How the ruling class racialised sexual violence

An 1857 cartoon calling for revenge for the Indian mutiny—murder was justified as a way of defending white women

The far right seeks to ­tarnish Muslims, refugees and migrants with accusations of ­paedophilia and rape.

Their claims have been backed up by a ­barrage of stories in the press and the “concern” of Labour politicians.

Accusations of sexual violence have been levelled at racialised groups for ­hundreds of years. Manufactured panics about the threat posed by refugees and migrants have nothing to do with ­protecting women. They drive racist violence and detract from an understanding of where sexism really comes from.

They are rooted in ­slavery, colonialism and racism.

The British ruling class ­justified their role in the slave trade with the idea that black people were less than human. They hid their open looting behind claims that they were spreading “civilisation” to the heathen barbarians.

British colonialists ­attributed an uncontrolled, animal-like sexuality to those they wanted to ­dehumanise. They identified black and brown men as a threat to the virtue of white women.

When colonised peoples came to Britain, these racist tropes could be stirred up by a ruling class intent on ­deflecting blame for poverty, disease and overcrowded slums from ­themselves towards foreigners.

There were no restrictions on migration into Britain during the 19th century. In the 1840s, famine forced thousands of starving Irish people to seek refuge in Britain.

Desperate refugees were “a ready-made scapegoat” for the miseries of life in the slums of London, Manchester and Liverpool. Disgusting racist tropes developed. The Irish were accused of being drunk, of ­carrying sexual and other diseases and of spreading prostitution.

The Spectator magazine claimed that Irish migrants “were barely civilised beings” who were “far nearer to savages than to any other white men”.

The words led to deeds. There were violent attacks on the boarding houses where Irish people lived.

The Irish were portrayed as a distinct race. Cartoons in magazines such as Punch showed Irish men as bestial, ape-like, degenerates who were innately criminal.

The racialisation of Irish people interacted with prejudice against the Catholic religion. Catholicism was seen as a “backward” religion and associated with sexual degeneracy. Historically, the word ­pervert referred a protestant who converted to Catholicism. In the mid-19th century, accusations of sexual criminality against priests and nuns were so widespread that the word became associated with sexual crimes.

There was a concerted ­campaign to associate Catholicism with the Hindu religion. The term Juggernaut was derived from the Jaganath Temple where erotic carvings supposedly demonstrated the pagan cruelty of Hinduism. In the 1850s, commentators denounced the “Juggernaut of Popery”.

In 1857 Indian soldiers led a wide-scale rebellion against the East India Company, Britain’s hated tool of colonial conquest.

A massacre of 200 British women and children at Kanpur sparked a campaign in the press that reached fever pitch with stories of hideous atrocities. Images of delicate British women defiled by “savage barbarians” were amplified through newspaper accounts, parliamentary debates, ­paintings and novels.

A letter to the Times newspaper reported that “our ladies have been dragged naked through the streets by the rabble of Delhi. Their daughters have been cut into snippets and sold ­piecemeal about the bazaar”.

Thousands of Indian men, women and children were murdered as part of the British response. The horrific cruelty was justified as vengeance for the defilement of British women.

Historian Vron Ware writes, “Colonised people were to be punished and to pay for their revolt against colonial rule, but the severity of the punishment was given the appearance of legitimacy by being carried out in the name of avenging the womenfolk.”

Some 40 years later, the accusations levelled at the Irish and Hindus were revived to ­criminalise Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitic pogroms.

Antisemites popularised the idea that Jewish refugees were implicated in the “white slave trade”. Lurid stories of young women being kidnapped by Jewish gangs and sold into sexual slavery generated a moral panic.

The hundreds of thousands of very young sex workers raped and exploited by British aristocrats every year excited no such interest.

Politicians and the press linked Jews with immoral behaviour and degeneracy. In 1905 the Aliens Act became Britain’s first piece of ­anti-migration legislation. It aimed to stop poor, destitute or “undesirable” migrants from entering Britain. Violence broke out. In 1911 there was a week-long riot in Wales against the local Jewish community.

The same antisemitic lies about Jewish refugees and white slavery were spreading in the United States. Ernest Bell’s 1910 book, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, sold 400,000 copies. It claimed, “It is an absolute fact that corrupt Jews are now the backbone of the loathsome ­traffic in New York and Chicago”.

The panic led to the passing of the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. The act made it a felony to transport women over state borders for “immoral purpose”. The act claimed to target forced prostitution, but it was used to criminalise racial mixing and consensual relationships ­outside of marriage.

These antisemitic tropes were regurgitated in the Nazi propaganda of the 1930s. Sexuality was crucial to the Nazis’ racial ideology. It helped maintain their vile idea of racial purity and dehumanise Jewish men. Nazi Julius Streicher’s ­newspaper Der Sturmer constantly published images of figures identified as Jewish, showing them as the defilers of young Aryan women.

In the US South, racist terror against black communities was justified by the creation of the myth of the black male rapist. All black men were seen as a threat to white women.

In the years after the American Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan terrorised black people. Some 10,000 black men were lynched in the Southern States between the 1880s and the 1940s. Thousands of people turned out to watch lynchings. Photographs of dead black men were turned into postcards.

Sexual threat was also ­mobilised to buttress the British Empire in the 20th century. In Kenya and Southern Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe—citizens’ militias were created in 1920s and 1930s. They were supposedly there to protect white women from being raped by black men.

These clampdowns were not prompted by concerns about actual sexual violence. As ­historian Ann Stoler observes, rape accusations in South Africa coincided with a rash of strikes between 1880-1914 by African and white miners. In Rhodesia, rape fears were stoked after a strike by white rail workers. The idea that black men ­represented a distinct threat towards white women was used to bond colonialists together and rupture any potential solidarity between white and black workers.

Racist slurs against black men resurfaced when migrants from the British Empire were invited to work in Britain after the First World War.

Black people faced ­discrimination in every aspect of their lives. Signs on ­boarding houses declared, “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish”. But it was the question of interracial ­relationships that stoked some of the most racist hostility. Racist riots in Nottingham and in Notting Hill in London in 1958 were sparked by confrontations involving black men and their white partners.

Today it is Muslim refugees and migrants who are seen as innately violent and denounced as “savages”, “monsters”, “fiends” and “beasts”.

The right weaponises people’s real fears about sexual violence. It spreads racist myths that violence against women and girls is a product of backwards cultures.

Blaming racialised groups obscures the reality of sexual violence—that it exists ­throughout society and is more often than not perpetrated by people known to the victim. It turns people’s attention away from understanding the real causes of sexism.

Capitalism breeds ­imperialism and racism. But it also breeds resistance. Irish migrants joined the Chartist Movement for democracy in the 1840s. British radicals stood in solidarity with the Irish struggle for freedom. Some stood with the Indian rebels. Many socialists welcomed Jewish refugees into their organisations and fought ­alongside them in the labour struggles of London and New York in the early 20th century.

The Communist Party in the US launched mass campaigns to defend black men from spurious charges of rape, the most significant being the campaign to free the Scottsboro Nine in 1931.

It rightly argued that the ­weaponisation of rape was a means of ­undermining united resistance to the system. We can build a movement that stands with women against sexual violence and opposes far right attempts to harness outrage at sexism for a racist agenda.