The Race Equality Foundation welcomes the publication of the Women and Equalities Committee report ‘Discrimination, harassment, and abuse against Muslim women’. The report provides powerful evidence of how Muslim women face a “double bind” of racism and misogyny, particularly in public spaces and when accessing services. The report documents not only the harms endured but also the continued failure of institutions to respond effectively.
The Foundation’s work in response to the racist riots of 2024 reinforces the issues now being highlighted by the Committee. As we heard during our national webinar series with over 400 participants and 21 expert speakers, Islamophobia was both a cause and a consequence of the riots, weaponised through narratives that painted Muslim men as threats and, used the language of “protecting our women” to justify racialised violence.
As our report illustrated, rather than stemming from concern for women’s safety, many of those promoting this so-called defence of white womanhood were themselves known perpetrators of misogyny and domestic abuse. One speaker rightly observed that such individuals uphold “patriarchal notions of the family and have never campaigned to end violence against women and girls.” The narratives driving the racist riots in 2024 served to mask racist intent while reinforcing systems of control over women and racialised communities, including Muslim women and other racialised minorities.
We must not allow this weaponisation of gender to go unchallenged. The violence of 2024 revealed how deeply entwined racialised and gendered harms are. Institutions too have failed to protect those most affected. Muslim women and other racialised minorities continue to bear the brunt of this failure, and as the Committee’s report shows, they are subject to unique and persistent abuse.
Yet, as the Committee’s report rightly notes, these harms are compounded by the Government’s continued failure to agree a working definition of Islamophobia. A failure that undermines the ability of statutory agencies and civil society to take coordinated and effective action against anti-Muslim hate.
Our report in 2024 called for urgent policy action; urgency now reinforced by the Committee’s evidence: to adopt a public health approach to violence prevention that explicitly addresses racialised and gendered harms; to develop national and local frameworks that coordinate prevention and response; and to ensure that those most affected are central to policy and practice.
We echo the Committee’s call for change. But we insist that change must start with listening to, and acting alongside, Muslim women and other racialised minorities, whose safety has too long been treated as an afterthought.
