Britain has been “naïve for far too long” about the threat mass migration poses to women and girls, ministers have been warned.
Sir Keir Starmer will fail to halve violence against women and girls unless urgent action is taken, Shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam told the Daily Express.
More than 1,000 cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) have been recorded by hospital bosses in the past 10 years, shocking figures revealed.
All of these “brutal mutilations” have been carried out in the UK.
By contrast, NHS figures show 1,225 women and girls were forced to travel to an East African country for the brutal procedure between April 2023 and March 2024.
In total, some 137,000 people living in the UK are believed to have undergone FGM.
Katie Lam, a rising star with the Conservative Party, slammed the Home Office for failing to “talk honestly” about the crisis, warning it is “as a result of immigration from societies where this is the norm”.
Ms Lam also warned “foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as British citizens”.
Writing for the Daily Express, she declared: “Labour’s aim to halve violence against women and girls in a decade may be a noble ambition but they won’t make much progress if they won’t be honest about the impact of mass migration on women and girls.
“This isn’t just the case with FGM. Foreign nationals are more than three times as likely to be arrested for sexual offences as British citizens. Further comparison with specific nationalities is stark. Afghans, for example, are 20 times more likely to commit sex offences than British nationals.
“We need to be selective when deciding who should be allowed into the UK. Instead, we have been far too naïve for far too long. Thousands of women and girls have suffered as a result. Unless the Government is willing to be honest about this, so will thousands more.”
Research by the Centre for Migration Control suggested foreign nationals were more than three times more likely to be arrested for sex offences than Britons.
The think-tank said foreigners were 3.5 times as likely to be arrested for sex offences as British suspects, based on a rate of nearly 165 arrests per 100,000 of the migrant population against 48 per 100,000 for Britons.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has ordered officials to release detailed breakdowns of offences committed by foreign criminals living in the UK while awaiting deportation. The data is expected to be published by the end of the year.
And Labour has vowed to ban foreign sex offenders from being granted refugee status, paving the way for more people to be deported. It follows the scandal of Clapham chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi being granted asylum despite receiving a suspended sentence in 2018 for sexual assault and exposure.
He went on to throw alkaline into the face of his ex-partner and her two children, leading to a nationwide manhunt before his body was found in the River Thames.
Home Office insiders believe their decision to include all sex offences in the legal changes could lead to immigration judges concluding that perverts sentenced to less than 12 months behind bars should be deported because they are not “conducive to the public good”.
The UK previously only treated an offence which led to a sentence of more than 12 months as a “particularly serious crime”.
