We are also generally buffeted by the same international trends and issues.
There is, in short, very little reason to believe that figures of this nature from the UK would not be substantially replicated in Ireland.
These figures, incidentally, have been replicated elsewhere. Migrants are heavily over-represented in sex crimes in Germany, Sweden, and a host of other EU countries that collate such data.
The obvious question is “why?”
Confronting data like this has to make us confront a fact – that migrants commit more sex crime as a proportion of the population than native born men – with an explanation. There are only three real explanations: That there are economic factors, or that there are cultural factors, or that there are reporting factors. We’ll start with the latter.
The idea behind “reporting factors” would be that migrant men do not commit more sex crimes, but are more likely to be reported, caught, and convicted. This is certainly a theory beloved of some on the left if and when they are forced to come up with an explanation for figures like those released yesterday: That a white woman is more likely to report an attack on her by a stranger, that police are more likely to take it seriously, and that juries are more likely to convict a foreigner than a native.
The problem with that theory is that it requires immense supposition. It also contradicts something that we are constantly told about sexual assaults which is that they generally are committed by people known to the victims. The other problem is that there is simply no compelling evidence for it. There is no data that suggests that women are more likely to report attacks by foreign men.
With economic factors, the theory would be something along the lines of “being at economic disadvantage makes men more likely to engage in sexual crimes”. Again, there is very little evidence for this.
If you take nationality out of it, it is true that more crimes of this nature are committed by (or at least convictions are secured against) men from lower socio-economic backgrounds. However, it may well be the case that this is a function of their poverty preventing them from accessing other remedies: A rich man can pay off a victim, a poor man cannot. Also, many sexual crimes – like workplace sexual harassment – are almost exclusively the domain of richer, better off men.
That leaves us with cultural factors, which is to my mind the only explanation that makes any coherent sense: Attitudes towards women are simply different if you grow up in the Middle East or Africa than they are if you grow up in Western Europe. You do not simply shed your views of women and their sexual value the moment you set foot on British (or Irish, or German) soil. These things are deeply engrained.
There’s evidence, too. From the Telegraph:
“Two nationalities – Afghans and Eritreans – were more than 20 times more likely to account for sexual offence convictions than British citizens, according to the data. Overall, foreign nationals were 71 per cent more likely than Britons to be responsible for sex crime convictions.”
If the reasons that migrant men committed more rapes and sexual assaults than natives were simply down to reporting factors, or economic factors, then those figures should be consistent across migrant groups: That is to say, an Afghan migrant should be no more or less likely to be nabbed for a sex crime than a Turkish one.
And yet, they are: Afghans and Eritreans – neither of them countries famed for women’s rights – produce vastly more sex offenders in the UK (in proportion to their numbers) than any other country does.
There have been similar patterns elsewhere with Algerians in other European countries.
The logical deduction to be made here is obvious: Allowing mass migration from countries with regressive social attitudes towards women is objectively dangerous for women in western European countries. The policy, therefore, should be to reject migration from those countries.
But in Ireland, we won’t even look at the figures, and to even have this conversation makes you a potential racist. That is a problem, and one people have a right to be vocal about.