You're not protecting women and children with violent protests

The protests at Citywest after the alleged assault of a young girl. Picture Colin Keegan/Collins

On October 20, there was an alleged sexual assault on a 10-year-old girl on the grounds of the Citywest Hotel in Dublin. A 26-year-old man has been charged in relation to the incident, and the judicial process is underway.   

Violent protests spewing anti-migrant hatred have followed quickly, drawing crowds of more than 2,000, four times the number counted at the Dublin riots of 2023. 

On Tuesday night, a Garda van was set alight and gardaí were attacked while the crowd reportedly chanted threats to burn down the hotel. 

This issue has already being turned into one of migration by TDs Carol Nolan (who called for the mass deportation of "violent" asylum seekers), Ken O’Flynn (who suggested we needed "proper vetting of immigrants" to keep our communities safe) and others, fuelling the discourse foreigners routinely face online, and on the streets. 

When it becomes routine to connect migration with sexual crimes, any incident is a potential tinder box.

The recent spate of anti-migrant violence in this country is largely couched in claims of protecting Irish women and children. An unprovoked attack on a Moroccan man by a gang of youths in south Dublin on October 2 was accompanied by slurs of ‘ Go back to your country’, ‘rapist’. 

The recent spate of anti-migrant violence in this country is largely couched in claims of protecting Irish women and children. Picture: Leah Farrell /  RollingNews.ie

In the serious assault on an Indian national in Tallaght on July 19, there was a false claim of paedophilia. When a protest against racist violence was organised a few days later, there was an anti-migrant demonstration at the same time. 

Members of this anti-migrant protest had posters of Ashling Murphy, for whose murder in 2022 Slovak national Jozef Puska was convicted. Conor McGregor, who has been found liable in a civil court for the sexual assault of Nikita Hand, regularly uses the trope of Irish women and children needing saving from foreigners. 

Groups of concerned mothers with prams have been front and centre of the many ‘Says No’ protests across the country. Former leader of the Irish Freedom Party Hermann Kelly even describes these groups in military terms when he celebrates the work of the ‘Mná na hÉireann Buggy Brigade’. The figure of their hate is the ‘unvetted migrant’ whose deviant sexuality, they say, makes him a constant threat.

But for the people making these claims, violence inflicted on white, or non-white women by white men, is no cause for rioting. 

There was no outcry about the deaths of Mongolian national Urantsetseg Tserendorj, killed by a white Irish teenager in an unprovoked attack in Dublin in 2021, or Jastine Valdez, a Filipina woman abducted in broad daylight and murdered by a white Irish man while walking to her family home in Bray in 2018. 

There were no protests following the sentencing on October 20 of a 22-year-old white Irish man who was found guilty of stabbing his ex-girlfriend Niamh Kelly 50 times in a brutal attack that has left her with lifechanging injuries. 

Urantsetseg Tserendorj was murdered by a white Irish teenager.

TD Ruth Coppinger has shared a statement by ROSA issued in response to the Citywest protests that underlines these disparities of response: “Dozens of cases of gender violence went through the courts yesterday and there were no protests called by the macho ‘protectors of women and children’ who only care if the perpetrator can be xenophobically ‘othered’."

Harming racialised foreigners by framing them as predators of white women and children is a common trope in Europe and the United States. 

Mathilda Åkerlund, a media studies researcher at the University of Gothenburg, shows how campaigns to promote Swedish national homogeneity, Islamophobia, and accusations of immigrant-perpetrated rape have gone hand-in-hand. 

In these campaigns, white Swedish women and children have been cast as ideal victims, and white Swedish men enjoy the licence to be simultaneously violent and protective. Such framing has important consequences: there is the ‘strategic erasure’ of sexual harm caused by white men, and the apparent lack of agency of both white women and children.   

There were no protests following the sentencing on October 20 of a 22-year-old white Irish man who was found guilty of stabbing his ex-girlfriend Niamh Kelly 50 times in a brutal attack that has left her with lifechanging injuries. Picture: Collins Courts

Criminologist Aisha K Gill shows how the UK has been beset by a moral panic concerning South Asian men grooming white girls for sexual exploitation. Over-reporting individual instances of sexual crime by foreigners or Muslims serves as a distraction from the fact the consistently largest group that perpetrates child sexual abuse is white British men. 

In June, when two Romanian-speaking teenagers were charged with attempted rape in Ballymena, there were anti-foreigner riots and violence for over a week. 

A disturbing report published by The Detail, based on police records obtained through a freedom of information request, found about half of the rioters arrested had domestic abuse complaints filed against them. 

Rachel Smilan-Goldstein, who studies voting behaviour at Stanford University, demonstrates how the trope of Latin-American men as abusers shapes views on immigration in the US only when white women are victims, as against any other race. 

Neither is this phenomenon new: in Mothers of Massive Resistance: The politics of white supremacy, historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae shows how "white motherhood" has been an active programme of resisting racial integration in the US over time, exemplified by the justification of segregation as essential for the protection of white children.

These examples illustrate how racism and misogyny intersect to produce ideal victims (the white mother, the white child) and ideal perpetrators (the predatory migrant man). Under this framework, violence committed by white men is minimised and attacks on non-white women and children go unnoticed. 

Further, when framed as the targets of migrant men, white women and children may be seen as justified in enacting racial violence themselves.

The widespread and continuous assaults on non-white people in Ireland are predominantly committed by youths. Children under Irish criminal law enjoy immunity unless they are cases of murder, manslaughter, rape or aggravated sexual assault. 

For juvenile offenders, the Children Act 2001 embraces youth diversion away from detention or penalisation. In the development of Ireland’s Youth Justice Strategy, there has been no consideration of race at any stage of the criminal justice process, and it is only recently the strategy recognised Irish Travellers as a vulnerable ethnic group. 

In first-hand accounts, youth perpetrators have been found mocking victims, saying ‘what will you do?’. Despite there being data and studies on racial disparity in reporting, leniency and sentencing in countries like the US and UK that reveal white youths to be found more ‘redeemable’, Ireland simply ignored race as a factor worth considering.

The strategy of weaponising violence against women and children in propagating white supremacist ideology is a worldwide concern, which has assumed a distinctly Irish flavour. Writing for the Guardian, Amelia Gentleman explores the trope of defenceless women and children, tracking its usage in the racialised political rhetoric of Nigel Farage in the UK, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Transatlantic online platforms play a key role. 

Aoife Gallagher, who studies the spread of extremism at the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, charts how Donald Trump’s presidency was constructed on 4Chan, QAnon as a reckoning to wage war against "child trafficking, paedophilia, and the satanic ritual abuse of children". 

While memes of Hillary Clinton torturing babies spread in the US, the weaponisation of babies in Ireland was done within the abortion debate through the Irish Freedom Party, figures such as Rowan Croft, and sites such as the Gript, the Burkean and the Liberal. Hermann Kelly declared in an interview that Irish kids are being killed and replaced by "every nationality that wants to come into our country". 

This framing of Irish children being replaced by non-white children reflects the ‘Plantation’ narrative; an Irish brand of the ‘great replacement theory’ that misappropriates Ireland’s colonial history and ties reproductive rights to migration. The theory blames, in part, the legalisation of abortion for declining birth rates among Irish women. 

If one looks at the social media platforms of Aisling Considine, the deputy leader of Aontú, calls for restricted migration, women’s rights (except in relation to choice or surrogacy), and protection of children feature in quick succession.  

Independent councillors Malachy Steenson and Tom McDonnell are simultaneously ‘pro-life’ and anti-immigration. 
Narratives that underpin racial hate by scapegoating foreign men only serve to continue the historical gender relations in Irish society that have shamed and abused women. When patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny are racialised, we all lose.

• Suryapratim Roy is assistant professor, School of Law, Trinity College Dublin; 
• Claire Walsh is curator, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh; 
• Rahul Sambaraju is visiting researcher, School of Psychology, University of Edinburgh.