Claims to be checked:
Context: In recent months, several European right-wing and far-right leaders or figures, particularly in Italy and France, have linked the presence of foreign nationals (not synonymous with immigrants), immigration and the incidence of gender-based violence.
“As the foreign component of the population has increased, European societies have not become less safe. On the contrary, overall crime has decreased slightly”, explains an Openpolis analysis of Eurostat data. Yet the argument that immigration increases the insecurity of our societies is a leitmotif that emerges regularly in public debate.
Jérôme Valette is an economist specializing in migration at CEPII (Centre d’études prospectives et d’informations internationales in France). Valette explains to Voxeurop that “given equivalent demographic and socio-economic characteristics, immigrants are no more likely than native-born people to commit a crime.” The contributing factors, on the contrary, are precarity and poverty: “Men, young people and people in precarious situations are often over-represented among immigrants.”
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Eurostat data (graphed here by Openpolis), for example, shows that foreign-born people face a higher risk of poverty in almost all EU countries. Greece, Italy and France rank second, third and fourth respectively.
Migration and gender-based violence: what’s the connection?
Italy
On 25 November 2024, during the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in an interview with Donna Moderna magazine, spoke of an increase in cases of sexual violence committed by immigrants (without citing any data or sources).
A similar position had already been expressed by Italy’s education minister, Giuseppe Valditara. The minister sparked controversy when he made the comments during the inauguration of a foundation dedicated to the memory of Giulia Cecchettin, who was killed by her white Italian ex-partner Filippo Turetta after Cecchettin expressed her desire to end their relationship. “We cannot pretend not to see that the increase in the phenomena of sexual violence is also linked to forms of marginality and deviance that descend in some way from illegal immigration,” Valditara said in a video message, in which he also explained that patriarchy ended in Italy with the reform of family law in 1975.
France
In France, this idea has taken the media spotlight in recent years, thanks to several factors that combine to exacerbate the polarization of public debate, and the normalization of a discourse promulgated by identitarian and reactionary movements. Among the possible explanations are the strong electoral advances of the far right, equally strong media coverage of debates on migration, and the influence of the Bolloré group, whose radio, press, and television empire gives ample space to the far right.
Prominent among all three of these is Alice Cordier and the “Nemesis Collective”. The French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau even expressed his admiration for the collective last January.
The “Nemesis Collective” is a French far-right and identitarian group that calls itself “feminist.” Created in 2019, it has gained increasing space in the media in recent years. Some members of the group have been candidates or activists for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (RN, far right). Others have been close to neo-Nazi or reactionary Catholic groups, as has been widely documented. Members of the collective range from 18 to 35 years of age. Alice Cordier (born Alice Kerviel) was born in 1997.
Cordier is a former member of Action Francaise (which began as anti-Dreyfusard movement in the late 19th century) and trained at the private Institut de formation politique (IFP). Several media outlets have investigated this institute’s connections with Manif pour Tous (a movement created to oppose same-sex marriage), reactionary Catholicism, and right-wing activism.
Cordier’s pitch is simple: there is a need for “identitarian feminism”, as they call it, or “right-wing feminism”, because feminism is mainly composed of “far-left feminists” who deny what Nemesis see as an essential issue in the struggle to defend women against sexist and sexual violence: “predatory rape”, i.e., violence against women that occurs in public spaces.
In May 2024, far-right MEP Marion Maréchal asserted that “77 percent of rapes on the streets of Paris were committed by foreigners.”
The choice to focus on this specific problem – a tiny scrap of the big picture – is an “intelligent” strategy for the far right. It allows them to ride the wave of feminism by pointing to a genuine problem – sexual violence – and then extrapolating data that serves to support a racist thesis.
Moreover, this position implicitly negates a more fundamental fact: the majority of violence against women occurs in family and social settings, and in most cases, is perpetrated by people close to the victims. The argument is fallacious by its very structure: if the concern was really women’s safety, the argument would go to the root of the problem, which is male structural violence, which has no color.
“The idea that foreigners constitute a risk to public decency, penetrating the nation’s territory in order to penetrate women’s bodies, is an old one. It is used by the far right to justify migration policies based on rejection and stigmatization,” says Anne Bouillon, a French lawyer who has more than 20 years of experience defending victims of domestic and sexual violence, and is the author of Affaires de femmes. Une vie à plaider pour elles (“Women’s businesses. A life spent advocating for them”, L’Iconoclaste, 2024).
Is there a relationship between immigration and sexual violence? “If we look at the overrepresentation of foreigners in crime statistics, we see that they account for 17 percent of suspects, even though they are only 8 percent of the population; if we focus on sexual violence, this figure drops to 12 percent,” says Jerome Vallette. The economist also wonders if this “could be due, for example, to the fact that migration flows include a higher percentage of men, and sexual violence is committed mostly by men”.
“My experience as a lawyer indicates that violence against women comes from all social classes. The common denominator among the women, regardless of their origin, religion, social class, profession or age, is that they experience violence from men. And the perpetrators are indiscriminate, from every origin, religion, social class and age group,” Bouillon concludes.
What does the data say?
The claims cited above are contradicted or complicated by data, as journalists and researchers have shown.
The statistics service of the French Ministry of the Interior provides data for 2022. The figures indicate that 87 percent of those accused of rape outside the family framework were French nationals. This data is not fully representative of the reality, since the complaint can occur long after the incident. Marion Maréchal Le Pen’s figure is based on a total of 97 sexual assaults, a drop in the ocean of violence suffered by women in France, and a tiny fraction of the total committed in Paris (Arte debunk the assertion here).
In Italy, according to the most recent ISTAT data (2022), 5,775 people were reported or arrested on charges of sexual violence. The latter category includes crimes ranging from harassment to rape. Of those reported, arrested or charged, 3,340 were Italian, and 2,435 were foreigners: 57.8 percent versus 42.2 percent. The latter represent 8.9 percent of Italy’s population.
Compared to the French data, the Italian data is lacking, since It only covers complaints filed with law enforcement agencies, and not all violence committed. Moreover, the complaints concern a very broad range of crimes (from harassment to rape). As ISTAT has explained several times, only a small minority of women in Italy report violent incidents to law enforcement (16 percent, according to 2014 data). Thus, the data is not representative. In addition, the data does not distinguish whether the perpetrators are documented or undocumented immigrants.
More up-to-date and detailed information is provided by reports published by associations involved in combating gender-based violence. According to the latest data, covering 2023, 74 percent of the perpetrators of violence reported to these centers are Italian, and the remaining 26 percent are foreign nationals. As confirmed by ISTAT data with respect to gender-based homicides (2023), in 74.2 percent of cases this violence is carried out by a man in an intimate relationship with the woman (a partner or ex-partner). Adding the percentage of cases in which the perpetrator is a family member, we reach 84 percent of the total.
“Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara mentioned ‘incontrovertible data’. The first problem with this is that there are no official databases where you can find unbundled data on gender-based violence”, says journalist and writer Donata Columbro, author of Quando i dati discriminano. Bias e pregiudizi in grafici, statistiche e algoritmi (”When data discriminates: Bias and prejudice in graphs, statistics and algorithms”, Il Margine, 2024). For example, it is not possible to find out how many crimes are committed by regular immigrants, and how many are committed by irregular immigrants. Yet Valditara refers to ‘irregular immigrants’, without citing a source for the data on which his claims are based”.
“In the ISTAT data it is clear that the majority of perpetrators of crimes connected to sexual violence are Italian, but it also has to be said that the figure is probably underestimated. We know that in cases of rape, incidents are reported more frequently if the perpetrator is a stranger, while violence committed by family members or partners remains unreported. In fact, the latter violence must first be recognized as such by women who are in an abusive relationship, and usually this happens at the end of a long journey that only in some cases leads to reporting. This is what emerged from the 2006 and 2014 ISTAT studies. In most cases, violence occurs in the domestic sphere, and the perpetrator is not a stranger,” Columbro concludes.