When will politicans speak up for us?
I was on my way to the car wash with my one-year-old when I realised I was being followed by two men.
Getting unwanted attention from creeps and fearing for your safety is, unfortunately, part and parcel of being a woman. I had a particularly terrifying experience at university, walking through the unlit streets of Selly Oak in Birmingham, with an oaf bounding after me, shouting unintelligibly. He eventually caught up, and I squared him, afraid that he would stab me from behind or worse.
“I just wanted to see what you looked like from the front because I was impressed with what I saw from behind.”
I hated myself for saying the phrase “I have a boyfriend,” but I was afraid for my life. The oaf reassured me he “wouldn’t want to get in the way of that” before leaving me to gather my wits and head for the safety of my student accommodation.
This time around, things were different. The two middle-aged white men following me to the car wash were motivated by racial hostility. “Get the p***s out!” they shouted, in broad daylight on a busy main street in Hounslow, West London.
Panic flooded through me. The rest of their words were drowned out. Do I turn around and confront them? A memory surfaced of being almost hit by a male passenger’s crutch on the bus when I called him out, eight months pregnant, for his misogynistic comments to another passenger. My protective maternal instinct kicked in, and I decided against it. As I ignored the two men, I spotted an elderly South Asian woman posting a letter in a nearby postbox. She slowed down when she saw them, then stopped, watching frozen. We exchanged a grim look. Helplessness. Fear. Humiliation, as the world carried on.
It wasn’t just their words that haunted me, but the way life carried on around us as if nothing had happened. In a chilling pattern across Britain, it now feels like the norm for brown women to be targeted. If my baby and I had been attacked, I feel there wouldn't have been much fuss.
Senior political figures have been silent about the rise in attacks on South Asian women. A 32-year-old has been arrested in connection with a racially aggravated rape in the Park Hall area of Walsall. A 49-year-old man and a 65-year-old woman were charged with two counts of rape in Oldbury, in September, and Halesowen, West Midlands, earlier this month, including an attack on a Sikh woman in her 20s and a separate attack which is not being treated as racially aggravated.
The recent assault on a six-year-old Indian-origin girl in Waterford, Ireland — where the child was reportedly punched and racially abused — mirrors a broader surge in anti-South Asian sentiment seen across the UK.
“[White men] raped our women 300 years ago when they pillaged our resources to build Britain after two world wars, and now they are doing the same thing because they can’t stand immigrants, even though this country would collapse without us,” says Sukhvinder Kaur, Chair of Sikh Women’s Aid, in a statement. “We are on the cliff edge of anarchy right now as a society, which is what happens when communities start turning on each other.”
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Sikh Women’s Aid have been inundated by calls from girls and women who are afraid to go outside following the spate of recent attacks, some as young as 16. Single mothers who don’t drive are requesting money for taxi fares to drop their children off at school.
The responsibility for these attacks doesn’t lie with white men or just one group of people. It's the systems that enable these incidents that require further scrutiny. Why haven’t our news and media outlets given these horrific attacks the same coverage as the far-right riots? Where is the support of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who feels compelled to “do everything” to overturn a ban on football hooligans but has so far been silent about South Asian women getting raped in public parks?
We are being drip-fed racism, and brown women are paying the price despite Labour’s pledge to halve violence against women. It's politicians like Nigel Farage, who once described immigrants as coming from cultures that are “alien” to British people, and Starmer, who echoed Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech— that infamously emboldened the far right — who are responsible for dehumanising immigrants to such an extent that brown women are bearing the brunt.
The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has appealed for anyone with information about the “horrific attack” in Walsall to come forward, but it isn’t enough. We need to have honest, uncomfortable conversations about how immigrants are routinely demonised by politicians whose divisive rhetoric doesn’t just poison public debate but emboldens hatred, fuels violence and has devastating consequences for South Asian women.
We refuse to stay silent.
Gender-based violence is not inevitable.
