by Imogen Garfinkel, Daily Mail
Nearly all women who attempt to reach the UK in small boats from northern France are raped on their journey, according to the home secretary.
In an interview with The Rest Is Politics podcast, Shabana Mahmood said sexual abusers would exploit most asylum seekers as long as traffickers continued to decide who came to Britain.
She said: ‘We’re not in control of this border. The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers.
‘You can almost guarantee that every woman that’s in the north of France has probably been raped along the journey.
‘Some of the men too, they’ve certainly been abused and threatened. That is not the model that should decide whether somebody gets to come to the UK, make this their place of sanctuary and ultimately become one of us.’
About 300 anti-migrant protesters clashed with police on Sunday after dozens of migrants arrived at a historic naval port via small boat using a ‘new route’ to evade detection.
Flares were set off during the stand-off at a marina in Gosport that lasted into the early hours of Monday morning.
The Home Office confirmed that 149 migrants were picked up in a mid-Channel rescue operation by the RNLI alongside a French coastguard vessel.