SARAH VINE: To even write this feels taboo. But we need to talk about how so many Western women are being sexually assaulted and murdered by migrants from misogynist cultures

Published: 01:00, 4 August 2026 | Updated: 01:29, 4 August 2026 There is a grim familiarity to the tragic deaths of two women in the news this week. Both young, beautiful and by all accounts kind, trusting souls, they were sympathetic to migrants and only had the best intentions towards them. One was American, Jamey Carney, 43, who had resettled in her ancestral home of Killarney, Ireland. Soon after, she inherited over €400,000 from her father and then fell in love with a Jordanian man 15 years her junior, whom she met at a pro-Palestinian protest. They got engaged, but on July 7 her daughter Michaela – aged just 13 – found her mother dead in her bedroom. She had been suffocated. Irish detectives identified her fiancé, Ahmad Al Seqar, as a person of interest – but discovered he had fled to Jordan, where he is currently under arrest. He has not yet been formally charged, but the authorities have requested he be returned to Ireland to face a potential murder charge. The second victim, 38-year-old Elisabeth-Jane Ross, was a committed Christian who had been volunteering for some years at a charity in Athens which specialises in providing medical assistance to refugees, particularly those from the Middle East. Her alleged killer, a 26-year-old Afghan man whom she is said to have met through her work in Athens, has admitted putting her body in a suitcase and dumping it in an abandoned car park. Her remains were discovered by a homeless man. The alleged killer then went on to withdraw money using her bank cards and sent texts from her phone and posted on her Facebook page to give the impression she was still alive. He remains in custody. Clearly, we will have to wait until these cases come to trial to know the full extent of what actually happened and whether either of these two men were responsible for the women’s deaths. Elisabeth-Jane Ross was allegedly murdered by a 26-year-old Afghan man whom she is said to have met through her volunteering work in Athens  Ahmad Al Seqar fled to Jordan after 43-year-old American, Jamey Carney was found dead in her home But these tragedies bring to mind the case of Rhiannon Skye White, a 27-year-old mother, who in 2024 was brutally murdered by a Sudanese national housed at the hotel in Walsall where she worked. She suffered 23 puncture wounds, 19 of them to the head, inflicted with a screwdriver. Afterwards, her killer bought beer, returned to the hotel – and was captured on CCTV dancing and laughing in the hotel car park. Sentencing her killer, Deng Chol Majek, to life with a minimum term of 29 years, the judge, Mr Justice Soole, said there was ‘no explanation’ for why Majek had murdered ‘a member of the hotel staff who together with her colleagues had been serving and helping you’. Needless to say, vile men who hurt women, especially when they don’t get their way, are by no means restricted to arrivals from other countries. One thinks of the recent case of triple killer Kyle Clifford, a former soldier, who murdered his girlfriend Louise Hunt, 25, after she ended their 18-month relationship. Louise was the daughter of the racing commentator John Hunt. Clifford also killed Louise’s mother Carole in the attack, stabbing her with a knife, before he used a crossbow to shoot dead Louise and her elder sister Hannah. There are many others, too many. But still, there is something about the recent influx of thousands of young men from very different social and cultural backgrounds (approximately 70 per cent of asylum seekers are male) that feels increasingly alarming in the context of women’s safety. If even a tiny percentage carry with them the openly misogynistic and sexist attitudes towards women that prevail in their countries of origin, shouldn’t we at least be concerned? In 2024, Rhiannon Skye Whyte, a 27-year-old mother-of-one, was murdered by a Sudanese national housed at the hotel in Walsall where she worked Deng Chol Majek was sentenced to 29 years in prison for murdering Rhiannon To even type those words feels deeply taboo; we are constantly being told it is wrong to characterise groups of people by the actions of just a few. And, of course, most immigrants are not a danger to anyone. But there is no denying cases of attacks on women by recent arrivals are far from rare these days. In 2020, for example, Azam Mangori, an Iraqi Kurd whose asylum claim had been rejected, murdered 32-year-old Lorraine Cox in his room above an Exeter takeaway and, in a chilling echo of Ms Ross’s case, used her phone and social media accounts to pretend she was still alive. In January 2024, Abdul Shokoor Ezedi, an Afghan national, attacked his former partner and children with a corrosive substance in Clapham. A few years previously, he had been granted asylum – despite a 2018 conviction for sexual assault. Last year, Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, from Ethiopia, was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old girl shortly after his arrival at the Bell Hotel in Epping. His case sparked nationwide outrage and protests from local residents. Also last year, Mehmet Ogur, a Turkish-Kurdish asylum seeker, raped an 18-year-old woman in Staffordshire. And earlier this year, Ahmad Mulakhil, an Afghan asylum seeker was convicted of the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton. More recently, three recent arrivals to the UK, Ibrahim Alshafe, Abdulla Ahmadi and Karin Al-Danasurt, received lengthy sentences for the brutal rape of a young woman on Brighton beach. And these are just a few of the more high-profile cases. Sad to say, but there does seem to be a grim pattern emerging. Of course, no one wants to be the person to point this out, given the risks of being accused of racism or religious hatred. In 2020 32-year-old Lorraine Cox was murdered by Azam Mangori, an Iraqi Kurd whose asylum claim had been rejected Then again, how much longer can we afford to ignore the facts? Especially since in the past our wilful refusal as a society to accept the reality – rather than the liberal fantasy – of integration has led to some terrible abuses. Most obviously this applies to the grooming gangs, where ‘cultural sensitivities’ prevented police and other authorities from acknowledging the extent and nature of the abuse, which was mostly carried out by men of Pakistani heritage in relation to very young white girls. It has taken years of campaigning by the victims and their families to obtain anything approximating justice – and, even then, many of the guilty are soon to be freed under the Government’s early release scheme, a decision which only adds insult to injury. But there have been other warnings, too, such as the infamous New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne of 2016. Around 650 women were sexually assaulted by groups of men around the city’s main railway station, a great number of whom were foreign nationals from North African countries such as Algeria and Morocco, others from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. The offences ranged from groping and other types of sexual assault to 22 rapes. The initial response was justifiable outrage, but very soon the ‘asylum seekers welcome’ narrative reasserted itself, any critic of Germany’s disastrous immigration policy being quickly neutralised by accusations of bigotry. Yet some critics cannot be silenced. Writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the few people brave enough to discuss this openly in her book Prey: Immigration, Islam And The Erosion Of Women’s Rights, has repeatedly pointed out the failings of the German authorities to accept the realities of that night, including the reluctance of the police and press to acknowledge the backgrounds of the suspects and a refusal to address questions about integration and women’s safety. Drawing on her own harsh Muslim upbringing, she argues that the attitudes of migrant men to women – such as a culture of victim-blaming in the case of sexual assault, or the notion that non-believing women are by definition promiscuous – are dangerously incompatible with our liberal society, and our reluctance to acknowledge this makes women in the West very vulnerable. There is a term for this wilful refusal to accept that no bad can come from the merging of two diametrically opposed cultures. It’s called suicidal empathy, and it’s increasingly what we see demonstrated by virtue-signalling politicians and young pro-Palestinians, many of them women, who march in support of Hamas or continue to deny what took place on October 7. You might have thought that the violent rape and murder of festival-goers that day, and the subsequent treatment of women hostages by Hamas, would lead them to question some of the terrorists’ motives at the cultural intersection between a strict Muslim society backed by the Islamic regime in Iran and the socially liberal nation of Israel. And yet they prefer to look the other way, lost in their magical thinking, which victim-blames Israel for what happened, glosses over the heinous acts of violent sexual misogyny committed that day, and even goes so far as to deny they even took place (despite ample evidence, much of it filmed by the terrorists themselves, to the contrary). But ideology is not entirely to blame. While in no way accounting for many of the cases above – and while ultimately responsibility lies with the man alone – on occasion it would appear that there is something about certain women, and young women especially, that makes them vulnerable to ruthless men – something that older, more battle-worn women such as me are wont to warn against but often find ourselves dismissed as ‘Karens’ or bigots. It’s a kind of romantic compulsion towards a certain type of man, often characterised in books and films as the ‘bad boy’ or the rough diamond. It’s why so many young women were drawn to dangerous revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, or why the world swooned over James Dean. It’s why Heathcliff remains the ultimate ‘romantic’ hero, despite the fact that he is clearly a raging misogynist with psychopathic tendencies. What could be more thrilling to a lonely heart in search of a hero than a young man supposedly fleeing oppression in a war-torn country, even better if that war can somehow be ascribed to the meddling of an imperialist oppressor. By association, they, too, become heroes of the story, unimpeachable in the eyes of their peers. It’s a kind of saviour complex, if you like, the belief – sadly often mistaken – that, with enough love and kindness, years of brutal indoctrination and violent trauma can be erased, and their own crippling anxiety about white, imperialist oppression will somehow be assuaged. Witness the women on the beaches at Calais, helping young men into their dinghies, getting between them and the authorities. Witness the women in Cueta recently, waving the 60,000 migrants through. They are not doing it for the sake of humanity (if they truly were, they would be out in Afghanistan trying to free women and girls from the Taliban or helping run trauma centres for the victims of the mass rape of women and girls in the Sudan); they are doing it to soothe their own bleeding hearts and make themselves feel better. When such evangelical liberalism encounters the desperation of desensitised men from cultures that at best view women as second-class citizens and at worst as worthless slaves, it’s a perfect storm. We need to wise up. Distasteful as this conversation is, we must have it. Otherwise, women and girls will continue to have their lives ruined.