Shabana Mahmood, the UK Home Secretary, said on 4 October 2026 that nearly every woman waiting in northern France for a small boat to Britain has probably been raped on the way.Â
Her words have since spread across social media, and many posts claim she said something she did not.
She spoke on The Rest Is Politics podcast with former minister Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, a former adviser to Tony Blair. Her point was about who controls the journey. “We’re not in control of this border,” she said. In her account, criminal gangs, who also traffic people, decide who reaches the French coast and who gets on a dinghy.
Then she said: “You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey.” She added that some men have also been “abused and threatened.” Her conclusion was that gangs should not decide who may come to the UK and “make this their place of sanctuary.”
So Mahmood was describing what happens to women in the hands of smugglers. She did not name who commits the rapes, and she gave no figure or study. She also said “probably,” a word the Daily Mail headline dropped when it wrote that nearly all women “are raped.”
Nigerians know this pattern. Women lured abroad with promises of work often end up in debt to the people who moved them, with no power to refuse.
Online, many X users used her remarks to attack male migrants as rapists. Others on Reddit argued that traffickers, not fellow travelers, are the main abusers. The reports contain no evidence to settle that argument.
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Imran Hussain of the Refugee Council welcomed her admission but questioned the government’s choices. “Protecting women means more safe routes, not fewer,” he said. He noted that the government closed family reunification last year, a safe route that primarily benefits women and children. The government announced new routes last week for Afghan women and Palestinians, but he said they cover only a few hundred people.
The remarks came as tension rose on England’s south coast. On Sunday 4 October, about 300 anti-migrant protesters clashed with police in Gosport, Hampshire, after the RNLI and a French coastguard vessel brought in 149 migrants from the Channel. Two people died trying to cross this week, and three died on 28 September, one of them a child.
