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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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The UK Home Office just published a guide for asylum seekers on... how not to rape women.

Some extracts from this 9-page document:

Women can work and earn their own money, study and go to school or university, travel freely, choose who they marry, or choose not to marry, make their own decisions about their lives

Women do not need permission from a husband, father, brother or any other man to do any of these things.

If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape.

Rape is a serious crime in the UK. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim.

You are expected to never try to have sex with someone who is asleep, drunk, or unable to consent clearly

The legal age of consent in the UK is 16. This means that anyone under the age of 16 is considered a child and cannot legally agree to have sex.

What could happen if you do not follow those rules?

Treating someone unfairly because of their gender can have serious consequences. If your behaviour is controlling or threatening, it may also be treated as domestic abuse, which is a crime. You could get into trouble with the police, lose your accommodation and support, and it could affect your asylum claim. There is more information about domestic abuse in the next section.

Domestic abuse is a serious crime in the UK. If you do any of the behaviours in the list, you could be arrested and go to prison, lose your accommodation and support, and it could affect your asylum claim.

It follows several high profile cases in which migrants convicted of sexual offences in the UK claimed in court to not understand the law.

A migrant who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old schoolgirl whilst living at an asylum hotel in Epping was said to have told her that it is normal to marry children “in his country”.

Ethiopian Hadush Kebatu, was sentenced for sexual assault before being deported to Ethiopia.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We expect everyone who comes to the UK to abide by our laws. If they do not, they will face consequences, including the refusal of their asylum claim and removal from the UK.”

Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the booklet saying the government wanted to make UK law "explicitly clear".

Finland has also been offering classes on "how to behave towards women" since... 2016. The fact that a government department, under UK Labour, produced a 9-page guide on these points, in this register, suggests that those migrant crime statistics are not so trivial after all. Incredible.

In a time where even legal immigration has become THE hot button topic for the right and even parts of the left, shouldn't it logically follow that people who treat the law and age of consent as optional are not blending in with the doctors and engineers if you DON'T want to harden public opinion against immigration? It's like they're not even trying.

In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.

by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests.

I think this is a profoundly tasteless context in which to invoke the Holocaust. Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide? Most of the headlines I've seen boil down to "we can't send this man who raped a British woman back to his home country, because he'd be put to death for having committed the same crime over there (which was, in fact, the very thing that prompted him to flee in the first place)".

Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide?

My point is that they should be - that this is what the legal category "asylum seeker" is supposed to be for - and the booklet makes sense in that context. To the extent that the category has been artificially expanded in a way that makes the booklet look weird, it's the expansion that is to blame, not the booklet.