How Europe’s Far-Right Turns Gender- based Violence into Anti-Migrant Propaganda

From the Ballot Box to the Street: Women’s Safety as a Political Weapon

Last year, Catherine Connolly was inaugurated as the 10th President of Ireland. Her campaign, against fellow female running mate Heather Humphreys, placed compassion and solidarity at top of the priority list. Her landslide victory was deemed remarkably historical. Yet, support for Connolly was not the only narrative expressed by electoral tendencies on October 24th. This election produced a record number of spoiled votes, with close to 13% of total ballots deemed invalid; in comparison to 2018 where 1.2% the total vote was spoiled. Ballots were instead marked with emotionally charged statements expressing fear for children’s safety and invoking nationalist slogans. Some referenced recent reports of a serious alleged assault involving a child in Saggart shortly before the election. Others referred to the killing of Ashling Murphy in 2022. Across these statements, women and children were framed as the primary victims, while responsibility was often implicitly projected onto foreign men. This response reflects a broader narrative that the safety of women and children in contemporary Ireland is under threat. However, concerns about women’s safety are not new. Ireland has a long history of failing to protect women, from the institutional harms associated with Mother and Baby Homes to the mistreatment of women campaigning for suffrage in the twentieth century. More recently, survivors of state-affiliated abuse have continued to face barriers to recognition and redress, as highlighted by campaigners such as Louise O’Keeffe. Concerns for women’s safety are increasingly co-opted as an insincere narrative of right-wing political groups and supporters. This is operationally elucidated by protests in Saggart, and the November riots in 2023. What was branded as peaceful protests revealed an opportunity to wreak destruction across Dublin communities, in the name of protecting women and children. This is not just an Irish story, but a pan-European one. At a London rally, Tommy Robinson emotes ‘’our women, our daughters are scared..’’, with other political figures such as Nigel Farage, Trump, and Orban domestically following suit. This article undercovers the paradoxical truth behind this narrative – best described by Sara Farris’ neologism – femonationalism.

The Protection Rhetoric: How the Far-Right Frames Women

The history of weaponising women and children’s rights for political gain is not a new strategy. The colonial trope of ‘’saving’’ women and children is based on the premise of basic societal fears around the welfare of those deemed ‘’most vulnerable’’. Yet, this view is intrinsically linked to extreme right-wing ideologies propagating traditional, patriarchal views of women’s role in society. Popular among these views is the Great Replacement Theory – the call for white women to have more white babies – producing a white supremacist faction of right-wing feminism. The weaponisation of women’s safety relies on a carefully curated moral panic. It is a narrative that depends on selective empathy, restricting womanhood to a narrow, racialised – white, native, and compliant – that reflects values of the ‘Republic’. The structural deceit at the heart of the protection narrative reflects the essentialist idea around women as the symbolic ‘’ bearers and reproducers of culture,’’ exclusively assimilated to Western values of care. 

Whose Safety? The Selective Concern for Women and Children

There is a deep hypocrisy fissuring the protection narrative. Often, violent outbursts are directed at the very same groups they aspire to protect – migrant women and children, alongside men. Take, for instance, the experience of Anupa Achuthan, an Indian nurse who has lived and worked in Ireland for nearly a decade. When her six-year-old Irish-born daughter was punched, hit with a bicycle wheel, and called a racial slurs, her attempts to speak publicly about the attack were met with thousands of online comments accusing her of lying and demanding she “go back to her country”. Those who claim to care about women and children were nowhere to be seen. As Achuthan noted, “It’s a lie, especially when women and children from immigrant communities are being attacked.” It is not a model of protection, but boundary policing: deciding whose pain counts as national pain.

The Real Geography of Gender-based Violence

The protection narrative collapses under the most basic of empirical scrutiny. For example, more than 100 women’s rights organisations warned that far-right actors are weaponising violence against women and girls to push racist, anti-migrant agendas. Thus, protection in public is used as a route to locating moral legitimacy in xenophobia. The paradoxical reality is that the call is coming from inside the house. In the UK, one woman is murdered every four days by a partner or ex-partner. Almost one in three women experience domestic abuse and sexual violence in their lifetime; circa 90% of those raped or sexually assaulted in the UK know the perpetrator prior to the assault. Thus, the inexcusably racist narrative has a core conceptual flaw; more than 40% of the 899 people arrested in the UK’s anti-immigration riots this year had previous convictions for domestic abuse. 

Safety is not a Selective Slogan

Across Ireland and Europe, appeals to women’s safety have become a powerful political currency traded in bad faith. It is not a commitment to women’s autonomy or protection, but a strategic effort to racialise harm through corrupting feminist ideology beyond its means. Femonationalism operates by transforming women’s rights into a civilisational boundary: a line that separates those deemed worthy of protection from those cast as permanent threats. However, the danger of this narrative is the burial of responsibility for the real issue at hand: by framing Gender-based violence as an imported problem, attention is diverted away from the structures and relationships in which violence most commonly occurs; within homes, institutions, and communities that are already familiar. Women’s safety cannot be secured through scapegoating, surveillance, or the policing of cultural conformity. Nor can it be achieved by deciding which women deserve protection and which must first prove their assimilation. When safety is reduced to a nationalist slogan, it ceases to function as protection and becomes instead a tool of social control. Real safety cannot afford to look through racialised eyes, anything less is not protection, but political masquerading as care.

Louise Sharkey is an undergraduate student in Law and Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. She is passionate about amplifying student voices and engaging with the global issues shaping her generation, particularly human rights, social justice, climate justice, inequality, and migration. Louise is especially interested in the power of journalism, activism, and storytelling to spark informed and meaningful conversation.