Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has said that women waiting in northern France to board small boats have almost certainly been raped on their journey to the coast, in an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast reported by the Guardian on Sunday evening.
Mahmood made the claim while arguing that criminal gangs, rather than the British state, currently decide who reaches the UK. The argument underpins her case for expanding sponsored safe routes for refugees, a central plank of the government's asylum policy.
"The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers. You can almost guarantee that every woman that's in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey. Some of the men too, they've certainly been abused and threatened."
Mahmood did not set out an evidential basis for the claim in the published accounts of the interview, and no Home Office assessment quantifying the prevalence of sexual violence on routes to northern France has been published. Home Office statistics on the Channel route record the sex, age and nationality of people detected arriving in the UK, not what happened to them before they embarked.
Those statistics also describe a different population from the one Mahmood was discussing. Around 33,000 people were detected arriving by small boat in the year to June 2026, according to a House of Commons Library briefing drawing on Home Office data, of whom roughly 72% were adult men, 13% adult women and 15% children. Mahmood's statement concerned women present in northern France, including those who never cross.
The home secretary also used the interview to play down the prospect of large-scale returns across the Channel, saying the UK was "not in control of this border".
"I'm afraid we don't just get to say, 'France take them back', and they just take them back. That doesn't work. They have to agree to do that."
She said the UK would be "accepting people from all over the world" in "the not too distant future" under a community sponsorship scheme for refugees, one of three sponsorship routes, alongside university and employer schemes, set out in immigration and asylum legislation brought forward this year.
Imran Hussain, executive director of external affairs at the Refugee Council, welcomed the recognition of the scale of sexual violence against refugee women and girls while questioning the closure of safe and legal routes that could protect people from exploitation, according to the Guardian's report.
In the same interview, according to the Guardian, Mahmood said far-right activists wearing balaclavas would "kill" her or "kick me out of my own country" if they took power. The full context of those remarks has not been published.
Mahmood met senior police officers on Thursday 10 September and told them to make full use of their powers, including bans on face coverings, after disruption at ports in Kent and Hampshire by masked anti-migrant protesters. "These scenes have caused disruption for people and, given that people are dressed in black wearing balaclavas, there is a fear factor and obvious malign intent being communicated to our residents," she told the meeting.
The interview comes during a period of sustained pressure on the home secretary over Channel crossings. Some 41,472 people arrived by small boat in 2025, the second-highest annual total since records began, and 781 arrived on 24 September, the busiest single day of 2026 to that point, according to ITV News.
Mahmood, who became home secretary on 5 September 2025, announced an overhaul of the asylum system modelled on Denmark's in November, making refugee status temporary and subject to review every 30 months and extending the wait for permanent settlement to 20 years.
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