Rape is as English as steak and kidney pie

13 June 2016. A World to Win News Service. "We all need to calm down here," UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage lectured a young woman student who called him out for his claim that Britain is threatened with rape on a massive scale if immigration is not cut off.

Repeatedly before this Buzzfeed/Facebook Live debate, he called the New Year's Eve assaults on women at the main Cologne train station a "nuclear bomb" that would engulf the UK if its government did not leave the European Union and abandon policies that allow any EU citizen to travel freely within the union, including people born outside of Europe. "Frankly if we are prepared to accept, or if Germany and Sweden are prepared to accept, unlimited numbers of young males, from countries and cultures where women are at best second-class citizens then frankly, what do you expect?"

The student, an audience member, knocked Farage back, for a moment. She calmly but very firmly told him, "You say that like England isn't already in the top five for rape statistics in the world without those migrants coming in. You can't blame it on the migrants when people get sexually harassed every single day in the streets. If you ask every single woman here she could tell you about a hundred incidents."

The truth of her argument is backed up by statistics gathered by the UK government itself. Most (90 percent) of sexual assaults and rapes are committed by men the woman has known, "often by someone the survivor has trusted or even loved... friends, colleagues, clients, neighbours, family members, partners or exes." (rapecrisis.org, figures for England and Wales)

When women in England and Wales responded to a survey conducted for the Home Office in 2013, 85,000 women said they had been raped and more than 400,000 reported being "victims of a sexual offence" on average every year for the previous three years. One in five women from the ages of 16 to 59 reported having experienced such crimes during her lifetime.

Farage claims rape is due to "some very big cultural issues", and that is largely true, although it is not due to other people's culture. Clearly rape is part of British culture, and increasingly so. (See The Independent, 10 June 2016 – "22 signs we live in a rape culture".) UK Home Office statistics show that rape and other violent sexual assaults rose sharply since the previous survey. But the authorities do not play a neutral role in relation to this culture. The survey concludes that the percentage of reported sexual offences the police referred for prosecution was lower than any time since the government first began collecting such figures. And of the reduced number of reported cases, only 6 percent of these resulted in convictions.

In fact, as any real analysis reveals, immigrant girls, women and boys are the most likely to be victims of men of all ethnic backgrounds, while the police and other authorities routinely ignore these crimes against them and the poor in general, when not actively covering them up, persecuting victims for reporting them or committing rape and abuse themselves.

It should be pointed out that the UKIP's rival "mainstream" parties, the Conservative Party of Prime Minister David Cameron and the Labour Party now headed by Jeremy Corbyn, have not only governed over this situation but were deeply involved in covering up rape, child abuse and other horrendous acts by white gangs, Asian gangs, police officers, Catholic priests and other religious figures, top BBC entertainers and other powerful celebrities, Members of Parliament and cabinet ministers. (See AWTWNS150316) More and more women have been getting raped and the British state has been an enforcer of this situation no matter which party has been elected. Why would future elections produce different results?

The British ruling class may have divisions about whether or not the UK should leave the European Union, but its leading political representatives are much more united about escaping the exposure of horrors deeply embedded in the society and its most important institutions – such as the systematic degradation of women at the core of British life and culture – and instead counterattacking around one of its favourite issues, the promotion of British chauvinism.